LISS/STEPVR 11th daily collation (digest 27/25)

Fri Apr 24 19:11:08 UTC 2020

and for no particular reason, I'm going to stick my thumb out, though will
need to go more Claudette Colbert, to hitch a ride to this wagon... I'm
kidding of course... Is it just me, or does it feel oddly necessary to
watch the Apple 1984 commercial? I've attached below...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zfqw8nhUwA

It's hard to say the PC world was anymore enlivening than the televisual
world it purported to replace, and the same could be said of the mobile
transformation 20 years later...
About that televisual culture,

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/imagine-all-the-people

"That, of course, is not what happened. Modern technology has indeed
consummated the televisual era, but with results quite opposite those the
imagineers expected. Instead, a curious form of Hobbes’s war of all against
all was unleashed. Online, each “netizen” produced more and more opinions,
fantasies, dreams, interpretations, and criticism. Marshall McLuhan
forecast the situation in his concept of the “global village
<https://www.amazon.com/dp/0226672980/?tag=thenewatl-20>” — not a
boundaryless and harmonious Eden sought by the imaginative social engineers
of the world elite, but rather a hot, crowded, fragmented, and fractious
realm, one much like the “world” that social media, to the shock of the
elite, became."

In the MIT press version of McLuhan's Understanding Media the introduction
coyly gives a post-60s update on the work's reputation (the MIT version was
published in 1994):

"The alarms and excursions associated with Understanding Media didn't
survive McLuhan's death  (on New Year's Eve 1980, at the age of 69), and
perhaps was to be expected from artisans still working in a medium that the
decedent had pronounced obsolete, the obituary notices were less than
worshipful. Informed opinion had moved on to other things, and McLuhan's
name and reputation were sent to the attic with the rest of the sensibility
(go-go boots, Sgt. Pepper, Woodstock, the Vietnam War) that embodied the
failed hopes of a discredited decade."

Let's take it from the man himself (pg.16):

"Electric speed mingles the cultures of prehistory with the dregs of
industrial marketeers, the nonliterate with the semiliterate and the
postliterate. Mental breakdown of varying degrees is the very common result
of uprooting and inundation with new information and endless new patterns
of information."

Televisual culture is ubiquitous for Zoyd & C., so much so that he is an
active participant. And like Bigfoot, to whom he is compared, are staged TV
moments, not real life random acts.

On Fri, Apr 24, 2020 at 1:23 AM peterthooper at juno.com <peterthooper at juno.com>
wrote:

> From: ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com>
> To: Pynchon-l <Pynchon-l at waste.org>
>
> Thomas sez:
>
> -Zoyd as Ned Bottom.
> > He?s a hardworking guy. Working class hero
> > ?we?ll meet at Ninny?s Tomb!?
> Bottom and the other workers have vocations, trades, jobs they are
> skilled at. They were once apprentices and are now masters of an art.
> This skill is power for the workers.
>
> They've no skill as Thespians. To keep their jobs they must hone their
> skill, but  as actors (or writers or Playwrights or Bartlebys ... see
> Pynchon's Sloth Essay), to keep  heads they depend on the fickle
> generosity of magnanimous royals. Zoyd, not an actor but a musician,
> has some related experience, but his once a year gig as an actor (not
> bad work if you can get it), and his head (including his maidenhead)
> can be kept only if he performs for his fickle and violent bosses.
>
> While we readers of books admire the author, the playwright, the
> actor, the musician, the poet, we know that even Shakespeare, the son
> of a provincial glover and illegal wool trader, was an actor, a
> popular entertainer, a job most people considered dishonorable.
>
>
> Yeah, as the exchange with Hector you quote below suggests, Hector, of
> Mexican ancestry (a Latino and usually a  target of the corrupt
> police, not to mention the faux protestant work ethic of
> pro-capitalism working class whites) is, ironically, spouting the work
> hard and play by the rules success myth) , even as he, like Zoyd,
> collects a government check. But yeah, Zoyd hustles. And Hector,
> though he hectors the hippies, and has disgust for how they live,
> because he half believes the false narratives about hippies and
> communes, and because he is more like them than he cares to admit,
> because he fears the false narratives about his people, respects Zoyd
> for his industry and work ethic. The fake economy in America can not
> allow the real economy, as the pandemic now has exposed it, to compete
> as a narrative, people can not know that communal living, as any
> economist knows, is inherently economical. The crazy commune
> narratives, the murder, neglect ... narrative, the hysterical high
> pitched narrative must silence the community. Americans are generally
> afraid of anything cooperative. Americans consider cooperative and
> communal living subversive.
>
> >
> > For one thing it?s still morning, early riser in my book. Those doves in
> > the dream could be the souls of the 290 people aboard Iran Air 655,
> > Thanatoids in the making.
>
> They are carrier pigeons and I place emphasis on the word **carrier**
> because, though I am not an expert, carrier pigeons don't carry
> messages; though they are related to the carriers of messages, they
> are not honing pigeons, but show pigeons, bred for perfect beauty.
> Not a mistake Pynchon would make. If it is one. And I don't think it
> is. The word carrier here seems to allude to an aircraft carrier. The
> squadron of jays, to a squadron of US jests. The light under the wings
> of the pigeons, like the light under the jest wings. So the text, in
> dream and in history seems to be about the US war on Iraq. Yes, I
> agree, that the Iranians murdered by the US are referenced here.
>
> -----------right, many kinds of pigeons. Even though a carrier pigeon
> didn't actually carry stuff,
> there's precedent for that. Passenger pigeons didn't ride.
> Homing pigeons is a different thing.
>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Date: Wed, 22 Apr 2020 10:03:50 -0400
> From: ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com>
>
>
> correction:  the US war on IRAN.
>
>
> ------skirmish. And may it never go beyond that, but recede. This is a
> nifty country, Iran -
> would be a great friend to have going forward.
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 6
> Date: Wed, 22 Apr 2020 13:48:36 -0400
> From: ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com>
>
> Never watched Moone Boy. I will look into it.
>
> I don't read Zoyd's dream as troubled. Perhaps my comparison with
> Poe's narrator (The Raven) suggests troubled dreams, but Zoyd is no
> Gregor Samsa. I brought Poe's poem in to provide an easy example of
> the confluence, the mixing of dream and non-dream, with history,
> including the author's and the reader's, even of events that transpire
> after 1984, the attack on Iran.  Pynchon is known for his use of
> anachronisms. These come in many forms, and this is one such. So Nixon
> shows up in GR. He mixes media into dream, into history, into readers.
> So, you, dear reader, like  watching an opera, with Maxine Tarnow
> watching it with her old man, and maybe it's apocryphal and
> anachronistic.
>  So Mr. Thoth:
>
>  "That cruel old man," said Mr Thoth, "was an Indian killer. God, the
> saliva would come out in a string from his lip whenever he told about
> killing the Indians. He must have loved that part of it."
> "What were you dreaming about him?" "Oh, that," perhaps embarrassed.
> "It was all mixed in with a Porky Pig cartoon." He waved at the tube.
> "It comes into your dreams, you know. Filthy machine. Did you ever see
> the one about Porky Pig and the anarchist?"
>
> Not troubled but nudged.  It's a nudge not a knife.
>
> Know much about Nudge Theory?
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_theory
>
>
>
>
> >From the past ---------
> From: David Morris
> To: "'pynchon-l@[omitted]'"
> Subject: VLVL, where are you? (1998)
>
>
> Class? Any comments?
>
> ----------nice research! The more things change... Wouldn't have it any
> other way, I guess.
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 15
> Date: Thu, 23 Apr 2020 07:47:45 +0000
> From: Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
>
> (vehicle census)
>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 16
> Date: Thu, 23 Apr 2020 08:30:40 GMT
> From: "peterthooper at juno.com" <peterthooper at juno.com>
>
>
> Rather be nudged than knifed, that?s for sure; rather nudge than knife.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>