Thanks for Guggenheim link / (1010 words) further musings

[gary webb]

The narrative has to make sense. We are often at our wits end to construct
a nice data-driven narrative because we live in a scientific age, and most
of the time it works. But when the narrative breaks down, or there are odd
diegetic jumps as that wanker Prof points out to Reg in BE  "One fateful
day in Washington Square, Reg happened to sell one of his cassettes to a
professor at NYU who taught film, who next day came running down the street
after Reg to ask, out of breath, if Reg knew how far ahead of the leading
edge of this post-postmodern art form he was working, "with your
neo-Brechtian subversion of the diegesis."" When this phenomenon occurs in
real time, and the conventional narrative we as humans construct to piece
together sequences of events breaks down, thus enters the dark reservoir of
Conspiracy. Pynchon gives us in Slothrop a conspiratorial meter, both in
his heightened paranoia and in his anti-paranoia. In his anti-paranoia is
the state where nothing is related, just seemingly random events, and the
process by which we try to connect them being insurmountably flawed in that
it failed in a single instance, thus forever invalidated, or we get
heightened paranoia where everything is interconnected, a sort of infinite
loop, an interesting feature of modern warfare, flooding the channels with
a seemingly infinite barrage information such that no source can make heads
or tails of it... Neither one of these states is very desirable, if one
values sanity.

The oft neglected aspect of Conspiracy Theories is their political
dimension. They have been used to galvanize underground movements, or
conceal them, as Mr. Machiavelli saith: "He who desires or attempts to
reform the government of a state, and wishes to have it accepted and
capable of maintaining itself to the satisfaction of everybody, must at
least retain the semblance of the old forms; so that it may seem to the
people that there has been no change in the institutions, even though in
fact they are entirely different from the old ones. For the great majority
of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities,
and are often even more influenced by the things that seem than by those
that are."

The American Founding Fathers were conspiracy mavens, read Bernard Bailyn's
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. They thought a sinister
cabal within the British government was trying to subvert their liberties
and religion, and install nobility in the colonies to command and control
(sound familiar?)... turns out no such thing existed, and the true cabal,
though how organized they were is debatable, within the British government
were Whigs, and friendly to the idea of colonial independence... a-and
after Revolution they had to launch a coup which probably only has
legitimacy now because of George Washington (Ewige Blumenkraft!) and tried
to legitimized through anon publishing of political pamphlets before a
sizable Anti-Federalist opposition could mobilize... and it is interesting
how that is not the historical narrative... and it is remarkable how
nonviolent (there was violence e.g. Shay's Rebellion) and how incredibly
violent the French version was when French Whigs tried to do the same
thing, more or less...

I always consider conspiracy theories like the necronomicon. We mortals
foolishly use them to conjure up these Lovecraftian monsters, meddling with
weird forces beyond our comprehension. I'd be willing to bet that Qanon
knew very little about Epstein, or Epstein's black book, and low and behold
this creature is summoned as if out of the void... I'm not suggesting the
two are related but its like Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum... you start
messing with these "diabolicals" and see what happens. I've linked an
interesting podcast, not the greatest quality interview but the content is
interesting, and it's interesting to see how the thread progresses:
https://parallaxviews.podbean.com/e/ep94/

Also, if your thirsty for more weirdness check out this mysterious work by
a one Chan Thomas, which has been censored and heavily redacted by the US,
all of it very interesting and very weird... not sure if real or imaginary,
but worth a glance, especially for all those Atlantis, or lost
Civilization, buffs:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7632659-the-adam-and-eve-story



On Wed, May 27, 2020 at 3:21 AM Cometman via Pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
wrote:

> David Morris, thanks for the Guggenheim link.
> And that Peggy Guggenheim was a big supporter of Djuna Barnes, right?
> Anybody currently around doing similar avant-garde lifestyle & patronage,
> crossing class lines out of love? (and, well, amatory exploration?)
>
> Opiate billionaires Purdue (well, Sackler) family getting some refusals of
> patronage; but they stay in their lane, class-wise, or so it seems. At
> least not openly Bohemian.
> Lawsuit settled, looks like OxyContin gets its own business unit, all
> profits going to the plaintiff class (speaking of class...) - which would
> seem to depend on the continuation of the abuse that the suit was about.(!?)
> I guess it’s none of my business, except maybe due diligence on burgeoning
> bohemian scenes, and basic human concern.
> Art musing in general way - big article in New Yorker some years ago
> alerted me to art theft, forgery, but also art as a way of laundering
> money. It’s like when you go to a furniture store, why is all the stuff so
> darn expensive? And art gallery is like 100 times more so. Even in like a
> Mexican buffet, this nice painting on the wall of an Aztec sunburst is
> marked $400. Repositories of value. Interesting stuff.
> So there used to be, speaking of repositories, a big repository of 911
> schtuff, where you could dally for days...anyway, one of the interviews was
> with a dude working in one of the WTCs, who said he was going to his office
> in like August 2001, and was turned back by officious armed dudes who
> claimed to be “redoing the security system” or something like that.We all
> know that the Gummo of the Bush family, Maurice or something, owned a part
> of the security company responsible for the WTC and Dulles. That demolition
> expert dude who called it the day of, and then changed his tune the next
> day...That Professor Jones formerly of BYU finding stuff in the rubble, who
> got kind of squelched when Bush 43 flew out to Utah and had a chin-wag with
> the school president...
> Lots of weird-beard action there. Like JFK, the copious literature is not
> only a repository of action around a node deemed important, but also a
> memorial of people who lived and loved in those days, and a window on a
> time that is receding from current events into history. It’s interesting,
> even fascinating, to read about.
>  Like f*cking Rumsfeld, we know what we know but we don’t know the extent
> of what we don’t know (or words to that effect) - but unlike that
> weird-beard, we lack an army to send to enforce the consequences of our
> conclusions. At least, that’s my situation - ymmv, though I doubt you’d be
> on the p-list in that case (though, quien sabe!?)
> These ae911 people are working within the law and even Lynn Margulis, the
> biologist (yeah, I know, not an architect or an engineer, but one heck of a
> brainiac) famous for exploration of mitochondrial DNA (requiescat in pace,)
> signed on to their declaration of dissatisfaction with the NIST report.
> As a thought experiment, the consequences of a victory in court would
> be???Damages for survivors a la OxyContin?Refund to New York Life insurance
> of their payout?News coverage - or news blackout and token damages such as
> the MLK conspiracy civil trial?Proof of demolition will not establish who
> did it, come to think of it.
> Who will bell the cat?
>
> My Maslow’s pyramid, not to mention my Freytag’s triangle, reading
> preferences, and instinct for self-preservation point in a different
> direction, but I respect their work and hope for the best for them
> personally, and for fair treatment of their cause.
> Now as to _Bleeding Edge_, the wellspring of speculation seems to center
> around the dark pile hight Deseret, near and similar to the Dakota, which
> itself connotes Rosemary’s Baby (which some buddies and I sneaked into to
> watch from the refreshment stand of a drive-in theater back in ‘69 and got
> kicked out of not too far into - we were able to watch the first feature,
> “Goodbye Columbus,” before somebody did their due diligence - so for all I
> know, those witches left Rosemary alone after she did a runner - although
> in the book the doctor she turned to was one of them...but you know how
> they always change the story in the movies) and the murder most foul of
> John Lennon by a dude whose dad is a Bush buddy.
> Anyway, the aesthetic implications of that nexus of evil, like my
> Freytag’s triangle, Maslow’s pyramid, etc, point away from controlled
> demolition, (which theory, like the smoldering foundations of WTC and the
> west wing of the Pentagon, remains dangerously hot for a long time) in
> favor of a broader societal critique: the photos of the missile suggest a
> different proximate cause, the frequent mention of the Deseret as a
> possible launch site juxtaposes with the missile’s strike zone (which, as
> Greg Palast pointed out, was Cantor-Fitzgerald, not only a prominent
> financier, but specifically a promulgator of tax-free municipal bonds for
> local governments to do infrastructure projects generally more economically
> than private-sector competitors, and more honestly than Goldman etc who for
> instance parlayed (as told by Matt Taibbi back when he was a good
> source) an Alabama sewer bond issue into a billion dollar fiasco. (Not to
> mention Greece.)
> And the Russian mob. So essentially (or, maybe it’s more of a luxury item)
> the dynamic is the residential bastions of privilege where Pynchon mentions
> at the Deseret party they gave attendees favors like trips to Gstaad (which
> of course connotes the hateful child of privilege in “Scent of a Woman” who
> sneeringly corrects our lumpen protagonist’s pronunciation of “Gstaad”) —
> Anyway, these fortunate sons live in places like that, getting Gstaad
> goodie-bags, and from those places emanate (we are possibly to surmise)
> ordnance to demolish the Cantor-Fitzgeralds of the world and their
> commitment to a financial “commonwealth”, utilities and roads that all can
> use and benefit from.
> Or not - probably ought to read it again. (-;
>
>
> --
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