Viral consciousness / eBay has tp / Ayn Rand, Larry David, and Mrs Win some

[peterthooper at juno.com]

Viral consciousness - visiting the oeuvre for ideas, there’s that giant adenoid in GR. Not exactly the same as a virus, but similarly incomplete as a life form, it snuffles its way around London. If you imagine  all the instantiations of the virus as a single phenomenon, there are similarities: primarily imho casting the Adenoid as a predilection for cocaine which was beginning to sweep through society around the time of GR’s publication and in many circles earned the sobriquet of “epidemic.” 

Metaphorically “going viral” has appeared often in popular parlance, around various other phenomena, occupying kind of the same headspace as the “100th Monkey” ideation that was popular enough in “New Age” circles to attract vigorous debunkers (and to intrigue those who are willing to consider such statements within a framework of common sense, whether to strip them down to their base pairs - to extend the metaphor - and use them for parts, or to accommodate some of the sequences within the ribosomes, organelles, vacuoles, or even the nucleus of one’s worldview.) 

The “going viral” verbiage posits a physical means of communication, so it isn’t as barn-door-like a target for materialists as 100th Monkey theory. It’s also very brief, so the metaphor resembles its own tenor and has permeated our discourse widely but - to the best of my knowledge - few if any writers have applied themselves to wailing on the metaphor even to the limited extent here offered.

But, tying it back into the Adenoid metaphor, the actual, non-metaphorical virus in its epizootic form (I just love the sound of “epizootic” heard inwardly in a WC Fields or William Burroughs voice, and I know I’m pronouncing and using it wrong, but it flows so trippingly) aggravates a propensity in the same way as the Adenoid: the immune response. The pneumonia that’s sometimes occurred in Covid-19 hosts is the body overreacting, isn’t it? An intelligent and measured immune response is what takes place in a large majority of Covid hosts, ways and means of dealing with the unwanted guest, ancient somatic traditions for reacting to this new variation on a familiar phenomenon come into play.

It is *so great* that, as a society, we’re acting on the idea that formerly inevitable collateral damages on the road to herd immunity are unacceptable!

The thought form of the Adenoid lumbers and lurches through the streets like a plague; the epizootic stumbles and shambles through our habits and parlance not so differently from (or “differently to” if you’re British) Pynchon’s _Gravity’s Rainbow_’s Adenoid.

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eBay has tp 
Well, they seem to: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=toilet+paper&_trksid=p2380057.m4084.l1311.R1.TR12.TRC2.A0.H0.Xtoilet.TRS0&_sacat=0

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Ayn Rand, Larry David and Mafia Winsome:
The take I think I’ve been cherishing on Ayn Rand is her followers would be the ones hoarding and price-gouging sanitizer, but Larry David in that movie where he blows up a stadium or something - the early scenes have him with really long hair, has that character’s nemesis who is portrayed as actually a good guy, naming one of his sons after Howard Roark or Ayn Rand herself. 

Mafia Winsome might be a nuanced take on Ayn Rand or a melange of various characteristics around her. Ann Tyler has said her idea of Heaven would be to live among the characters in the books she’s written. While I’ve never read any similar statement about or by Thomas Pynchon, I find myself liking, to some extent, most of the characters in his books: poor old Dumpster Villard, or Lloyd Nipple, or Greta Erdman or Gory Gnahb. 

Virally speaking, and to purée the metaphor, one’s cellular mechanics have come to include epicycles to accommodate them beyond their utility in demonstrating certain principles which one may or may not intuit that the author may or may not be trying to illustrate.

For that matter, there are little nuggets of likeability in Rand characters such as Dagny Taggart (vanishingly few in John Galt, however) and contrarianly in that Ellsworth Toohey (in fact I think I liked him best of all.) Somewhere I picked up those books around age 15 (my mother gave me _For the New Intellectuals_ and _The Virtue of Sefishness_ for Christmas that year, I think because she saw me reading the novels, and wanted me to dig a little deeper) and they made clear that the quality-of-life checks uttered by Objectivism all bounced - something I strongly suspected in the novels, but was willing to read on about the long-waisted (what the heck does that really mean anyway?)(but 15 yo me found it enticing) Dagny Taggart and the tragedy of typos in the New York Times, and inedible soybeans replacing wheat (which, come on, is just as inedible before processing), and farmers pulling their plows by hand after Ellsworth Toohey and the New Dealers refused all glory to that Frisco guy and his ilk.

“Hello Frisco!” “Hello Slug!” Winced reading that, like fingernails on chalkboard or eating one of those Sour Patch Kids - actually at the time there was something else really sour, big or little things, “Bite ‘em for a burst of flavor!” - Ghod! SweetTarts!
(I was more of an Ice Cube (milk chocolate cubes) or Chunky (but the Ice Cubes were better!) kind of kid.  Or Sen-Sen, Beechnut/Blackjack/Fan Tan Gum, little drops of Binaca, and for a salty treat a dry boullion  cube or Onion Soup straight out of the package. But not so much of a sour aficionado.)
Reading Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged at my grandma’s farm, with the tin roof on which the rain could play polyrhythms; that winter it was _Look Homeward, Angel” and “You Can’t Go Home Again,” at my other grandma’s Florida bungalow.
>From Galt to Gant, surrounded by grandmotherly kindness. Much gratitude for many of these memories!

But anyway, besides holding Objectivism up for well-deserved ridicule, there may be some interesting considerations in the way Mafia Winsome is ensconced in _V._