BEg2 Chap 8: Ball lightning

[Mark Kohut]

I like that naturalistic dialogue too....and the social observation of
NYC.....TRP is almost Sinclair Lewis here, Main Street NYC, right, lol....

Pointing out the same slang is insightful I say because it is and because I
was too tone deaf to notice....small mistakes or for some kind of stylizing
effect?.....(I think Allen is right, small mistakes)

On Sun, Dec 12, 2021 at 9:45 AM Allen Ruch <quail at shipwrecklibrary.com>
wrote:

> I’m halfway between Joseph and Mark on this one. I like some of the
> bizarre intrusions—usually the more supernatural stuff—but find some of the
> more, uh, goofy moments simply off-putting and detracting from the book.
> For instance, the “Transformer ship” and “Venice Tetris game” in “Against
> the Day” always irk me a bit.
>
> Regarding Rich’s comment about dialogue: I actually like the dialogue in
> Pynchon’s last few books. I find it very naturalistic for the most part,
> and it’s not boring to me at all. My only problem is something there’s a
> bit of Tom Clancy Syndrome—where every character uses the same phraseology
> or slang. For instance, in “Bleeding Edge” it bothers me that everyone says
> “Yups.” I lived in New York during this time period, and 99% of the people
> said “yuppies.” It’s fine if the slang is used just by members of one
> family, but when it bleeds over into other characters, it makes me aware
> that there’s really only one author behind the dialogue. The word “Plutes”
> is similar in “Against the Day.”
>
> For the record, I like "Bleeding Edge." My *least* favorite Pynchon novel
> is actually "Inherent Vice." And I am a HERETIC, as my favorite Pynchon
> novel is *not* "Gravity's Rainbow," but "Mason & Dixon." And, AND I kinda
> *love* "Against the Day"—read it three times, argue about it all the time
> with my Pynchon buddies. (I rank thusly: M&D, GR, AtD, Lot 49, V.,
> Vineland, BE, IV.)
>
> —Quail
>
> From: Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
> Date: Sunday, December 12, 2021 at 5:31 AM
> To: Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>
> Cc: Allen Ruch <quail at shipwrecklibrary.com>, The Whole Sick Crew <
> pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Subject: Re: BEg2 Chap 8: Supernatural Intrusions
>
> I think almost everything you just wrote is wrong, incorrect. Not that you
> will see this. Ball lightning is near a low point for me in that sublime
> book. Projection at work, joseph, I suggest.
> A: I want to think about it all as do all of the readers who love this
> book, who increasingly love this book for what some are now calling
> prescience, whether Pynchon fans or not. A--And,
> even the Plisters who actually do not like this book give us different
> smart reasons why, but they aren't yours.....You are telling all of us,
> even them, why they don't like it?.......Laughably arrogant, I suggest.
>
> China's system was not born here, if here means the US. Anyone reading
> this knows that. China is so deeply Chinese, even in its revolutions that
> that is where Chian watchers start their understanding.
> Did you ever hear that great line from the great China scholar, Newman, I
> think. Any people or ideas that enter China soon become Chinese....
>
> Your last line in your summary lines is simply pathetic.
>
> Also, your first line about Pynchon in this novel is also wrong. All the
> layers are there, always, every work. You just don't get it if you reduce
> them to what you want to call them. Artificial distinctions, another
> lifelong satirization of Pynchon's.
>
> On Sat, Dec 11, 2021 at 10:08 PM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net<mailto:
> brook7 at sover.net>> wrote:
> easier questions first- Pynchon readers seem less enthralled with BE as a
> whole, and I think this is part of why. We like the weirdness and the
> sublime quality of hanging out for a few days or weeks with Ball lightning,
> talking across that usually unbridgeable gap.  I think the confrontation
> with the abyss combined with 9-11 and ithe loss of privacy is also
> uncomfortably close to home. Throw in the weird scene and video  with the
> shoulder fired missile, and who wants to think about it all. Look what it
> stirred up here.
> Abyss- all of the above with the full impact of all that we do not know.
> I don't think you could take things any more seriously than GR.
> China's system was born here, but they have caught up.
> The redcoats have not come to my house directly but they are turning over
> Julian for more torture and that matters.
>
> Less supernatural as in missing the third layer that is in most of his
> novels. As you know, because the story, I’m fairly certain, came from your
> web page, Pynchon once compared his writing to one of those medical texts
> with overlappable transparent layers.  As a stained glass conservationist I
> sometimes have worked with Tiffany and Lafarge Windows with multiple layers
> and the whole idea has affected my own art and the way I look at TP and
> other fiction. I see 3 fundamental layers( I have an essay somewhere if you
> are interested)with the more direct comments of the author himself being a
> kind of 4th layer and the readers a 5th in the sense that like all writers
> he wants to connect. The base , or at least fundamental to the 3 layers is
> history itself and Pynchon tries hard to make this accurate and full of
> timely details. My presumption here is not that history can be accurately
> told but that it actually happened and is a proper setting for writing
> about the  human experience and maybe some other shit too. The second layer
> I call the plausible fictive, but is also called realism naturalism or just
> fiction. This is the primary characters and their imagined lives along with
> fictional towns , bars, mayonnaise attacks etc..  Still pretty normal
> stuff. The third layer is the supernatural, which almost always has a
> mythic dimension. This is why I referred to Pugnax, the Chums, Thanatoids,
> etc. These could be dismissed as silly but fun storytelling devices but I
> think there is more to it. It adds a layer that has always been part of
> human consciousness and treats it as something perfectly normal with real
> effects on other layers. Whether Pynchon believes M&D’s line was really a
> colonial violation of telluric patterns or just a means of land theft, we
> know he has M&D wrestle with the ethical dimensions of what they are doing
> and uses supernatural stories to amplify such issues.
>    That was probably too big of an answer but this third supernatural
> layer is seriously reduced in BE and a more psychological approach takes a
> central role. I think it makes the writing  just a bit less lively, less
> fun,  and less multi-dimensional but Pynchon's other emphasis is on the
> role of computer tech and the web and I am suggesting that maybe this
> forfeiting of the supernatural and mythic weird comes from a sense that
> screens  is where we have turned our attention and that in doing so  we may
> well have forfeited a vital dimension.  Not only that but we have forfeited
> it to a logic system that  easily serves  as system controls for a ruling
> class that may be socipathic at a fundamental level, and also  a logic
> sytem that is not part of biological complexity, moral compassion, or real
> joy in living . I personally doubt that biology or physics  or
> consciousness is built up from binary logic. I like computers as a very
> powerful  tool, but like you and  Cassidy certain things or spaces or
> energy systems, movies, etc. feel as you said ’colonized’ and while I try
> to face my own shadow some things I just walk away from or dig into my
> internal love mantras and wait for some light.  Is there evil? Even with my
> inclination toward Taoism I can’t dismiss it as easily as I used to.
>
>
>
> > On Dec 11, 2021, at 7:17 PM, Allen Ruch <quail at shipwrecklibrary.com
> <mailto:quail at shipwrecklibrary.com>> wrote:
> >
> > The suspension of the Bill of Rights was the worst—I was shocked to find
> I had to quarter Redcoats in my apartment! They really drank me out of
> house and home. Couldn't make a decent pot ocoffee to save their lives.
> >
> > But kidding aside, while your post contains all the eloquence I've come
> to enjoy from your writing -- I'm a sucker for "chthonic" -- I'm not sure
> I'm following a few of your points, which is likely my fault. Just to
> clarify: You feel the book is less supernatural because Pynchon is taking
> things more seriously, because he's dealing with recent events? Or because
> he feels modern people, or perhaps his characters, have lost touch with the
> mythic? And when you say the Deep Web (via DeepArcher) draws people "toward
> the abyss that is an inevitable part of the subconscious," do you mean
> loneliness? The self? Depression? Death? All of the above?
> >
> > I think I get what you are saying—perhaps in a Gurdjieff/Watts kind of
> way—but here's something about the Deep Web in Bleeding Edge that still
> feels more sinister to me than the Dark Night of the Soul, perhaps
> more—colonized? Or maybe this is just one of the Pynchon things I'll never
> really "get." (Yes, I admit, there are parts of "Against the Day" that
> still leaving me scratching my head.)
> >
> > And finally, what do you mean by "What readers do with that is
> interesting. Pynchon fans seem distinctly less enthralled." Less enthralled
> with exploring darkness, or just less enthralled with BE as a whole?
> >
> > Anyway, I certainly agree with you that our "planet wars" have claimed
> enough victims, and we should treasure human contact. Well said. (Though I
> reckon that China may be offended by your claiming that the US has the
> "largest civilian surveillance system ever imagined." You should really
> give them more credit, they're trying so hard!)
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > —Quail
> >
> >
> >
> > On 12/11/21, 6:02 PM, "Joseph Tracy" <brook7 at sover.net<mailto:
> brook7 at sover.net>> wrote:
> >
> >    But I do have that question for everyone: how literal do you take
> Bleeding Edge?
> >
> >    Good question, especially because, as you point out, there is
> distinctly less intrusion of the supernatural or mythic weird than in any
> other Pynchon Novel: no talking ball lightning, no chasing harmonicas into
> the underworld, no Thanatoids, lovestruck mecahincal ducks, Pugnax, Vheissu
> etc.
> >    I mean there is the cosmic bike messenger and in this very chapter a
> psychic bladder function, but these are, let’s face it, just not the same.
> Later there are ghosts but even those can be interpreted as psychological
> illusions or alternately insights.  It is as though the dreaded nuclear
> armed V2 had finally hit and the worst it could do was bring down towers
> and kill a few thousand more victims of the planet wars. Which by the time
> BE was being written had produced more planet wars and a hundred fold
> increase in innocent victims. Well innocent in that most people don’t
> actively drop bombs on other people and wouldn’t even donate to the bombers
> if the national bomb campaigns relied on volunteer donations.
> >       The human suffering is all too real too, and other realities have
> come with it: the sudden turn to patriot act paranoia, the drone wars, the
> suspension of the Bill of Rights and the institution of the largest
> civilian surveillance system ever imagined.
> >      Maybe TP  has brought his readers out of a world on which the
> people interact powerfully with the mythic because that is his sense of
> what is happening. I have the feeling he is not that thrilled with a world
> so severed, both from the mystical and from the multicultural, multivalent
> social hodgepodge that does not so easily lend itself to the manipulations
> of binary code and binary politics. Maxine is the most interactive human in
> P’s writings and what she is is the normal social experience of a great
> deal of human history. She gives us the big picture view that  cyberspace
> promises but can’t deliver.  Everyone is different, looking for meaning,
> respect, everyone is struggling with the effects of social isolation and
> lack of power to stop a growing plutocracy, marital and family breakups,
> predators, bad habits.
> >       The deep web functions not so much like a balloon ride into new
> dimensions of understanding, or even a cthonic confrontation with the deep
> forces of history and myth like Slothrop’s toilet adventure. It draws
> people toward the abyss that is an inevitable part of the subconscious. It
> is lonely and we all must enter eventually.  What readers do with that is
> interesting. Pynchon fans seem distinctly less enthralled. I have mixed
> feelings. I been there plenty and the main result is I want to treasure
> every human contact.
> >
> >
> >
> >> On Dec 11, 2021, at 4:04 PM, Allen Ruch <quail at shipwrecklibrary.com
> <mailto:quail at shipwrecklibrary.com>> wrote:
> >>
> >> I liked Myst. I am a hardcore video game player, and I still love open
> worlds the best. Myst was a forerunner to so many great things, even stuff
> like GTA and Skyrim. Great game.
> >>
> >> Which brings me to Cassidy. I keep re-reading that section, and even
> though I read "Bleeding Edge" when it first came out, maybe I just don't
> remember—what is there about the abyss in Deep Archer? It's often spoken of
> in mystical terms. I think Cassidy gives the first impression of that,
> beyond Maxine's initial "gee wow," that is. Cassidy remarks:
> >>
> >> “Hard to explain. It was all just coming from somewhere, for about a
> day and a half I felt I was duked in on forces outside my normal perimeter,
> you know? Not scared, just wanted to get it over with, wrote the file, did
> the Java, didn’t look at it again. Next thing I remember is one of them
> saying holy shit it’s the edge of the world”
> >>
> >> Pynchon loves supernatural spaces, and I think he's strongly suggesting
> that the Deep Web—or video games, or Myst, etc.—has the capacity to be an
> Other World. And not just Gibsonian cyberspace—or maybe it's just that
> after all?
> >>
> >> Maybe because weird fiction/horror is my favorite genre, I'm fascinated
> with the intrusions of the supernatural—or if not the supernatural, then
> the sublime?—in "Bleeding Edge." I mean, it's one thing in M&D, AtD, etc.,
> but this seems to be Pynchon's most "realistic," or perhaps "historical,"
> book. Sure, there are some things that suggest an alternate, wackier
> universe—the Naser, proösmia, Maxine being ok with being a stripper—but
> then again, there's something even weirder going on, right?
> >>
> >> Anyway, I won’t go into any future events just yet, I'll wait until we
> get there. But it's something to keep an eye on as the book develops. But I
> do have that question for everyone: how literal do you take Bleeding Edge?
> >>
> >> —Quail
> >>
> >> PS: Sorry I know this post is all jumbled with ideas and not lucidly
> written, but I'm on my third Abelour.
> >>
> >>
> >> --
> >> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
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>
>
>
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