BEg2 chapter 2 my .02

[Tucker Anderson]

Duck stamps seem like something that Pynchon would have a small fascination
with. Functionally, the stamps serve as a fee that hunters pay in order to
take a migratory bird that is federally regulated (unlike hunting of other
non-migratory game species, all of which are regulated by the states). No
stamp on your license; no hunting rights for migratory fowl. The fee serves
a number of conservation purposes, including the tagging and tracking of
waterfowl flyways. I haven't had the good fortune of getting one, but some
of my friends have taken a duck that has a tracking band-- the hunter is
instructed to call in to a 24-hour hotline to report where the bird was
shot. The operator will then relay information about where the duck was
tagged, how old it is, and any known locations over its migratory life.

The stamps are also a grand dupe-- a way to encourage those who are not
hunting to contribute to the North American conservation model. With
declining numbers of hunters, our various state and federal administrative
bureaucracies have devised unique and interesting "stamps" to encourage
charitable giving from wildlife enthusiasts. The states use the funds
primarily to buy land and apply permanent wildlife management easements--
the establishment of public trust lands. In my state, the annual "habitat
stamp" is the equivalent of a "support our troops" ribbon circa 2002. Every
truck and boat has a collection of the stamps prominently displayed. A
signal to all on the road- and water-ways that the operator has accumulated
years of hunting experience all while contributing to the increased
conversion of private territory to public commons.

All this to say: stamps are a conspiracy.

-Tucker

On Mon, Nov 8, 2021 at 11:32 PM Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Duck stamps - recurring motif, CoL49 & AtD
>
> AtD even has the bit about sticking the precious rarity on a letter
>
> “Irwin always pays retail, being the 301.83 in the relationship” - 301.83
> being the DSM code for Borderline Personality Disorder
>
> On stamp collecting, seems like a kind of cool habit if you look at it
> right. It can accumulate value, but also having a stamp collection makes
> you have to arrange them, put them in a protective covering, have a safe
> place to keep all that, lore about the stamps, other collectors, some
> source of income to support the habit.
> Like Zoyd’s ham-shaped trailer, eventually you end up building a house
> around it.
> Maybe I’ll start collecting stamps myself.
>
>
> Hashslingrz what is their deliverable?
> I map them to Google
>
> And hwgaawgh to YouTube -
>
>  I conceive their relationship of hwgaawgh’s subornation by Hashslingrz as
> an exaggerated version of Google acquiring YouTube (which was actually
> founded in 2005 and acquired in 2006 - I remember when people first started
> posting YouTube links to the p-list)
>
> This is fuzzy logic on my part. The parts I like best are the human
> relations & the wordplay/jokes so I form a big clay Golem McGuffin out of
> other things that seem important but are less pleasing to contemplate. This
> is one of those.
>
> Fiction fictitiously applied to fiction, but such details as I’ve ferreted
> out do point to Hashslingrz being one of those companies needing lots of
> servers and locations, so Gabriel Ice would be like an amalgam of Jeff
> Bezos, the Google guys, and the rapacity of Bill Gates & the
> want-to-control-everything of Steve Jobs…
> Sort of a one-stop corporate bad guy Scarsdale Vibe for the new millennium.
>
> But this is one reason I value these reads so highly, they tend towards, as
> Paige Browning said in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, “transcending the
> bullshit.”
>
> Actually reading the more involved parts instead of giving them a probably
> inaccurate tag* and moving on to the next joke or characterization or the
> next expletive, like Fat Freddy of the Furry Freak Brothers does when the
> students occupy the library and he goes looking for the “fuck books,” is
> something I rarely do without peer pressure.
>
> So - glad to be here!
>
>
> * I often repeat how I missed the part in the Kafka story where the guy
> turns into a bug, and wrote a paper without knowing that plot element.
> Couldn’t figure out why everyone was so nasty to him, but focused the paper
> on the relationship with his father.
> Still made a B, but one could do better.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>