Fwd: Not P but the prologue is all about him. On this Horror Anniversary.

[Mark Kohut]

And I am old enough to remember when some thought Hillary Clinton was a
worse choice because she was more hawkish (verbally)

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/12/mike-pence-nuclear-football-capitol-riot



---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Jan 6, 2022 at 6:23 AM
Subject: Not P but the prologue is all about him. On this Horror
Anniversary.
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>


We all know that Henry Adams was a deep influence on Thomas Pynchon,
visible almost openly in early
Tom Pynchon. We all know that Henry Adams is reduced to one masterpiece in
the judgment of history,
the great, psychologically weird, *Education of Henry Adams*. (His
novel *Democracy
*has minor Minor Novel fame
in the American canon, it might be said. Joan Didion musta had it in mind
with her novel, *Democracy*, just sayin'. We
can bet our casino capitalism ticket that TRP has read it. It may lay
behind parts of his books, maybe BE most, actually. The corruption of money
 )

But there are other details about Adams I learned when I chased Tom down
this rabbit hole when I was younger. Here is a minor one and I know
correlation is not causation but in the first volume of Adams' multi-volume
history of the US, he bothers to record how many
post office deliveries A DAY the US post office had in cities like New York
at the turn of the nineteenth century. in 1800. Up to four or more, if I
remember right..It was as if
the PO was a virtual messenger service; the PO system then had no room in
America for the Trystero, one might say, which was being itself in Europe,
so to speak.
Remember how Pynchon made clear that it moved to different countries in
history?

But more relevant to today. Henry Adams wrote another book, famous enough
in its time called *The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma. *I clearly
remember when the paperback reissue
came into the bookstore I worked at in college, later sixties, before I
knew thing one about Adams but did know just a little about Pynchon but not
any connection.   These were four essays
on aspects of democracy in America. You can offer 100 to 1 odds that TRP
read this, because two of the essays, the ureadable ones, used a
now-defunct-conceptually
scientist's physics ideas to explain history. Entropy among them. The
unscientific ones, as I remember, were all half-predicting that democracy
would decline and fail.
Sooner than in 2022. Adams was, let's say, so pessimistic but so smart, he
could not help feel projectively the secular endtimes were almost upon us
THEN......

Getting the timing wrong is too easy a way to say Adams was irrevocably
wrong. The Civil War did come. Now it is 2022, a year after, had there been
only 5 Trump loyalists
in certain jobs in five states, we would not even be talking about Ukraine,
if we were not shut down for subversion, LOL. (Us?, did they read all of
us?The Russia apologists? )

PS. For my annual birthday wishes to Thomas one year during the Trump
regime (sic), I wrote and suggested he get this book back into print--with
just a few words from him--....There was an edition published
in the 1930's I believe, anyway much later that evidently did deep-six
those two physics essays, with x's and y's and charts and formulas. This
edition could have been found and reprinted with a new introduction. ( I
think it was one of Adams's descendants, prob James Truslow Adams, who gave
us the phrase t*he AmericanDream* and called Native Americans "the savages"
in the early pages of HIS history of the US..(.One might say the occupation
of the historic Adams family was writing histories of America....)

Anyway, as always, neither he nor Melanie
responded nor did they make it happen.


https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/opinion/jan-6-jimmy-carter.html