CoL49 group reading - tidbit from Chapter 1

[Joseph Tracy]

Very cool research.  Pynchon seems to be telling us some of what he was reading.  

> On Jun 21, 2024, at 6:06 AM, Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Anorak fare (-;
> 
> Whilst trying to remember anything about Pierce that might’ve led to him
> naming her, she does a bunch of stuff, including
> 
> “reading of book reviews in the latest Scientific American”
> 
> June 1964 -
> Long review of a book on cybernetics
> Short reviews of, among others
> - CP Snow book on 2 cultures, expanding on his 1959 lecture
> - Mushroom hunter’s guide
> - A book of biographical essays on Faraday, Maxwell, and Kelvin
> - Oceanic Sculpture, Melanesian carvings & masks, “some are almost
> overpoweringly grotesque and terrifying, [like Doc Hilarius’s Fu Manchu]
> some subtly sinister, some brilliantly humorous…”
> 
> July 1964 -
> Long review of a book on human behavior
> Short reviews including:
> - The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Oskar Pfister, a Protestant clergyman,
> first to use psychoanalysis to help his parishioners
> - _Architecture in Transition_ by Constantine Doxiades, who suggested that
> “[the] solution for the expanding metropolis is to build it like a strip
> development along a central traffic artery and call it a ‘dynopolis’”
> 
> August is almost autumn but -
> Long review of a book on decision theory in government
> Short reviews
> - Lectures on gas theory by Boltzmann
> - The World of the Past by Jacquetta Hawkes
> - Mocrographia by Robert Hooke (illustrated)
> 
> 
> - I was wondering if there’d be anything on postal systems, but tbh,
> mention of this pursuit seems more to establish Oedipa as capable of
> serious thought than to point to any particular book
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
Oedipa may feel out of her league with the mathematics of entropy but sees right through Nefastis  premise that concentrated sorting is not work requiring energy.