CoL49 group reading ch3 - Lissajou / Botticelli

[Joseph Tracy]

Thoughts  on strip Botticelli. 

The most famous Botticelli painting and the obvious reference is The Birth of Venus.  Looking at this painting produces another left-right conundrum. Venus, assimilative of  Greek Aphrodite, is born from sea foam and is usually depicted nude. (She is the  goddess of love, eros, fertility, prosperity, prostitution and even victory. ) In the Birth of Venus she is shown rising on a shell from the turquoise sea, naked with long( Rapunzel-like)  luxuriant blonde hair,  a thick strand of which covers her vagina. There are figures on her right and left. On her right is  a partially clothed airborne  Zephyr embracing a figure who could be her sister or feminine brother, He blows  toward her, his soft breeze carrying flowers. On her right is another blond-tressed woman, who is more earthily voluptuous and standing on the shore ( Gaea?). She is holding forth a beautiful piece of cloth rippling in the breeze decorated also with flowers, It looks as though the cloth is intended to provide a covering for Venus but Venus seems blissfully indifferent and Zephyr’s breeze would seem to oppose that effort. What is pure unadorned love? A fantasy, a balance, a commitment, a dangerous delusion? All these questions are part of COL 49

Part of OM’s pursuit of liberation has to do with a need for sexual bliss , but internally she wants that combined with love. She is caught between the Zephyr of blissful freedom and the earthy need for a deep soul connection she felt in the presence of the Varo painting. She is not alone in wanting a union that embraces both  the healing of tears and  delight of pleasure. If we look at her as I have been doing as an allegorical type of reference to the soul of the american people we can see a similar struggle raging in the culture of the time. Throughout  the culture we can see a   reckoning with patriarchy and a dark violent past,  a reckoning with the desire to live up to the role of  heroic liberator from fascism, but mixed with with all the PTSD, alcoholism, Neo colonialism and Mcarthyist madness  that followed. Paranoia is not just aberrant unrealistic  individual psychology; it was coming into the culture like a wildfire from the highest levels for often devious and self-serving purposes.The pendulum of history swings a bit.  McCarthy gets shut down, SGT. Pepper strikes up the band, Kennedy wins over Nixon, a fresh breeze is blowing away the plans of the CIA and Curtis LeMay when seemingly out of the turquoise blue sky the presidents head gets blown off. The baby boomers are listening in. Questions are being asked.  The securities of left brain linear logic make their case with war and media management and resistance to civil rights and anti -war movement, endless prosperity via Oil and  atomic victory; the right brain says look at the big picture, freedom and friendship are possible. Remember the suffering, how easily fascism became a global cult.  What kind of world do we want? Not that simple but a reasonable rough approximation. Who will win the affection of the lonely princess, the people, the duck-and-cover generation?

 

> On May 22, 2024, at 1:27 AM, Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> “Two phase-shifted sinusoid inputs are applied to the oscilloscope in X-Y
> mode and the phase relationship between the signals is presented as a
> Lissajous figure.
> 
> In the professional audio world, this method is used for realtime analysis
> of the phase relationship between the left and right channels of a stereo
> audio signal. On larger, more sophisticated audio mixing consoles an
> oscilloscope may be built-in for this purpose.
> 
> On an oscilloscope, we suppose *x* is CH1 and *y* is CH2, *A* is the
> amplitude of CH1 and *B* is the amplitude of CH2, *a* is the frequency of
> CH1 and *b* is the frequency of CH2, so *a*/*b* is the ratio of frequencies
> of the two channels, and *δ* is the phase shift of CH1”
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> “realtime analysis of the phase relationship between the left and right
> channels”
> 
> Everyone is probably heartily tired of “right-brain/left-brain” ideation (I
> know I am) but the many occurrences of some kind of a duality (2 floors in
> Entropy, Stencil and Profane, elevated and gutter language in GR) elsewhere
> in Pynchon’s works make it difficult to ignore a bifurcation in the story -
> 
> A) On one channel, Oedipa’s awakening into sexual “infidelity” with its
> good and bad aspects (and her reactions both thoughts & feelings which are
> all very interesting & imho would still be so without the Tristero (but of
> course then what would she be having them about?)),
> 
> - sidebar: _Story of O_ 1954 would be an interesting compare/contrast here
> - or what if O had a college education and more agency ??? -
> 
> 
> B) and the limning of recent history with each Tristero brushstroke also
> adding real or plausibly fictive historical details, nicely crafted in
> beautiful language.
> 
> Which if that scheme doesn’t directly imitate the Lissajou figures, at
> least thinking about a possible connection provides the concept of “more
> than one thing going on, and they are related”
> 
> Seems pretty relevant to that thorough likening of “strip Botticelli” to
> “Tristero revelations”
> 
> 
> - Botticelli isn’t a game anyone I’ve ever met has played.
> 
> I did read a reference to it in one of the “Man from UNCLE” novelizations -
> quite some time ago - Napoleon Solo and a lady friend were playing it, &
> maybe Ilya Kuryakin was also .
> 
> - quick sidebar w/r/t Man from Uncle, 1964-68, so available to Tubeophile
> author at time of writing - though I’d be surprised if he read any of the
> novelizations - ¿quién sabe? - perhaps the show with its frequent trope of
> “pulling in innocents to a spy caper” and its rather lighthearted approach
> may have helped to inform if not the “plot” but the tone - like “what would
> the civilian be thinking during all of this” or even, “what would happen if
> UNCLE turned over the case to the housewife? Or if Napoleon slept with the
> informal recruit”
> 
> - I figure it’d be Napoleon, but the girls I knew all seemed to like Ilya,
> so maybe it’d be he.
> 
> ———
> 
> Wikipedia said Botticelli’s kind of like 20 questions, but trying to guess
> specific people.
> 
> Which I think could be useful as a way to feel out new acquaintances to
> assess how “hip” (well-informed) they were, & in which areas. How many
> questions you could come up with? How long to zero in?
> 
> So linking The Tristero to a game of strip Botticelli is a similar angle to
> the quite sound marketing (and legal - because obscenity challenges were
> only beginning to recede into the past) strategy
> 
> Similar to writing on the bathroom mirror “SEX!”
> 
> And then, lower down, in smaller print, “now that I’ve got your attention,
> clean the sink”
> 
> 
> Strip Botticelli! Now that I’ve got your attention, isn’t it interesting
> how many weird things happened in postal history? Makes you want to buy a
> lot of stamps, doesn’t it?
> 
> The beginning of Chapter 3 even suggests that outcome: “Much of the
> revelation was to come through the stamp collection Pierce had left…”
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l