ST etc

Wed Apr 8 11:30:04 UTC 2026

I agree with what you say about Pynchon's 'vision' as I call it......but
not on some of your examples...

In Vineland, Zoyd's discussion with Mucho Maas (now a record exec) about
acid in the 60s, which made you learn "That you were never going to die.
Ha! No wonder the State panicked. How are they supposed to control a
population that knows it'll never die?" is undercut by the line that
follows: "It was the way people used to talk" (313-14). We cannot be
certain, even about the most potent and interesting forms of critique.

C'mon, Zoyd?....Zoyd, the voice of the author, or the reigning answers?
when people were on acid?.   This is at base a social answer about people's
beliefs when on acid in the sixties ---"used to talk"...and how reliable
(again) is Zoyd with his social observations... ???....

Pynchon is satirizing acidheads pretty clearly here.....not critiquing
anything but them here, imo...

On Wed, Apr 8, 2026 at 7:19 AM Corbeau Castrum <filsducorbeau at pm.me> wrote:

> I definitely agree that GR is not a tidy-layering like High Castle, and
> that Pynchon's trying to change our minds. But I think that the novel is
> trying to challenge our choices and our preconceptions about what we
> believe to be important. Bernard Duyfhuizen talks about "reader traps" in
> which we are lured into one interpretation of the text only for it to be
> undercut or rendered less certain than we expected.
>
> Take for example the famous passage where Enzian is reflecting on
> interpreting the Holy Text of the Rocket ("all right, say we are supposed
> to be the Kabbalists out here, say that’s our real Destiny, to be the
> scholar-magicians of the Zone, with somewhere in it a Text, to be picked
> to pieces, annotated, explicated, and masturbated till it’s all squeezed
> limp of its last drop . . . " 529 in penguin) and the needs of technology
> ("It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all the
> atre, all just to keep the people distracted . . . secretly, it was being
> dictated instead by the needs of technology ... " 529-30) , which is
> ultimately undercut by the suggestion that "Well, this is stimulant talk
> here, yes Enzian’s been stuffing down Nazi surplus Pervitins these days
> like popcorn at the movies, and by now the bulk of the refinery—named,
> incidentally, for the famous discoverer of Oneirine—is behind them, and
> Enzian is on into some other paranoid terror, talking, talking, though
> each man’s wind and motor cuts him off from conversation" (530).
>
> The Argentinian anarchist Squalidozzi says in opposition to the land
> divisions of primitive accumulation, “We want to leave it open. We want it
> to grow, to change. In the openness of the German Zone, our hope is
> limitless.’ Then, as if struck on the forehead, a sudden fast glance, not
> at the door, but *up at the ceiling*—‘So is our danger’” (268). With the
> openness of the Zone comes this intense sense of hope, but the openness is
> ephemeral, soon suffering the Elect’s ever-present colonization of the
> material, intellectual, emotional, psychological, and spiritual conditions
> of existence. Squalidozzi may fail, but by leaving the novel open overall,
> Pynchon aims to maintain the presence of this hope, despite all the
> circumstances, on an aesthetic level.
>
> So Pynchon leads us strongly in the direction of a particular political
> critique but refuses to confirm/affirm it unconditionally. If we read GR in
> its totality, rather than just picking and choosing what we like, then we
> are obliged to suffer and endure this uncertainty. In this reading, "Is the
> baby smiling, or is it just gas? Which do you want it to be?" (133) is
> about getting the reader to question their own desires. For me Pynchon's
> ultimate goal is to force us to remain open to the text and to the world.
> He wants to expose us to his radical critique of colonialism, technology,
> and power without us becoming dogmatically attached to this particular c
> ritique.
>
> In Vineland, Zoyd's discussion with Mucho Maas (now a record exec) about
> acid in the 60s, which made you learn "That you were never going to die.
> Ha! No wonder the State panicked. How are they supposed to control a
> population that knows it'll never die?" is undercut by the line that
> follows: "It was the way people used to talk" (313-14). We cannot be
> certain, even about the most potent and interesting forms of critique.
>
> Thus I think that contradiction and ambiguity is essential to Pynchon's
> aesthetic and political project and how he wants to change our minds. Can
> we hold it all together? seems to be the persistent question.
> On Tuesday, April 7th, 2026 at 16:32, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> 'Ambiguity' in* the Seven Types of Ambiguity *means ...willful
> resonances" willful multiple meanings......the book is a hundred years
> old---you can browse
> in it online somewhere and you will see that what Empson showed was that
> beautifully and it is one way to show what happened as literary modernism
> as a movement moved in time....
>
> Ambiguity is an ambiguous word, lol...
>
> Everywhere, Pynchon shows a vision of reality, some part of his vision of
> reality, etc....shimmering with multiple meanings.....,start with V
> .....and don't stop...
>
> On Tue, Apr 7, 2026 at 9:21 AM Mike Weaver via Pynchon-l <
> pynchon-l at waste.org> wrote:
>
>> I'm not sure contradictory or ambiguous are useful terms when looking at
>> GR. Pynchon wants us to decide what is important and the few
>> alternatives presented are hints in that direction - the most obvious
>> being "Is the baby smiling, or is it just gas? Which do you want it to
>> be?"
>>
>> For Pynchon it's not about creating a tidy layering of alternates as in
>> Man in a High Castle, dreaming a butterfly or butterfly dreaming wise,
>> it's about turning the decision making back to the reader. Although its
>> themes are found elsewhere in his work that method of delivery first
>> practised in Lot 49 was given his all in GR and never used again. GR is
>> the only book he has written which has changed people's way of seeing
>> the world. Whether it has the same power now it had for we who lived in
>> a similar cultural milieu is a question I sometimes ponder. The people I
>> know who have admitted to being changed have all been of my generation.
>>
>> cheers
>> Mike
>>
>> On 07/04/2026 12:05, Corbeau Castrum via Pynchon-l wrote:
>> > One aspect of Gravity's Rainbow (which I don't believe is replicated to
>> quite the same degree in his other novels) is the deliberately
>> contradictory nature of the plot. Most clear example: Slothrop's
>> conditioning by Laszlo Jamf, whose files he reads and whose tomb he visits,
>> is contradicted by Mickey Wuxtry-Wuxtry, who affirms that "Jamf was only a
>> fiction, to help him explain what he felt so terribly, so immediately in
>> his genitals for those rockets each time exploding in the sky . . . to help
>> him deny what he could not possibly admit: that he might be in love, in
>> sexual love, with his, and his race's, death" (753 in penguin). The
>> Schwarzkommando also have several different contradictory versions (first
>> as fictitious characters in allied propaganda film, survivors of the Herero
>> genocide brought back to German to be trained as future neocolonial leaders
>> in Africa, subversive rocket troops).
>> >
>> > This contradictoriness of the plot is never resolved, and GR has been
>> compared to Todorov's vision of the "fantastic", in which the possibilities
>> of a natural or supernatural explanation for the events of the plot is
>> likewise never resolved or clarified.
>> >
>> > One way of approaching this situation is to see GR in terms of the
>> alternate history, in which one fictitious version of history "overwrites"
>> (Andreas Martin Widmann has a book that looks at GR this way) the more real
>> version of history. So, for example, in The Man in the High Castle by
>> Philip K. Dick, a German-Japanese WW2 victory overlays the Allied victory
>> that we know to be true. In GR, with its open ending and lack of
>> resolution, there are multiple layers of overwriting that we are obliged to
>> hold together simultaneously.
>> >
>> > Do you get the impression that in Shadow Ticket, one particular
>> historical plot/ending takes precedence over another? If only because of
>> its similarity to our own explicitly fascistic US? Or are our choices
>> suspended and left open? Does Skeet's letter at the end belong to a
>> particular vision of the US? I'm also thinking about that moment when Hicks
>> gets knocked off the boat but then the narrator affirms that this isn't the
>> case and he's back on the boat—which to me is less multiple possibilities
>> and more just a self-aware deus ex machina by the narrator.
>> >
>> > What do you folks think?
>> >
>> > On Monday, April 6th, 2026 at 22:07, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> >
>> >> I think the ending reveals we are in the US via shadow-line. (See
>> Conrad)
>> >>
>> >> On Mon, Apr 6, 2026 at 12:08 PM Joseph Tracy via Pynchon-l <
>> >> pynchon-l at waste.org> wrote:
>> >>
>> >>> The ending reveals that we are in an alternate history of the US. Not
>> >>> merely a fictionalized portion of that history but something that
>> could
>> >>> have happened if the Bankers Plot, revealed by the plotter's intended
>> >>> choice for a president to replace Roosevelt, Smedley Butler, had
>> >>> succeeded. This is part of the distinct difference in tone and style
>> >>> from where America headed in the Roosevelt years. Shadow Ticket plays
>> >>> like the society has become an extension of somewhat canned noir
>> movies
>> >>> where everyone talks like a movie tough guy or a hard boiled dame:
>> >>> Cagney, Robinson, Bogart. Noir is the shadow style invoked rather than
>> >>> the upbeat style of a Capra with warmer voices like Jimmy Stewart or
>> >>> William Holden Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell. Perhaps the intent was to
>> >>> remind the reader of where the gangster/cop style favored by our
>> current
>> >>> Capone of Cheese came from; how it slowly went out of fashion after
>> the
>> >>> war, revived by McCarthy and the red scare movies, and finally was
>> >>> superseded by more suave and sophisticated combination anti-fascist,
>> >>> anti-commie heroes like James Bond and Cary Grant and later Jack Ryan.
>> >>> Hollywood has had a big role in shaping the national mythology for a
>> >>> long time, even after WW2 rewriting that history to exclude the
>> Russian
>> >>> Army from the victory over the German war machine, and to exclude
>> >>> Gypsies, communists, the gay and antifascist dissidents from those
>> >>> murdered in concentration camps though historians say they were
>> >>> collectively larger in number than the murdered Jews. They are still
>> not
>> >>> included in any of the many movies about Nazi atrocities I have seen,
>> >>> or in Shadow Ticket. WTF?
>> >>>
>> >>> I think the noir style of ST is oversaturated with Hollywood but it
>> >>> says something about the role of self image as a mythic force that
>> >>> shapes how people see themselves and their world and what they are
>> >>> willing to accept as the role of government, the role of war, the role
>> >>> of enemies, the balance between workers and owners, the nature and
>> >>> appeal of 'the leading man' or 'sugar daddy' or 'protector soldier' or
>> >>> 'law enforcer' .
>> >>>
>> >>> The role of alcohol and other mind altering substances is an
>> >>> important part of the cultural mileu of ST though it manages to hide
>> in
>> >>> the shadows cast by radioactive cheese, like Pete Hogsbreath in the
>> >>> shadow Tyrannosaurus Rump, or like its theoretical opposite of upright
>> >>> drug-free Christian Zionism in the same shadow. Go figure.
>> >>>
>> >>> Other topics worthy of a few riffs: Cheese, Sacco and Vanzetti, Jazz
>> and
>> >>> klezmer, the nonexistence of Japan in a WW2 era novel, Hungary,
>> >>> motorcyle culture, labor history in 40s Wisconsin, Gun molls and
>> >>> heiresses, the long history of private ' law enfocement'. Cocaine in
>> the
>> >>> 30s and 40s, the presidency of Herbert Hoover.
>> >>>
>> >>>
>> >>>
>> >>> On 4/5/26 11:43 PM, Michael Bailey via Pynchon-l wrote:
>> >>>> Changing the (a) to “ass-backwards” , maybe go that way for awhile
>> >>> (pondering)
>> >>>> … the parting missive (291-293) from the kid, who without the
>> umbrage of
>> >>> McTaggart’s shadow ticket would be like a young apprentice under his
>> >>> (McTaggart’s) developing aegis, but instead was being like shunted
>> off from
>> >>> the Chicago private dick cohort and onto riding the rails with
>> Zinnia, a
>> >>> young female companion who dreams of Hollywood Stardom - “They’re
>> always
>> >>> looking for ‘us Ruby Keeler types’”,
>> >>>> https://youtu.be/hV2ZwftnaHg?si=wKfwlPfjxkTdaKpO
>> >>>>
>> >>>>
>> >>>> and why not? Who’s to say that that, and Skeet’s detecting ambitions
>> in
>> >>> the larger market, won’t work out? The Lake Michigan shore, America’s
>> >>> Riviera, will keep on keeping on without Hicks or Skeet or Zinnia -
>> Elliott
>> >>> Ness and his ilk will arrive to clean up Chicago, and community
>> organizers
>> >>> there, among many others, will bring to fruition Langston Hughes’
>> prophecy
>> >>> about a black President - I can’t find this poem, am I mistaken, I’m
>> sure I
>> >>> read it a few years ago - he predicts to the exact year a black
>> >>> President…breathtaking!
>> >>> Not according to AI search, but AI gets stuff wrong.
>> >>>> Lew Basnight, with a friendly loan, obviates their necessity for
>> riding
>> >>> freight trains, good of him, and shares some sobering takes -
>> “another one
>> >>> of those pep talks you guys are so good at.” I guess Lew moved back to
>> >>> Chicagoland/Milwaukee from LA himself? Or simply that he gets around.
>> >>>> The letter’s a nice reminder of where McTaggart’s come from, with no
>> >>> return address but at least a promise to pick up again (the
>> correspondence,
>> >>> not that particular letter, that is - he must’ve mailed the letter
>> for McT
>> >>> to’ve gotten it, right?)
>> >>>>
>> >>>> “Maybe they’ll keep finding new ways to be innocent.”
>> >>>> I like the way Skeet thinks.
>> >>>> Also, “Best pals always”
>> >>>>
>> >>>>
>> >>>>
>> >>> --
>> >>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>> >>>
>> >> --
>> >> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>> >>
>> > --
>> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>
>
>