ST etc

Wed Apr 8 11:58:37 UTC 2026

I should've copied the entire passage, which is as follows (and I should clarify the best lines are actually from Mucho, not Zoyd):

"Well I still wish it was back then, when you were the Count. Remember how the acid was? Remember that windowpane, down in Laguna that time? God, I knew then, I knew. . . ."
They had a look. "Uh-huh, me too. 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? When that was always their last big chip, when they thought they had the power of life and death. But acid gave us the X-ray vision to see through that one, so of course they had to take it away from us."
"Yeah, but they can't take what happened, what we found out."
"Easy. They just let us forget. Give us too much to process, fill up every minute, keep us distracted, it's what the Tube is for, and though it kills me to say it, it's what rock and roll is becoming — just another way to claim our attention, so that beautiful certainty we had starts to fade, and after a while they have us convinced all over again that we really are going to die. And they've got us again." It was the way people used to talk. (313-14)

So yes it's a satire of 60s acidheads and their naive youthfulness, but there's also an interesting critique of the media vis-a-vis the possibilities of (anarchist) revolution. What really struck me about this passage was the way it resonates with David Marriott, an Afro-pessimist critic and Frantz Fanon scholar, who argues that in The Wretched of the Earth, "decolonial violence is far from its Hegelian origin, and refers to a struggle that is not to the death, but to a struggle with and from death, a struggle that seeks to go beyond the death in life" that characterizes the Black experience ("Judging Fanon, 14). Fanon wants to change the relationship the colonized has with death, to no longer fear it in quite the same way and thus "conceive of revolutionary liberation [...] as a refusal of any sovereign claim to master blackness" (15). If as a colonized person experiencing social death, you are marked for death for the start and are only waiting for the sword of damocles to drop, then what's the point in being afraid if you are essentially already dead?

Thus in GR we have Enzian telling Slothrop about his sense of perceptual non-being after being passed over for death during the Herero genocide:

Well, I think we’re here, but only in a statistical way. Something like that rock over there is just about 100% certain—it knows it’s there, so does everybody else. But our own chances of being right here right now are only a little better than even—the slightest shift in the probabilities and we’re gone—schnapp! Like that.”

“Peculiar talk, Oberst.”

“Not if you’ve been where we have. Forty years ago in Südwest, we were nearly exterminated. There was no reason. Can you understand that? No reason. (367)

So the relationship to death is an important element here in Pynchon's writing on the Black experience (picking up on the discourse of Black Power) and on members of the 60s counterculture more generally.
On Wednesday, April 8th, 2026 at 13:30, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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 ("allright,sayweare supposedtobetheKabbalistsouthere,saythat’sourrealDestiny,to bethescholar-magiciansoftheZone,withsomewhereinitaText,to bepickedtopieces,annotated,explicated,andmasturbatedtillit’sall squeezedlimpof itslastdrop..." 529 in penguin) and the needs of technology ("ItmeansthisWarwasneverpoliticalatall,thepoliticswasalltheatre,alljusttokeepthepeopledistracted...secretly,itwasbeingdictatedinsteadbytheneedsoftechnology..." 529-30) , which is ultimately undercut by the suggestion that "Well,thisisstimulanttalkhere,yesEnzian’sbeenstuffingdown NazisurplusPervitinsthesedayslikepopcornatthemovies,andby nowthebulkoftherefinery—named,incidentally,forthefamousdiscovererofOneirine—isbehindthem,andEnzianisonintosome otherparanoidterror,talking,talking,thougheachman’swindand motorcutshimofffromconversation" (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, butup 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 critique.
>>
>> 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