ST ch 19 French 75s, Greasy Thumb Guzik, California

[Robin Landseadel]

MK: "Great....I'm wrong...."

Good to know

" . . . but Hollywood does not count, in my opinion...."

Central to what TRP was up to, really, really, really central to the author's enterprise.
As In, Pynchon and Company was crashed by Fox Films, buried history if you ask me.
Trying to find anything—anything—about Pynchon and Company is next to impossible. 
Pynchon and Company was a major player in the stock market right up to April 24, 1931.
William Fox and Fox Films was the reason P & C collapsed. 'splains a lot of what's going
on in Shadow Ticket.
 
Get a load of this fabulous sequence from Against the Day:

The shelves and bench-tops were crowded with volt-ammeters, rheostats,transformers,
arc lamps whole and in pieces..." https://althouse.blogspot.com/2006/11/shelves-and-bench-tops-were-crowded.html
 
“... half-used carbons, calcium burners, Oxone tablets, high-tension magnetos, alternators
store-bought and home-made, vibrator coils, cut-outs and interruptors, worm drives, Nicol
prisms, generating valves, glassblowing torches, Navy surplus Thalofide cells, brand-new
Aeolight tubes freshly fallen from the delivery truck, British Blattnerphone components and
tons of other stuff Chick had never recalled seeing before.”
 
A truly freaky foreshadowing, if the Pynchon Wiki site is correct:

" . . .  Oxone . . . Blattnerphone components
This list, all by itself, has drawn attention from a book reviewer and a blogger, both of
whom regard it as "typical" of AtD. Oxone is an oxidizer in solid form, used today for
swimming pool treatment. Thalofide describes a kind of photoelectric cell or electric
eye. Aeolight is a brand of discharge lamp. The Blattnerphone was a wire recorder.
 
Most of these components are part of the Movietone Sound System, used to record
sound on movies and invented by Theodore Case. He invented both the Aeolight lamp
and the Thalofide thallium sulfide photoelectric cell. The system has been incorrectly
attributed to Lee De Forest, so Case is a preterite inventor, related to De Forest in a
manner similar to Tesla's relation to Edison. Don't know about that Oxone though ...
 
ATD 1018-1039 - Thomas Pynchon Wiki https://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_1018-1039
 
“ . . . The commercial use of Movietone began when William Fox of the Fox Film
Corporation purchased the entire system, including the patents, on July 23, 1926.
Despite Fox owning the Case patents, the work of Freeman Harrison Owens, and the
American rights to the German Tri-Ergon patents, the Movietone sound film system
utilized only the inventions of Case Research Lab.
 
Also in 1926, William Fox hired Earl I. Sponable (1895–1977) from Case Research Lab
and acquired the sound-on-film patents from Case. The first feature film released using
the Fox Movietone system was Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), directed by
F. W. Murnau. This film was the first professionally produced feature film with an optical
soundtrack. The sound in the film included music and sound effects but only a few
unsynchronized spoken words. The system was also used for sound acting sequences
in Mother Knows Best (1928).
 
Within two years after purchasing the system from Case, Fox bought out all of Case's
interests in the Fox-Case company. All of Fox's sound feature films were made using
the Movietone system until 1931, when it was superseded by a Western Electric
recording system that utilized the light valve invented by Edward C. Wente in 1923.
Despite this change, Fox continued to use the Movietone system for the Movietone
News until 1939, due to the convenience of transporting the single-system's sound film
equipment. . . “

Movietone sound system - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movietone_sound_system
 
" . . . the LSD experiments at Stanford don't count either, imo...they ain't no style..."

The MKULTRA program is a direct outgrowth of Operation Paperclip:

Operation Paperclip was a secret United States intelligence program in which more than
1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians were taken from former Nazi Germany    
to the US for government employment after the end of World War II in Europe, between 1945
and 1959; several were confirmed to be former members of the Nazi Party, including the SS or
the SA.
 
The effort began in earnest in 1945, as the Allies advanced into Germany and discovered a
wealth of scientific talent and advanced research that had contributed to Germany's wartime
technological advancements. The US Joint Chiefs of Staff officially established Operation
Overcast (operations "Overcast" and "Paperclip" were related, and the terms are often used
interchangeably) on July 20, 1945, with the dual aims of leveraging German expertise for the
ongoing war effort against Japan and to bolster US postwar military research. The operation,
conducted by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA), was largely actioned by special
agents of the US Army's Counterintelligence Corps US Army's (CIC). Many selected scientists
were involved in the Nazi rocket program, aviation, or chemical/biological warfare. The Soviet
Union in the following year conducted a similar program, called Operation Osoaviakhim, that
emphasized many of the same fields of research.
 
The operation, characterized by the recruitment of German specialists and their families,
relocated more than 1500 experts to the US. It has been valued at US$10 billion in patents and
industrial processes. Recruits included such notable figures as Wernher von Braun, a leading
rocket-technology scientist. Those recruited were instrumental in the development of the US
space program and military technology during the Cold War. Despite its contributions to
American scientific advances, Operation Paperclip has been controversial because of the Nazi
affiliations of many recruits, and the ethics of assimilating individuals associated with war crimes
into American society. . . "
 
Operation Paperclip - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

MKULTRA:


Origin of the project

During the early 1940s, Nazi scientists working in the concentration camps of Auschwitz and
Dachau during World War II conducted interrogation experiments on human subjects.
Substances such as barbiturates, morphine derivatives, and hallucinogens such as mescaline
were employed in experiments conducted on Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Jewish, and other
prisoners of war. These experiments aimed to develop a truth serum which would, in the words
of one laboratory assistant to Dachau scientist Kurt Plötner "eliminate the will of the person
examined." American historian Stephen Kinzer said that the CIA project was a continuation of
these earlier Nazi experiments, as evidenced by MKUltra's use of mescaline on unwitting
subjects, replicating previous Nazi experiments conducted at Dachau. Numerous Nazi scientists
would be employed by the United States government after the war as part of Operation
Paperclip, with some figures such as Kurt Blome becoming involved in MKUltra.
 
American interest in drug-related interrogation experiments began in 1943, when the Office of
Strategic Services began developing a "truth drug" that would produce "uninhibited truthfulness"
in an interrogated person. In 1947, the United States Navy initiated Project CHATTER, an
interrogation program which saw the first testing of LSD on human subjects. . . "
 
MKUltra - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra
 
" . . . Yes, forgot about Lot 49....totally.....you are fully correct....actually forgot in my aging head
that he was there so early in his adulthood...,"

And now I am going to tell you a little story.

1979, I move from Pasadena, California to Berkeley. I get a job (in the summer) and a studio
apartment real quick. Both right on the corner of Telegraph and Bancroft, a beautiful sort of
madness. But the job is at Odyssey Records and that record store chain folds in about three
months. My next job turned out to be seasonal, didn't know that walking in, Campus Textbook
Exchange, also really close, right across the street from the campus. Independent textbook
store, trades a few textbooks for cash but mostly textbooks for textbooks, back when textbooks
were used year after year. What I didn't know before is that mass-market (or "pocket")
paperbacks have a weird process for returns called "stripping". Tear off the cover of the
paperback, keep the cover to mail back to the publisher to balance the account, throw away
the contents.

The Crying of Lot 49 is a popular novel for English 1A classes. It's short, it's "literary", and at the
UC Berkeley campus, it's plenty relevant with its placement of Oedipa's literary research at the
UC campus, with loads of clues of how and what the author knew about the place.
 
I ask the owner if I can take a stripped copy home, he sez yes, I strip about 100 copies and toss
them into the recycling dumpster (every big bookstore has one, magazines get stripped too). . . 
 
. . . and proceeded to read the damned thing continually for the next six months or so, well
after my run at Campus Textbook Exchange runs out with my next (temporary) job involving
taking the bus to Transbay Terminal in San Francisco, still re-reading the skinny paperback
on the way to work. I've read the book at least once every year ever since.
 
Do the math.

I'm haunted by how much the information/entropy metaphor of The Crying of Lot 49 applies
to my stumbling upon the book. "WASTE" indeed.
 
And then there's the American Waste Law, Pynchon vs. Stearns. And the Automobile Graveyard, and on and on, one of those places that seem so small on the outside but
so big on the inside.
 
" . . . Yes, my punctuation about GR is this: what kind of "California style" has GR?...."

Besides this?
 
. . . LOS ANGELES (PNS)—Richard M. Zhlubb, night manager of the
Orpheus Theatre on Melrose, has come out against what he calls
"irresponsible use of the harmonica." Or, actually, "harbodica," since
Manager Zhlubb suffers from a chronic adenoidal condition, which affects
his speech. Friends and detractors alike think of him as "the Adenoid."
Anyway, Zhlubb states that his queues, especially for midnight showings,
have fallen into a state of near anarchy because of the musical
instrument.

"It's been going on ever since our Bengt Ekerot / Maria Casarès
Film Festival," complains Zhlubb, who is fiftyish and jowled, with a
permanent five-o'clock shadow (the worst by far of all the Hourly
Shadows), and a habit of throwing his arms up into an inverted "peace
sign," which also happens to be semaphore code for the letter U,
exposing in the act uncounted yards of white French cuff.
"Here, Richard," jeers a passerby, "I got your French cuff, right here,"
meanwhile exposing himself in the grossest possible way and
manipulating his foreskin in a manner your correspondent cannot set
upon his page.

Manager Zhlubb winces slightly. "That's one of the ringleaders,
definitely," he confides. "I've had a lot of trouble with him. Him and that
Steve Edelman." He pronounces it "Edelbid." "I'b dot afraid to dabe
dabes."

The case he refers to is still pending. Steve Edelman, a Hollywood
businessman, accused last year of an 11569 (Attempted Mopery with a
Subversive Instrument), is currently in Atascadero under indefinite
observation. It is alleged that Edelman, in an unauthorized state of mind,
attempted to play a chord progression on the Department of Justice list,
out in the street and in the presence of a whole movie-queue of
witnesses.

"A-and now they're all doing it. Well, not 'all,' let me just clarify that,
of course the actual lawbreakers are only a small but loud minority, what
I meant to say was, all those like Edelman. Certainly not all those good
folks in the queue. A-ha-ha. Here, let me show you something."
He ushers you into the black Managerial Volkswagen, and before you
know it, you're on the freeways. Near the interchange of the San Diego
and the Santa Monica, Zhlubb points to a stretch of pavement: "Here's
where I got my first glimpse of one. Driving a VW, just like mine.
Imagine. I couldn't believe my eyes." But it is difficult to keep one's
whole attention centered on Manager Zhlubb. The Santa Monica
Freeway is traditionally the scene of every form of automotive folly
known to man. It is not white and well-bred like the San Diego, nor as
treacherously engineered as the Pasadena, nor quite as ghetto-suicidal
as the Harbor. No, one hesitates to say it, but the Santa Monica is a
freeway for freaks, and they are all out today, making it difficult for you
to follow the Manager's entertaining story. You cannot repress a certain
shudder of distaste, almost a reflexive Consciousness of Kind, in their
presence. They come gibbering in at you from all sides, swarming in,
rolling their eyes through the side windows, playing harmonicas and
even kazoos, in full disrespect for the Prohibitions.

"Relax," the Manager's eyes characteristically aglitter. "There'll be a
nice secure home for them all, down in Orange County. Right next to
Disneyland," pausing then exactly like a nightclub comic, alone in his tar
circle, his chalk terror. . . 

Gravity's Rainbow, pgs. 769/770
 
My point, and I do have one, is that the author has arrows pointing to Operation Paperclip
and Project MK Ultra in both The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow. A whole lot of
Gravity's Rainbow revolves around Operation Paperclip, some to the roots of what was to
become MKULTRA.

I'm going to recklessly spitball this one—1964. The author is trying to get a gig after quitting
Boeing. Teaching math at U.C. Berkeley? Ain't happening. However, he's got an agent for his
books, V. turned out well, but the agent says we need something quick. So, what's on the
author's mind is this big, big book that will probably take years to write. But a man's gotta eat.

So, he takes ideas that he researched for the big one, giving us an idea of how LSD got to be a
big thing in the mid-sixties thanks to Operation Paperclip.
 
Now, a musical interlude:

"And what is it that put America in the forefront of the nuclear nations? And what is that will
make it possible to spend $20,000,000,000 of your money to put some clown on the moon?
Well, it was good old American know-how, that's what. as provided by good old Americans
like Dr. Werhner von Braun."

https://youtu.be/fl5ouqFWqk8?si=kchl8z91DgG6Mwii

"There must be a pony in here somewhere."