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

[Mark Kohut]

I know Hollywood, media and movies are central. But those are themes,
ideas, some techniques in his fiction as I wrote about Dick. I hear a
Southern and Northern California style as was said as like in 49 and other
places, not in the dream factory.

If my understanding is too narrow then keep writing. Of Course California
is big for him.

On Fri, May 15, 2026 at 9:48 AM Robin Landseadel <
robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:

> 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
> *OperationOvercast* (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."
>
>
>
>
>
>
>