Bleeding Edge's pear tree....yes?

[Mark Kohut]

A venn diagram of our reading with our concerns would overlap how much?.....

The WEather Underground were not until the 60s were as good as
over...1969.....THEY and their violence was
NOT a part of the sixties.....it was the violence against them....see
sixties historians like Gitlin, O'Neill...

The Weather Underground are the mustard in one sense....

The mustard plant is a BAD SEED.....(see book allusion).....the mustard
plant is a home-grown metaphor....

Alice is so unrliable a narrator about the sixties---LOOK how Hill
characterizes her.....as bad as the middle class
that goes on Nation cruises and thinks they can see politics
right....Limousine liberals....those others you wrote of here....

CC" The problem with mustard is that you can't just chop it down. The seeds
can last for years. It will always come back. You have to cut it out
completely. You have to cut it out by the roots" (388).

Where does mustard come from?   can't just chop it down like a cherry tree
  one must get it out by the roots....like a cancer in the body
politic...the culture

Another invasive species, like the pear, from the East....

Wild mustard plants originated in the Mediterranean region and parts of
Western Asia, where they grew as native weeds before being gathered and
cultivated by ancient civilizations.

   -

   *Earliest Cultivation:* Archaeological evidence indicates that
white (*Sinapis
   alba*), brown (*Brassica juncea*), and black mustard (*Brassica nigra*)
   were cultivated in the Middle East, ancient Egypt, the Indus Valley, and
   China over 4,000 to 5,000 years ago.
   -

   *Spread to Europe:* Greek and Roman traders and conquerors helped spread
   mustard seeds across Europe, where Romans developed the practice of
   crushing the seeds and mixing them with unfermented grape juice (*mustum*)
   to create a paste similar to modern table mustard.







On Sun, Sep 13, 2026 at 8:25 PM Corbeau Castrum via Pynchon-l <
pynchon-l at waste.org> wrote:

> On the topic of the use of the language of colonization for plants, Nathan
> Hill's narrator deploys it in The Nix (2015) to speak about the dangers of
> an aggressive mustard plant. (This is not directly Pynchon, but Hill is
> compared to Pynchon (as well as DFW and John Irving) in the first blurb
> inside the novel, and then the novel's cover also uses the exact same
> fucking font as Gravity's Rainbow's cover (and incidentally an edition of
> the French translation of The Rainbow by DH Lawrence).
>
> "The problem was that they grew so quickly they stole sunlight from other
> ground plants, including young trees. They also had no natural
> predators—the local deer population ate everything but the mustard, leaving
> it free to colonize. It also produced a chemical that killed off bacteria
> in the soil that other plants needed for growth. A perfect botanical
> terror, in other words" (384).
>
> The character most interested in the dangers of these mustard plants,
> Alice, is a former "hippie" (the novel's characterization) turned middle
> class homeowner, and indeed "all her former radical energies now poured
> into things like selecting the perfect pendant lamps, or achieving the
> ideal kitchen work flow [...]" (384). But this is not so bad, the narrator
> continues, even if Alice feels guilty: "That by choosing a few very private
> concerns and pouring herself into them, she had never felt so expanded.
> That, paradoxically, narrowing her concerns had made her *more* capable of
> love and generosity and empathy and, yes, even peace and justice" (385).
>
> Even though Alice has "sold out," her new, more concrete perspective (less
> floating in the abstractions of 60s hyped-up polemical denunciations of
> American empire) allows her to realize that the anti-war movement was
> itself deeply misguided:
> "They never saw how their resistance had begun to look comical. They were
> beaten by the cops and the public cheered. They thought they were changing
> the world and what they did was help get Nixon elected. They found Vietnam
> intolerable, but their answer was to become intolerable themselves.
> [paragraph break]
> The only thing less popular than the war in those days was the anti-war
> movement.
> [paragraph break]
> This truth was obvious, though none of them saw it, convinced as they were
> of their own righteousness" (386).
>
> The final lines of this chapter (and section), two pages away, are as
> follows: "The problem with mustard is that you can't just chop it down. The
> seeds can last for years. It will always come back. You have to cut it out
> completely. You have to cut it out by the roots" (388).
>
> Underneath these lines I scrawled (I can hear my booking-publishing mother
> gasping), "mustard, mustard gas, colonizer, fascism, vietnam agent orange"
>
> In short, Hill's narrator has taken the language of 60s discourse and
> applied it to a more ecological concern. Clearly the colonial metaphor is
> supposed to amplify our understanding of the intensity of the mustard
> problem, but working our way backwards, it's not clear what pulling out
> mustard from the roots means for either anti-colonial/anti-war struggles or
> our understanding of the 60s.
>
> And, just as in my reading (!) of American Pastoral, there is a clear
> dialogical asymmetry. Sure, these accusations about the counterculture and
> the anti-war movement can ring true to certain ears, yes young people like
> to virtue signal, yes concrete political action is better than disconnected
> abstract symbolism (I am reminded of "Only a Fool Would Say That," Steely
> Dan's response to John Lennon's "Imagine"), but the perspective of sincere
> 60s radicals (think of those wily Weather Underground folks), who continue
> to engage with the period "without apology" (also the title of a 1984
> Fredric Jameson-edited issue of Social Text), is notably absent from the
> novel. A covertly tendentious portrayal/memory of the 60s, n'est-ce pas?
>
> On Sunday, September 13th, 2026 at 20:48, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > *Official Findings:* The 9/11 Commission, as well as subsequent thorough
> > reviews by the CIA inspector general and the Commission’s executive
> > director (Philip Zelikow), investigated these theories and found *no
> > evidence* that the CIA ever attempted to recruit Hazmi and Mihdhar, or
> that
> > they were acting as intelligence assets. Instead, the breakdown was
> > attributed to severe bureaucratic silos, poor information sharing, and
> > institutional incompetence rather than a secret operational partnership.
> >
> > On Sun, Sep 13, 2026 at 12:12 PM Joseph Tracy <coypoet at mailfence.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > > 2 more 9-11 hijackers identified recently as CIA recruits. Congress
> > > owned by genocidal foreign government, war on Spanish speaking native
> > > Americans,  water seized by ICE-y  advocates of technofascism, Haaretz
> > > reveals that Netanyahu was clearly warned about Hamas action, both
> > > parties supporting murderous policies in the middle east, wall street
> > > buying single family homes everywhere. Seems like one 9-11 after
> > > another, perpetrators never apprehended.
> > >
> > > I know nothing about Callery pears  but plenty about european
> > > colonialism and there is some resemblance to invasive species. We have
> 3
> > > highly aggressive invasive plants here in Vermont that are locally
> > > problematic , 2 of which I have spent many dayys trying to remove
> > > completely out of my large vegetable and flower garden. These plants
> > > are in much of new England and really do a lot of damage. People who
> > > steal other people's lands, resources and freedom always tell
> themselves
> > > it is for the best and pride themselves on how tough and smart  they
> and
> > > their weapons are , how savage, violent  and worthless those whose
> lands
> > > they take by violent savagery.  At least Callery pears have no drones,
> > > missiles, AI targeting tech, bullets. Just seeds.
> > >
> > >
> > >     Colonialism is rooted in the lie that mass murder and theft are an
> > > inevitable product human nature and Divine will  even though no
> cultures
> > > accept that they should be destroyed thereby and no religions endorse
> > > murder or theft.   I do not see Trump as aberrant in the history of US
> > > colonialism. .  "In 1918 46 percent of Indians nationwide were infected
> > > with Trachoma, and 36 percent with tuberculosis, 27 percent of Indian
> > > children died before age 3."  (The Chosen and the Damned", by David
> > > Silverman.) This is a tiny glimpse into hundreds of years in which the
> > > government and popular US cruelty and violence was in many ways greater
> > > than right now. The difference is that now we are all potential targets
> > > of this insatiable appetite.
> > >
> > > Maybe it is just entropy. Maybe civilization just  accelerates entropy
> > > by providing yachts and castles and private jets to its management
> > > class. A nice thick insulation on the power lines, a proper distance
> > > from the bullets. Maybe the endless betrayals are for our own good.
> > > Maybe spring will always bring new life and hope.  Maybe some are born
> > > to sweet delight and some are born to endless night. For me who loves
> to
> > > eat peaches from China grown in my own garden, who loves to play music
> > > with friends and family, to make art from glass windows to ink
> drawings,
> > > and who has payed no war taxes for 25 years. The hard part is to see
> how
> > > all this is affecting my children. How hard it has gotten  to hope for
> a
> > > good peaceable life.
> > >
> > > Should we find the counter-force and join up however we may,  or hope
> it
> > > all goes ...  to that magical dream we call 'away'. Where on a gravity
> > > bound planet is 'away' ?  Many seem to hope maybe it will all go away,
> > > wherever that is.
> > >
> > > I have been saying the same thing on the P-list for a long time. The
> > > empire isn't changing for the better and both parties are in on what is
> > > once again manifest in genocidal mass murder. I wish I had been wrong.
> > >
> > >
> > > On 9/12/26 1:30 PM, Mark Kohut wrote:
> > > > https://x.com/japan_nobunaga/status/2098819428263563329?s=20
> > > > --
> > > > 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
>