Arts & Letters

I recently finished off Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, and since my brain has stopped hemorrhaging, I figured it was time to go back and continue cataloguing items of interest, quotes, and other footnotey type stuff. I’ve been doing this since I started the novel, about a year ago. See: [part I | part II | part III | part IV]

• Zipf’s Principle of Least Effort: George Kingsley Zipf studied word frequencies and found that analyzing texts in many different languages throughout history produced strikingly similar results, which when graphed were always close to a straight line. Zipf’s 1949 book Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort states the mathematics of Zipf’s Law, but also “crosses a line, blending statistics with paranoia as Zipf – not sounding at all like a statistician – pleads to the reader that his Principle lays bare nothing less than the secret structure of all social relations – not just linguistic, but economic, political. etc. He waxes utopian about the explanatory power of the Principle.” Basically, what this means is that most people, most of the time, will not take the time to overcome small challenges. “To be habitual, an action must be relatively effortless or carry a particularly large psychic reward.”

  Or, as Robert Heinlein wrote in Time Enough for Love: “The Principle of Least Effort: ‘Progress doesn’t come from early risers–progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.'”

• At one point Pynchon refers to “The American vice of modular repetition”, which I though was just a fantastic way of putting American ingenuity during the war. Our equipment during the war wasn’t always the best, but we invariably made one hell of a lot of them (taking advantage of “modular repetition”), and they were robust, simple to repair and maintain.
• A quote (page 350): “Simple talion may be fine for wartime, but politics between wars demands symmetry and a more elegant idea of justice, even to the point of masquerading, a bit decadently, as mercy.” Nowadays, talion doesn’t cut it during wartime, but its an interesting quote nonetheless.
• Yet another quote (page 434): “If there is something comforting – religious, if you want – about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.” Paranoia is one of the main themes running throughout the novel, and probably warrants a discussion of its own…
• And another (page 587): “Non-Masons stay pretty much in the dark about What Goes On, though now and then something jumps out, exposes itself, jumps giggling back again, leaving you with few details but a lot of Awful Suspicions. Some of the American Founding Fathers were Masons, for instance. There is a theory going around that the U.S.A. was and still is a gigantic Masonic plot under the ultimate control of the group known as the Illuminati. It is difficult to look for long at the strange single eye crowning the pyramid which is found on every dollar bill and not begin to believe the story, a little.” Imagine the fun the “Bush Lied!” folks could have if Bush was a Mason. Alas, he is not… yet the conspiracy theories march on. There is a “Masonic Home” about a mile down the road from me. Very strange buildings; they look almost majestic, yet forbidding. I wonder sometimes if I should worry about that.
• Gravity’s Rainbow is a strange book, in that it is at times incomprehensible and deadly serious, while other times lighthearted, goofy and even humorous (often times simultaneously incomprehensible, lighthearted, funny, and deadly serious). For instance, Pynchon seems to delight in naming people and places and things such as Seaman Bodine’s ship: the U.S.S. John E. Badass, a place where they hold Runcible Spoon fights. Or Dr. Lazlo Jamf, whose last name is an acronym for “Jive Ass Mother Fucker”, which lets you know just how trustworthy the man is…

Well, that about does it for this installment. I think theres enough here for at least one or two more entries, and a review is coming as well. See also: [part I | part II | part III | part IV]

The Road to Oceania by William Gibson : When George Orwell had to come up with a name for his classic piece of dystopian literature, he did so by inverting the last two digits of the year of his book’s completion. Thus 1984 was born, but it was not a novel about the future, it was a novel about 1948. As such, while its still a shocking dystopian vision of what could have been, we’ve got other fish to fry.

Elsewhere, driven by the acceleration of computing power and connectivity and the simultaneous development of surveillance systems and tracking technologies, we are approaching a theoretical state of absolute informational transparency, one in which “Orwellian” scrutiny is no longer a strictly hierarchical, top-down activity, but to some extent a democratized one. As individuals steadily lose degrees of privacy, so, too, do corporations and states. Loss of traditional privacies may seem in the short term to be driven by issues of national security, but this may prove in time to have been intrinsic to the nature of ubiquitous information.

I find this to be an interesting perspective, though I’m not sure how close we’d ever get to a “state of absolute informational transparency”.

This is not to say that Orwell failed in any way, but rather that he succeeded. “1984” remains one of the quickest and most succinct routes to the core realities of 1948. If you wish to know an era, study its most lucid nightmares. In the mirrors of our darkest fears, much will be revealed. But don’t mistake those mirrors for road maps to the future, or even to the present.

We’ve missed the train to Oceania, and live today with stranger problems.

Read the whole thing, as they say. Just as a note, you might want to check out the spiffy new edition of 1984 that was recently released with a new forward by some Thomas Pynchon guy. [via Instapundit]

Yet another entry in an ongoing project to collect interesting tidbits, quotes, and footnotes for Thomas Pynchon’s novel, Gravity’s Rainbow. Strangely, the novel has begun to take form for me, actually being coherant at times with some sort of plot now apparent (albeit not a linear or traditional one). See also: [part I | part II | part III]

• Qlippoth : Usually described as a plane or planes containing living souls which unwillingly became demons and are thus known to the main sequence of Western Magic as Qlippoth, Shells of the Dead. The Qlippoth can be viewed as a negative reflection or counterbalance to the Sephiroth (the Tree of Life). Just as the Sephiroth depict progressive evolution and eventual reunion with God, the Qlippoth symbolize progressive degeneration, entropy, and disintegration.
• Metatron : In Kabbalistic lore, the highest angel who sits next to Yahweh’s throne. He acts as the voice of God and it’s Metatron’s task to sustain mankind. He has been known as the link between the human and the divine. The burning bush, pilars of fire, and any other time a human thought they were talking to God, they were actually talking to Metatron. You can also see him perform these functions in Kevin Smith’s film Dogma.
• There are several passages that reminded me of Fight Club: “But tonight he lies humped on the floor at her feet, his withered ass elevated for the cane, bound by nothing but his need for pain, for something real, something pure… pain. The clearest poetry, the endearment of greatest worth…”
• Funny concept: “He will learn to hear quote marks in the speech of others.”
• Werewolf : Not just a lycanthrope, but, rather, an underground army recruited and trained in 1945 for guerilla warfare against the Allies who were in the process of occupying Germany. Technically spelled Wehrwolf (meaning, literally, “defence wolf”), the term actually has a long association with irregular warfare in Germany. The Nazi variety preferred the English spelling, as it sounded more feral and it distanced them from previous Wehrwolf movements.
• Lord Acton : English historian at Cambridge. In a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, he infamously wrote “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Another Acton quote: “History is not woven by innocent hands.”
• A nice Pynchonian quote: “…the best feeling dusk in a foreign city can bring: just where the sky’s light balances the electric lamplight in the street, just before the first star, some promise of events without cause, surprises, a direction at right angles to every direction his life has been able to find up till now.”
• What kind of mustache would you grow? “‘Bad-guy,’ sez Slothrop. Meaning, he explains, trimmed, narrow, and villainous.”

That does it for this installment of Footnotes from Beyond the Zero (which, since I’ve finished the “chapter” labeled “Beyond the Zero”, has become a bit of a misnomer, but I like the name anyway, so I’ll stick with it). See also: [part I | part II | part III]

This is yet another in what will likely be a long series of posts cataloging some of the interesting little footnotes I’ve been making while reading Thomas Pynchon’s novel, Gravity’s Rainbow. The prose is beautiful and thick with historical references, and so when I come upon a particularly interesting passage or historical tidbit, I note it here. See also: [part I | part II]

• Rundstedt offensive : Gerd von Rundstedt (1875-1953) was one of Adolf Hitler’s most respected military leaders in World War II. In 1944, this German field marshal directed the Ardennes offensive (most famous for the Battle of the Bulge). General Dwight D. Eisenhower called him the ablest of the German generals of World War II.
• Pierre Janet : A psychologist and neurologist, Janet was influential in bringing about in France and the United States a connection between academic psychology and the clinical treatment of mental illnesses. He stressed psychological factors in hypnosis and contributed to the modern concept of mental and emotional disorders involving anxiety, phobias, and other abnormal behaviour.
• German Communist Party (KPD) : After WWI, some socialists and communists began to form more radical groups. In December, 1918, a group of radicals established the German Communist Party (KPD). One of the more influential leaders of this revolution, Rosa Luxemburg who was executed in an attempt to cull the rebellion, is referenced in the book quite a bit. Throughout the 1920s the KPD was very much under the influence of Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Germany’s KPD became the largest Communist Party outside the Soviet Union and was fairly successful in elections until Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party came to power, at which point the KPD was banned and its leaders imprisoned.
• A nice quote: “Yet who can presume to say what the War wants, so vast and aloof it is… so absentee.
• Another quote: “…look at the forms of capitalist expression. Pornographies: pornographies of love, erotic love, Christian love, boy-and-his-dog, pornographies of sunsets, pornographies of killing, and pornographies of deduction — ahh that sigh when we guess the murderer — all these novels, these films and songs they lull us with, they’re approaches, more comfortable and less so, to that Absolute Comfort.”
• One of Pynchon’s interesting talents is his ability to sum up a character with a single sentence: “He has, had, this way of removing all the excitement from things with a few words. Not even well-chosen words: he’s that way by instinct.” I’ve known people like that, and I knew everything I needed to know about this character from reading this one sentence.

That does it for this installment of Footnotes from Beyond the Zero. For more riveting info: [part I | part II]

For those who will inevitably be flummoxed by this entry, be aware that it is part of an ongoing attempt to illustrate some of the things in Thomas Pynchon’s novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, that I find interesting (see Part I)… This is going to be a weird one, folks, so lets stay frosty:

Dr. Laszlo Jamf was a Pavlovian psychologist who sought to condition an infant (Tyrone Slothrop), but previous attempts at such experiments brought in too much subjectivity. How can you quantitatively measure fear (as a previous experiment had attempted)? Dr. Jamf, therefore, decided that his indicator would be the erection of a male infant. Fear is subjective, “but a hardon, that’s either there, or it isn’t. Binary, elegant. The job of observing it can even be done by a student”.

Unconditioned stimulus = stroking penis with antiseptic cotton swab.

Unconditioned response = hardon.

Conditioned stimulus = x.

Conditioned response = hardon whenever x is present, stroking is no longer necessary, all you need is that x.

But what is x? It is the “Mystery Stimulus” that has fascinated generations of behavioral-pyschologists, and that is the whole point of the experiment. Traditionally, the subject of the experiment would have to be de-conditioned. Dr. Jamf would have to “extinguish” the hardon reflex he’d built up. This is where things get tricky: “…we must also realize that extinction can proceed beyond the point of reducing a reflex to zero. We cannot therefore judge the degree of extinction only by the magnitude of the reflex or its absence, since there can still be a silent extinction beyond the zero.”

Apparently, Dr. Jamf extinguished only to the point of zero, ignoring the “silent extinction beyond the zero”. Lt. Tyrone Slothrop was discovered many years later (now a man) to be quite sexually active. He even has a map on which he has marked his sexual conquests. Oddly, the marked points on the map happen to coincide identically with V-2 rocket impact sites! This is what seems to indicate some sort of latent conditioned response in Slothrop… Naturally, there is all sorts of speculation as to how this could be.

Further complicating matters, apparently the list of sexual conquests/rocket impact sites are described by a Poisson Distribution, a probability density function (one that tends to pop up in nature quite often).

So, yes, Gravity’s Rainbow has its share of interesting ideas, existing beside all of its beautiful nonsensical prose. Just one interesting note concerning the etymology of “Jamf”: apparently it is derived from an abbreviation of “jive-ass mother-fucker” which is said to have originated with Charlie Parker. Naturally, this lets me see Dr. Lazlo Jamf in a substantially different, and much less trustworthy, light…

And just for fun, some more quotes, further illustrating my fascination with how Pynchon’s language is structured:

• “…but it’s something they want to keep, so much that to keep it, they will take on more than propaganda has ever asked them for. They are in love. Fuck the war.”
• “Who can find his way about this lush maze of initials, arrows solid and dotted, boxes big and small, names printed and memorized?” – This in reference to the confusing proliferation of secret governmental agencies, each with their own acronym and each ordered in a mezmerizing hierarchy. The specific line quoted struck me because it could just as easily be applied to the computer industry…

Perhaps a sign of literary masochism, I’ve taken to reading the infamous rainbow. To be perfectly honest, I’m in way over my head. Is it too much to hope that the novel is deliberately nonsensical? That I don’t understand what is going on half the time because I’m actually not supposed to? Maybe. I don’t know, and I’m not sure I ever will. However, for whatever reason, there is one thing I’m really enjoying about the novel, and that is the footnotes, or, rather, the lack therof. Pynchon salts his prose with words, concepts, and ideas that are vague and esoteric; they require a certain amount of work in order to be understood. Though there is one resource that makes this exercise thankfully simpler, I have enjoyed going through these references and figuring them out. So, kind of as a way to keep track of what I’ve learned, I’ll be posting whatever interesting tidbits I’ve found. Heres to hoping you find this interesting…

• Gravity’s Rainbow: No better place to start than the title. The most obvious, and therefore common, interpretation for “gravity’s rainbow” is the parabola described by the rocket’s trajectory from launch to hit, as the projectile gradually loses its battle with gravity (the point at which gravity begins to win is known as Brennschluss) and is finally pulled back to earth. There are other interpretations, including a speculation concerning a poem by Rilke and the assertion that the very structure of the plot (such as it can be referred to as a “plot”) demonstrates the same guiding principles as the arcing path of a rocket…
• Narodniks: Coming from the Russian root narod, meaning “people”, Narodniks literally means “going to the people”. It was a movement among idealistic Russian intellectuals in the 1860s and 1870s in which they abandoned their urban life and attempted to “go to the people” in the hopes of convincing the peasantry of their moral duty to revolt. They found almost no support among the suspicious peasants, and were swiftly and brutally crushed by the Tsarist Police (known as Okhrana). Though they experienced little success, their tactics, ideas and practices influenced later revolutionary groups.
• dacoit: “The Dacoits were Burmese guerrillas who fled to the hills and jungle after the overthrow of Burma in 1886, and waged a desultory campaign against the British for several years.” The term dacoity has come to be known more generally as robbery by soldiers or a gang.
• Fuzzy Wuzzies: No, they aren’t bears. A derogatory term used by the British for Sudanese muslims (in reference to their hair, which was, well fuzzy). In 1884, a British force was badly defeated by a local tribe (known as “Mahdists”) which fought with spears. The British eventually proved victorious, and the Mahdists’ bravery against the British was honored in a poem by Rudyard Kipling.
• I just like this quote: “Shit, money, and the World, the three American truths, powering the American mobility, claimed the Slothrops, clasped them for good to the country’s fate. But they did not prosper… about all they did was persist” [page 28] I like it not so much for its content, but, rather, its structure.

Well, that’s all for tonight. I hope you’ve found this interesting. I certainly have. At the rate I am going, I should finish the book sometime around Christmas! Next up is the enigmatic Dr. Lazlo Jamf and Poisson distributions, among other oddities…

The Story of George by James Grimmelmann : An interesting Median Strip piece concerning the design and construction of the famous Pirates of the Caribbean ride. Its a great read. Disney is notorius for pissing off its employees (or, rather, ex-employees) once their job is done. There is a legion of graphic artists whose grievances against Disney are great; this is perhaps why you see so many wierd hidden offences in their animated movies (such as this new one, pointed out by xmark). There is also rumoured to be a painting in the Magic Kingdom bearing a cartoon Hitler amidst a large ensemble of Disney characters. In relation to the post below, grenville pointed out that Mirimax (owned by Disney) is buying up riights to Hong Kong films, changing the stories, dubbing, editing, bastardising and then suing anyone who releases the original art. There is an online petition, but I doubt it would do any good…

alan moore: magician is a site with various odds and ends written by Moore. I found most of it to be interesting. It includes some loose plans for a comic-book Grimoire, an article explaining why he became a magician, and some interesting correspondance with Dave Sim (creator of the long running independant Cerebus comic that I wrote about a while back).

Completely unrelated: Steven Den Best comments on the timely release of the new Ridley Scott directed, Josh Hartnett vehicle, Black Hawk Down.

Radio Diaries is a collection of National Public Radio programs that were designed to give a voice to people not typically represented in the public forum. Particularly interesting are the prison stories (2001’s main theme), though the audio journals of teenagers, workers, and the elderly are good as well.

This past year, five inmates, four correctional officers and a judge were given tape recorders. For six months, the diarists kept audio journals and recorded the sounds and scenes of everyday life behind bars: shakedowns, new inmate arrivals, roll call, monthly family visits, meals at the chow hall, and quiet moments late at night inside a cell. The series is an intimate and surprising audio portrait of prison life.

The series aired in on NPR’s All Things Considered in January 2001.