The Nova Trilogy
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- back before the whole fucking shithouse goes up! breakthrough in grey room coordinate points cut word lines from a land of grass without mirrors happy cloak hassan i sabbah image is virus izzy the push mr bradley mr martin nova crimes shift coordinate points stay out of the garden of delights terminal sewer the caustic enzymes of woo the centipede gods the insectoids the mayan caper the nova mob the old man of the mountain the orgasm death gimmick the ovens of minraud the subliminal kid the vegetable people the word broken pounded twisted exploded in smoke this is war to extermination towers open fire trak utilities undifferentiated tissue uranian willy
just reserved a copy. i'm reading some other stuff as well (always tend to read a few things at the same time nowadays unless it's something BIG and SIGNIFICANT).
i enjoyed 'naked lunch', a lot more than i thought i would, so i think more Burroughs might be worth pursuing.
i enjoyed 'naked lunch', a lot more than i thought i would, so i think more Burroughs might be worth pursuing.
version
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Naborhood in Aqualungs
This one seems to be a cut-up or fold-in of the previous section - So Pack Your Ermines - and some other stuff. The main thing I got from the two of them was the constant mentions of metals, gases, liquids, colours and minerals. He keeps talking about suffocating people, carbon dioxide, silver, aqualungs, diving suits, ice, sapphires, emeralds, people turning blue, acid.
Limestone John luring people into the amphitheatre in order to suffocate them and paint the scene is an odd one. I had to read it a couple of times as I thought he was spraying the people and the painting was him literally suffocating them with paint rather than filling the place with carbon dioxide and painting the scene on the wall.
This one seems to be a cut-up or fold-in of the previous section - So Pack Your Ermines - and some other stuff. The main thing I got from the two of them was the constant mentions of metals, gases, liquids, colours and minerals. He keeps talking about suffocating people, carbon dioxide, silver, aqualungs, diving suits, ice, sapphires, emeralds, people turning blue, acid.
Limestone John luring people into the amphitheatre in order to suffocate them and paint the scene is an odd one. I had to read it a couple of times as I thought he was spraying the people and the painting was him literally suffocating them with paint rather than filling the place with carbon dioxide and painting the scene on the wall.
luka
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This is a good observation. There is a synethestic use of colour blocks as a shorthand way to invoke realms of experience. Where the oxygen is low and it's cold and we turn blue for instance. At the point at which human life becomes impossible. Below sea, or outside the atmosphere.
luka
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What it links back to, this absence of oxygen, these intolerable pressures, these blue mineral regions, these white hot ovens, is the presence of an intruder on our line with interests inimical to our own and craving conditions ruinous for human life. This is how heroin addiction becomes the central metaphor
If you look at the chapter 'this horrible case' you have it spelled out very clearly
If you look at the chapter 'this horrible case' you have it spelled out very clearly
version
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I read this about pressure, colours and minerals the other day.
Real power is not in subjective, apparent power but in the ability to structure, scientifically manipulate, and take and combine. Pynchon is trying to take us away from analyzing things in a way that relies on people’s intentions and beliefs, on cause and effect, verbalized explanations after the fact. This theme comes up all throughout the Rainbow. When Rathenau lists all those parameters - pressures, temperatures, flow rates - those are all things that control what happens in a chemical reactor: you control what comes out by controlling what goes in, and it doesn’t particularly matter if you can visualize what’s going on in there. This is what happens in industrial chemical synthesis.
Pynchon also seems to like the theme of an assertion by structure. A synthetic polymer is a type of massive, repeating structure. He analogizes the 20th century world to a polymeric repetition of death, transforming the “original death” captured in fossil fuels to a deathward structure “favoring death” that continually produces human physical and psychological death. You really have to read the whole episode this way. This is what the description of “purple” is about (it’s the synthetic dye mauvine, which lit off the petrochemical industry). You have these prehistoric living things that died with the indignity of exiting the natural cycle so that humans could come along and tinker with their remains, seemingly redeeming that by making a color that’s more special than all the natural ones. This is basically how he’s describing the 20th century world: a polymeric repetition of death.
When Rathenau says “structures favoring death” are “strongest in compression” - which is how concrete behaves - this is one example of an assertion by structure. The way the atoms are arranged in a mineral like concrete require it to behave in this way. There are other parts of the Rainbow where structures assert themselves, without requiring any human agency to do so. Don’t know if you’ve read this far yet, but you’ll see a part about an oil refinery. It’s only been seemingly destroyed: its structure, combined with the structure emerging from the war, have rationally rearranged themselves in a way determined by their preexisting structures. That would be one perhaps truer nature of synthesis and control.
version
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This stuff about compressing images into the molecule is brilliant, also the stuff about 'coordinate points' and nova criminals jumping along lines of them, body to body. The bit about them taking the most extreme message of one group, playing it back to another then doing the same the other way is apparently more or less what the Russians did with Facebook groups to stir up shit in the US too. They'd set up events and groups which were opposed to each other then real people sympathetic or hostile to them would get into it, turn up to the fake event they'd organised etc.
version
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I know it's all part of it, but I reckon this is my favourite of the ones I've read as I'm much more interested in his ideas about control, the image etc than all the weird sex, the hangings and so on. It's like reading all the good bits from The Soft Machine without the bits that bored me.