version's Thomas Pynchon masterclass

version

Well-known member
I didnt take it as a 'youve made youre bed now sleep in it' type jab.
Neither did I. I thought she was just saying that's literally how it is which I took as conflicting with what Friere was saying, but maybe I've misunderstood their respective arguments.
 

version

Well-known member
Vineland catches the light in a different way. It hasn’t become less sad, and certainly not less funny. But read it today, in the midst of our own fever dream of penal sociality, and you are liable to be taken aback by the clarity of its insistence that a style of carceral fanaticism—a making over of everyday life into the image of perpetual security crisis—is no less a signature of the thing we call neoliberalism than are manic privatization, oligarchic dominion, and the total absorption of public life into market imperatives. Uproarious and joy-propounding as it is, Vineland is a novel of acute political grief—a thing as near to us as it has ever been, and likely to get nearer.
 

version

Well-known member
It means he reads more than I do and has more interesting things to say about the stuff he reads. I'm just good at remembering interesting stuff other people have said.
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
Steppen Wolf is an interesting inclusion on the Joyce-Beckett-Burroughs chain. Im not even sure how relevant Beckett is to Pynch but there is at least similar intensities with regards to prose.
 
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version

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Pynchon does mention Hesse at one point. He talks about "Demian-metaphysics".

"Kurt Mondaugen took it as a sign. One of these German mystics who grew up reading Hesse, Stefan George, and Richard Wilhelm, ready to accept Hitler on the basis of Demian-metaphysics, he seemed to look at fuel and oxidizer as paired opposites, male and female principles uniting in the mystical egg of the combustion chamber: creation and destruction, fire and water, chemical plus and chemical minus -"
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
found this on the sub

Demian metaphysics refers to Herman Hesse’s novel of the same name, in which the title character argues that "what particular movement one serves and what pole one is directed from are matters outside one’s own choice." What was truly important was the “knowledge that individuals have of one another,” from which would emerge a sense of community to "transform the world"… Thus from a perspective of one who subscribes to "Demian-metaphysics," Hitler embodied a unifying energy: here was a leader who would mend the economic, political, and social rifts that had opened in Germany since the end of the First World War. Whisson points out the profound impact Demian had in 1919 on young intellectuals who were disenchanted with the European order that had lead to the first World War.”
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Steppen Wolf is an interesting inclusion on the Joyce-Beckett-Burroughs chain. Im not even sure how relevant Beckett is to Pynch but there is at least similar intensities with regards to prose.
That was exactly what jumped out at me from that page of scribbles too.
 

version

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I've never found much on Pynchon and Beckett. There's this on Pynchon Notes,
 

version

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This appeared on the Pynchon sub the other day. Intriguing,
I can't remember the exact books or sections, but there are a number of Italian characters that pop up manning human torpedos.

Anyhow, the unit of the Italian navy that used these were called the Decima Flottiglia MAS, or X-MAS, and were similar to Navy Seals. This unit was commanded by Junio Valerio Borghese, from the aristocratic house of his family name, which has a Pope in its bloodline. Junio was known as The Black Prince, and after WW2 was aided by James Angleton of the OSS in avoiding execution. The Unit had very close ties with the German SS.

This is the interesting part though. In the film Salo, or 120 days of Sodom, the director Pier Pasolini dressed the guards presiding over the Black Mass rituals in the uniforms of the Decima Flottiglia MAS.

So,

a) The SS studied and practiced Occult rituals heavily influenced by the Thule Society.
b) A highly specialized Italian Naval Unit with very close ties to the German SS.
c) An Italian Aristocrat commanding this Unit under the name "The Black Prince".
d) A movie about four Italian Aristocrats performing a Black Mass under the protection of this Unit.
e) The movie was released 5 years after The Black Prince attempted a neo-fascist coup in 1970.

What are the specifics of when/why these Italian torpedo men show up in Pynchon books?
 
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