"Let me be unambiguous. I prefer not to be photographed."

While I was reading Gravity's Rainbow, I signed up to Pynchon-L, a mailing list. I finished Gravity's Rainbow two days before Thomas Pynchon's 76th birthday. A blogger put up the laundry list of Known Photos of the cautious author. It raised my hackles slightly because I had, in the spirit of research, watched 'The Life of P.', a documentary-style theory of Pynchon's life & career that's informative and annoying as hell at the same time-- because it is made by a group of people I often consciously avoid, fans.

Fanatics, I should say. A number of these folks actually bought Thomas Pynchon's letters (or at least facsimiles thereof), letters smuggled out of an archive which should not even exist, because Pynchon's former agent chose to sell his correspondence. Digest that a moment. There is a black market specializing in mail by the author of 'Crying of Lot 49'.

I don't know about you-- maybe I get outraged easily --but that seems a trifle unseemly. Weird, even. Like DIY plumbing aisle vacuum bed weird. I am saying that it might not be illegal and nobody might be getting hurt I shore don't understand it and it's making the horses nervous. This is behavior committed by a fanbase who study, religiously at times, the life of a man who prefers to remain anonymous. A fanbase which pries, then denies that it pries by defending the right to stalk a man who's quoted as saying "Let me be unambiguous. I prefer not to be photographed." to CNN in response to their perverse determination to 'out' a known but (let's be honest) niche author as Living In New York.

What part of any of this is not stalking? If you read even the shortest of his novels, his work puts forth a Theory of Disappearance, a hole where the individual is encouraged to imagine (for) themselves. He doesn't want us to collect photos of him. He didn't want to distract or detract from the work. David Lynch doesn't answer questions about his movies, not that people don't waste time asking anyway; Pynchon saves everyone a great deal of wind by removing himself from the equation entirely. I respect that because I'm a world-be artist & author and, having failed at being a comic artist in 2004 & determined to fail again & better before 2014, I'm leery of the pitter-pratfalls of ego.

But that's all postmodernist / emo overthinking. At the root of it you have a shy everyman who doesn't want limelight, he just wants to put the work out there. That's where the fenceline is. His library of works is that part of himself he chose to share with us. If he wanted perfect strangers to bug him (& his family) all the time he'd have made more of an effort to make himself Marketable, but that also is not what P. is about.

Luckily P-List is not filled with people determined to pick Pynchon apart. But among the more vocal I heard elements of class envy, or perhaps privacy envy, this idea that he shouldn't have the right to Avoid Publicity and protect himself from invasive assholes, as though Invasive Assholes don't constitute about 47% of the human race. [I'm being conservative. I'm sure absolutely everyone has in some way spied or peeked upon someone else. We are curious mammals. But how many perpetuate this behavior? How many turn it into an obsession, or a career, or in their weirdest apoxia-induced visions, both?] Forgive the crass generalization, but anyone who's been to a convention knows what I'm talking about, the creator's nightmare, that human cruise missle, the Entitled Fan. The guy who follows Alan Moore to the urinal demanding a signature. He was probably the anonymous Usenet memespurt to popularize the fundamentally Weird yet pervasive notion that Alan Moore's a hypocrite for not being bullied into writing a sequel to Watchmen.

I am saying that we are all secretly monsters of one kind or another, and I think it only natural or right for people to protect, to limit themselves to their daily 33 millirem exposure. The less exposure to assholes the less likelihood I will become one myself. Doesn't matter if it's done in self-defense. Why risk the unpleasantness?

Pynchon is a case where I try to avoid knowing more than I ought to, because that strays into territory where I don't want to know more. I appreciate P.'s anonymity. I think it helps us appreciate his work more clearly. I'd rather study a painting than listen to the artist yap into the wee hours. I like commentary tracks and Warren Ellis talking technique and Eddie Campbell telling me what brush he uses, but that's shop talk and it's superfluous really. Pynchon has my respect and I think he's got it right. Some P-Listers were on his side. Others proved the rule, reinforcing the need for Pynchon's firewall.

One of the few absolutely true things I have learned from a lifetime of studying & cautiously particpating in this noisy, noisy culture of ours is that Fans Are Trouble. I'd rather have friends. Fame is a display cage, a butterfly trap. Those things aren't meant for living in. No-one who collects butterflies peers at them perched in neutral, flexing their joints with uninflected insect restraint, and huskily murmurs "That's where *I* belong." If they do odds are they're sweatily loitering the Home Depot plumbing aisle, fingering the fittings.

if you squint extra hard you can spot the breach of trust

Most of the letters are signed ''later, Tom,'' one, ''love, Tom.'' Then suddenly on Jan. 5, 1982, he writes, ''As of this date, you are no longer authorized to represent me or my work,'' and signs the letter ''Cordially, Thomas Pynchon.'' In a follow-up letter, he asks Ms. Donadio's assistant to send him everything else of his that she still has. He does not mention the letters.

When asked about the Pynchon letters, Ms. Donadio, who lives in Connecticut, said: ''I never talked about Thomas Pynchon when I represented him. He was so terribly private.'' She added that it was ''a matter of honor'' not to talk about him now. Mr. Pynchon, of course, could not be reached for comment, but through his lawyer, Jeremy Nussbaum, he expressed his acute concern that Ms. Donadio had sold the letters.

''It's a rather startling event,'' said Mr. Nussbaum. ''I've never heard of an agent selling letters of a client, except after the death of the client. They were entrusted to her in a relationship of confidence, and they were sold against his wishes.''

--from the NYT

Pullman curiosities.

Atrocity Boy pps. 8-9 & happy 76th b'day, Thomas P.

Henry Rollins on Joe Cole:

On April 10 of this year, a man named Joe Cole would have been 52 years old. On 12/19/91, this man was shot and killed in Venice while being robbed at gunpoint. I was a few feet away. Even though it has been more than 20 years since he was killed, I think of him often.

Joe Cole's murder gave me a powerful tutorial on guns and America. The United States is full of some of the most resourceful, generous and hardworking people I have ever encountered. Yet statistically, America is a nation of killers and the killed.

We Americans have a familiarity and fascination with guns, murder and those who kill. From soldiers to serial killers, we study, immortalize, fanaticize and fear them. Try driving the streets of Los Angeles without seeing a billboard depicting a film with a lead actor holding a gun. It's almost as if guns are harmless props used to bring out the cheekbones and jawline of the screen star. It is hard to think of a leading man who hasn't at one time posed with a gun. Guns are part of the American identity.

While guns are constantly in the hands of wealthy actors, their more meaningful use is often by those several rungs down the fiscal ladder. These are the people who live in the other America, the one that Wayne LaPierre warns you about and implores you to arm yourself against.

You can pass all the gun legislation you want. None of it will make me feel any more or less safe than I do right at this moment. The murder of my friend taught me that America is a 50-state-wide killing field. None of that red state/blue state bullshit means a damn thing to me. As soon as I leave my house, I am on the kill grid. If I am anywhere in America, as far as I'm concerned, it's game on for Murder One.

Dead bodies at crime scenes sometimes look ridiculous. People often fall and land in positions reminiscent of a game of Twister gone awry. They look lonely and small, like the punchline of an elaborate and incredibly cruel joke.

The morning after the murder, I was released by the police after being held overnight, as apparently is common with witnesses. I went back to the front lawn of the house I was renting, where Joe Cole was killed. I had to clean up his remains before his parents arrived. There I was, my friend's blood and brains all over my hands, trying to figure out what to do with this human matter. Do I throw out the bloody towel? Wash it? Bury it? What about the water in the bucket or the bucket itself? I felt completely stupid and worthless at that moment.

Joe Cole, who spent the last several seconds of his short life in pathetic, animal panic, had perfect taste in music. He was completely connected to the main stem. Hendrix, Stooges, Sabbath, Coltrane -- like that. He was a way out guy, a total Space Brother. He had a lot of friends yet was very alone. His killer has never been caught.

In the weeks and months after his murder, I was inundated with letters of condolence and, sadly, stories from other Americans who had been through the American gun homicide experience. Some of these stories would peel the paint off your car. The instances of sadness, loss and horror expressed in these letters was unbearably heavy. It was perhaps the pointlessness of the deaths that was the hardest part to deal with. The convenience store that suddenly turns into a blood-splattered box with a young fiancé on the floor. Someone gets a phone call and everything changes forever.

As the years after Joe Cole's murder passed, I started to understand that the crime component in America was a massive revenue stream. The Military Industrial Complex, the Prison Industrial Complex, Hollywood -- all thrive on constant conflict as the standard modus operandi. Without the threat of violence and the fact of violence, the American machine, as we know it, would seize.

As a demographic, the ones doing a large part of the killing also are doing a large part of the breeding. Much of the time, they kill each other locally. A Los Angeles policeman once characterized this as "the self-cleaning oven." Gun manufacturers and their lobbyists don't live in these places or know where they are. Beyond the point of purchase, they don't give a fuck.

I am neither pro- nor anti-gun: I am gun-conscious. I live in America. I know I can get taken out, almost any time, anywhere. I don't subscribe to the John Wayne concealed-carry horseshit-- they're the ones who shoot themselves in the balls and bleed out in the church parking lot. It's almost funny. I have reconciled myself to the hard fact that I live in a country of consequences.

I am all for background checks, yet completely understand why a bitch like Wayne LaPierre isn't-- it steps on his clients' cash flow. I happen to think that selling a gun to a person with mental health issues is a bad idea. I also think that when someone becomes a gun owner, they often acquire some mental health issues. The lunatics have not taken over the asylum, they own it. As your birthright, you are a life member of the great American gun show.

I sometimes catch myself wondering what Joe Cole would have made of the Internet, cellphones and downloaded music. So much has changed in America since he was murdered. A lot hasn't.

Joe Cole was like thousands of other Americans. He was shot and killed by another American. I can assure you, if he were somehow able to read his obituary (which I believe I wrote for the L.A. Weekly), he would not be at all surprised as to how he went out. This is who we are.

--from the LA Weekly, Apr. 11, 2013

Fantastic Mashup: fantastic finale

Think I'm satisfied with my coloring technique. Should serve me well with Atrocity Boy.

Kathy Acker reading at the Western Front

Excerpt of Kathy Acker reading at the Western Front. from Western Front Archive on Vimeo.

Sunn O))) & Nurse With Wound: The Iron Soul of Nothing

Noise is a specific frequency, a philosophy-- and not one for everybody, all of the time, because that philosophy is beauty in transformation, in listening for symmetries in the fractured vessels of creation, in decay & bloody birth. Noise is enlightenment flowering from a dungheap.

Psychical entropy.

In Pynchon, this mass trend ["a clear movement toward death or, preferably, non-humanity", as in V.] is often portrayed.... as being conscious and malignant, perhaps because it stimulates a kindred urge of the human psyche. Wylie Sypher notes that "under the guise of the death wish Freud gave psychoanalysis its own version of the theory of entropy. If, he says, the tendency of instinct is toward repeating or restating an earlier condition, than the desire to return to the inorganic is irresistable, and our instinct is to obliterate the disturbance we call consciousness." In other words, man.... seeks to become "subject to the laws of physics"; the death wish is "what Freud himself called a kind of 'psychical entropy'".

--p. 48

Whole technologies such as plastic, electronics, aircraft are spoken of as having desperate, vampirish needs that 'dictated' the war: "dawn is nearly here, I need my night's blood, my funding, funding, ahh more, more" (GR, p. 521).

--p. 53

The superstitious veneration for technology gives the man with means the stature and power of a god, even though he be in social consciousness & insight something far less.... Pynchon argues that humankind and not technology is responsible for the social grotesqueries that he documents so voluminously.... he warns against the modern animism that ends in apathy. Enzian considers here the dangers of such resignation:

"Yes but Technology only responds [....] 'All very well to talk about having a monster by the tail, but do you think we'd've had the Rocket if someone, some specific somebody with a name and a penis hadn't wanted to chuck a ton of Amatol 300 miles and blow up a block full of civilians?' Go ahead, capitalize the T on technology, deify it if it'll make you feel less responsible-- but it puts you in with the neutered, brother, in with the eunuchs keeping the harem of our stolen Earth for the numb and joyless hardons of human sultans, human elite with no right at all to be where they are--" (GR, p. 521)

Pynchon and Harrington both suggest that our fatalism concerning the effects of technology may have produced a hazardous concentration of power. Harrington maintains that computer and cybernation in particular "could conceivably eliminate the middle levels of executive decision" thus creating "an even tinier elite and a larger, [more] alienated mass" than existed before....

Walter Rathenau.... predicted as early as 1917 in Von kommenden Dingen that autonomous & interlocking megacorporations would come to dominate the economy, producing their own resources and manipulating rather than answering to the market. Currently, they have achieved a dangerous degree of both independence and interconnectedness. As Pynchon demonstrates in his tale of Byron the bulb, Their world of bureaucratic, political, military, and corporate interlocks has developed to the point where an event in one sector will ramify all the others. As a consequence the entire system moves toward inflexibility, oppressive stability or-- in Weber's terms --"routinization"....

One cannot say for certain to what extent Pynchon holds these views, for at times he presents them through paranoid or otherwise unbalanced characters. Nonetheless, he must share the concern of such a sane & perceptive historian of science as A.E.E. McKenzie: "Science is now so much an integral part of modern civilization that it is no longer merely the private activity of individuals... It is a social function". However, "most research in applied science in western countries is planned, not by the State but by large combines or cartels...." Pynchon asks what insures Their socially responsible use of science and technology. His 'paranoid' characters may perceive a terrible reality to which the 'sane' have become inured.

--pps. 61-4

from Signs & Symptoms: Thomas Pynchon & the
Contemporary World (1983) by Peter L. Cooper

Don't care for Barth, however:

"....Barth perhaps marks the extreme of an important counterrealistic impulse: to violate realistic illusion, to prevent a suspension of disbelief by insisting on the complexity of plotting & structure, the freedom of invention & distortion, the sport of stylistic & allegorical contrivance, the artifice of fabulism. He says, 'Affirm the artificial element in art (you can't get rid of it anyhow), and make artifice part of your point.' "....Most of the writers I have discussed combine all these motives, but in different proportion and degrees. Those who want most to escape confinement will unmake their structures through use of dissolving points of view and narrative disruptions. Those who enjoy authorial gymnastic will unmake their structures self-parody, typically by caricature of the traditional methods they often use. Pynchon is one of the very best practitioners of either method."

pps. 33 & 35 of Signs & Symptoms: Thomas Pynchon & the Contemporary World

GR to be done eating brain shortly...

No Tickee Autopsy: TRANCE

Cannot get over how facile TRANCE was. In interview Danny Boyle said that the film is “the first time I put a woman at the heart of a movie.” Maybe he should have made a film that wasn’t entirely about violent, possessive males and the obsession with shaven vaginas, then.

/co/ you magnificent bastards

c/o /co/'s 'Hawkman ate a sandwich' thread

i do not claim this but OH IF I COULD

ATROCITY BOY: cover ruminations

mothman 10: grand finally

oh politics, up yours

mothman 9: groundwork

pause / organize / blog

mothman 8: out of the woods (barely)