Olympic Mess

https://dissensus.com/index.php?threads/15620/

15th Jul 202029th Jul 2020 olympicmess

Spitball: Pierce Inverarity is James Joyce

Joyce famously said he’d “put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality”.

Now think about how Pierce is presented. He’s a storyteller, his fingerprints are all over the place and he appears to have left a near-infinite number of ‘enigmas and puzzles’ behind, to the point where it seems possible he may not be dead at all…

Pynchon, a known Joyce fan, was writing Gravity’s Rainbow – a book which, if not heavily-indebted to, at least leans on Ulysses – whilst working on The Crying of Lot 49. Perhaps then the latter’s an illustration of Pynchon – the ‘postmodernist’ – grappling with Joyce – the modernist – and his legacy/influence as he works on the former, his Ulysses.

Imagine Pynchon’s Oedipa and Pierce is Joyce:

“Might Oedipa Maas yet be his heiress; had that been in the will, in code, perhaps without Pierce really knowing, having been by then too seized by some headlong expansion of himself, some visit, some lucid instruction? Though she could never again call back any image of the dead man to dress up, pose, talk to and make answer, neither would she lose a new compassion for the cul-de-sac he’d tried to find a way out of, for the enigma his efforts had created.” (The Crying of Lot 49, 123)

Is the young Pynchon wondering whether he can match Joyce? Whether he can be his ‘heiress’? Pierce’s ‘headlong expansion of himself, some visit, some lucid instruction…’ and ‘the cul-de-sac he’d tried to find a way out of, for the enigma his efforts had created’ read as though they could describe Finnegans Wake — the point at which Joyce completely blasted off, leaving the ‘code’ for Pynchon, his heir, in Ulysses.

The title The Crying of Lot 49 itself may also come from Joyce:

“The lacquey by the door of Dillon’s auctionrooms shook his handbell twice again and viewed himself in the chalked mirror of the cabinet. Dilly Dedalus, loitering by the curbstone, heard the beats of the bell, the cries of the auctioneer within. Four and nine... ” (Ulysses, 304)

There’s a touch of Joyce to the issues surrounding the play too. What with the constant disputes among scholars, the bootleg versions, the variations and errors, it isn’t far off the ongoing debate surrounding the ‘definitive’ Ulysses. Not to mention the anecdote of an acquaintance of Pynchon’s alleging the Gravity’s Rainbow galleys were arranged in order for the book to have the same number of pages as Ulysses and it perhaps also finding its title in Joyce: Roygbiv. 32 feet per second.

15th Jul 202029th Jul 2020 olympicmess

Gunstar Heroes OST – 4 – Stage 1

8th Jul 202029th Jul 2020 olympicmess

Inesse

5th Jul 202029th Jul 2020 olympicmess

Crush (Extended Remix)

5th Jul 202029th Jul 2020 olympicmess

Kids C Ghosts (Bankruptcy Dub)

4th Jul 202029th Jul 2020 olympicmess

Symbol of James Joyce, Constantin Brancusi (1929)

4th Jul 202029th Jul 2020 olympicmess

Pa Salieu

3rd Jul 202029th Jul 2020 olympicmess

Morphosis

The internet. An extension of the human organism or an organism in its own right? Bowie once jokingly referred to it as an alien life form and I feel there was some truth in that… Carpenter’s ‘Thing’ assimilating everything on the planet….

… communicating online can feel like attaining several additional limbs, like Spider-Man’s Doc Ock or the Boiler Geezer in Spirited Away. You’ve got text, but you’re also able to pull in image, video, audio and all sorts to make up for the absent physical component. The mouth seals… the body freezes… a cluster of antennas and tendrils come flailing and sprouting…

… smart phones… gateways to an increasingly sprawling and fragmented Hall of Mirrors…

… run with the internet as organism and it can start to look like an example of a parasite…

“In evolutionary biology, parasitism is a relationship between species, where one organism, the parasite, lives on or in another organism, the host, causing it some harm, and is adapted structurally to this way of life.“

… or an invasive species….

“An invasive species is a species that is not native to a specific location (an introduced species), and that has a tendency to spread to a degree believed to cause damage to the environment, human economy or human health.”

http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/003875.html

“One of the sublimely ruthless (=machinically efficient) aspects of the behaviour of Aliens, predators and shoggoths from which the organism recoils in horror is their readiness to ditch body parts when they are damaged or redundant.”

The internet does this all the time. How many formerly huge or important sites have disappeared over the years? Myspace was massive at one point…

“You can cut into Naked Lunch at any intersection point… I have written many prefaces. They atrophy and amputate spontaneous… “

William S. Burroughs

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-thoughts-of-a-spiderweb-20170523/

The Thoughts of a Spiderweb

‘Spiders appear to offload cognitive tasks to their webs, making them one of a number of species with a mind that isn’t fully confined within the head.‘

https://dissensus.com/index.php?threads/14845/