<html><head></head><body bgcolor="#FFFFFF"><div>And thus google cements its empire. <br><br>No dia 29/04/2014, às 21:00, "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" <<a href="mailto:danldo@gmail.com">danldo@gmail.com</a>> escreveu:<br><br></div><div></div><blockquote type="cite"><div><div dir="ltr">That would be because Marc changed to Gmail.</div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 12:00 PM, Fred Kiesche <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:godelescherbach@gmail.com" target="_blank">godelescherbach@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr">NEWSFLASH: This e-mail did not end up (first) in the spam folder. Went right into the inbox.</div><div class="gmail_extra">
<br><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div><div class="h5">On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 2:33 PM, Marc Aramini <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:marcaramini@gmail.com" target="_blank">marcaramini@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
</div></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div><div class="h5"><div dir="ltr">
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">* "Forlesen", number 60 needs a bit more polish but I will finish it. I am skipping ahead temporarily. Also testing this new email - hope it is not spammed.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">“Civis Laputus Sum” appeared in
<i>Dystopian Visions</i> in 1975 and is reprinted in <i>Storeys from
the Old Hotel</i>. The wolfe-wiki does an excellent job in
identifying several of the references, but I want to take a closer
look at the symbolism of the whales' heads in the chapters of <i>Moby
Dick</i> Jeremy has memorized, as I believe those heads map to Stursa
and Jeremy pretty perfectly.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">SUMMARY:
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">Our narrator Jeremy, a scholar on a
floating island university consisting of literary academics called
Disagreeables and aging athletes called Blazers, finds a book which
has escaped the burning and purging of many other volumes. He sits
down to read it and begins to talk to it (or rather, its long gone
author). His place on the edge of the floating island, hidden behind
the hawthorns, is seldom visited by anyone because of the proximity
to the drop – the Blazers fear their balls might be thrown over.
Below, fog has covered the earth. The majority of books have been
burned long ago and the library space used for games. One of the
antigravity units is failing and causes the island to list and sway –
it's failure is considered inevitable.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">The university was launched probably 15
years before this point from Philadelphia, and the academics continue
to hold their sterile meetings and have memorized <i>Moby Dick. </i><span style="font-style:normal">As
Jeremy talks with Marcia, an aging athlete trips and falls, almost
hitting them. His fellow Blazers jeer and laugh at him. As they
attend their scholarly meeting, Stursa, the aging athlete, shows up.
Jeremy then finds his book in the basement of the library where it
escaped incineration and goes to read it, and Stursa comes to speak
to him. There, the attempted reconciliation by Stursa for their
youthful disagreement, in which Stursa threw Jeremy into a bush,
proceeds. Jeremy seizes the opportunity to tell Stursa they need a
man to play Queequeeg in their existential adaptation of Moby Dick,
with the fog bound earth being the Whale itself and the island as the
ship. Jeremy will play Ishmael, and he brings up the scene where
Queequeeg must bravely dangle on the side of the ship. He can
finally have Stursa at his mercy, where he can cut him free and send
him to his doom … the only question remains: “Should I show
[Stursa] the knife?”</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">COMMENTARY:</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">It does seem that the books are
utilized for fuel or for some purpose in keeping them aloft – while
both factions are somewhat juvenile and less than adult, the lack of
practicality and passion found in the Disagreeables, from the motley
one eyed lens of Marcia to the dispassionate recital of scholarly
work to which only Stursa listens attentively, would seem to indicate
that there is a practical reason for the burning to which they
object. In addition, the adequate food stores and the relative
emptiness of the island indicates that use of library space is not
the primary issue. It seems that they are burning them gradually, as
there are still personal books to read. The poem Marcia writes that
flatters Jeremy as the “iron watcher” posits what life is like
below: “What do they do in the fog-locked cities, in the dripping
towns of Rome and Albuquerque and Damascus? There is vegetation, says
one who watches – the iron observer of the stone bench … Through
the parting mists he has seen great trees. Always great trees.”
Perhaps the atmosphere is no longer suited to humanity, but will
bring about a world perfect for giant vegetation. Jeremy paraphrases
the rest of her poem, which no one listens to, in which the mist is
compared to a bridal veil like that around Venus.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">LITERARY REFERENCES:</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">Marcia carries a tome by Ezra Pound,
Elizabeth Barrett is mentioned, and Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Twain,
Dickens, Orwell, and Agee are listed as being cast already into the
fire. Of course Laputa in the title references the floating island
of impractical scholars in Gulliver's Travels. The whole situation of
choosing to memorize works against the threat of their burning is of
course straight from Bradbury's <i>Fahrenheit 451</i>. Let us take a
look at the actual chapters Jeremy's responsibility was to learn:
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">MOBY-DICK:</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">Jeremy has memorized chapters 71-75,
and these are directly relevant to the characters' positions,
literally and symbolically.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">Chapter 71 involves the Pequod
encountering the Jeroboam, which has been overcome by a possibly
insane man who proclaims himself to be the angel Gabriel. He has
taken over the ship and his prophecy of doom proved correct for their
captain. When Ahab attempts to deliver a letter to the Jeroboam,
which has been stricken with plague, Gabriel returns it at knife
point to Ahab, declaring that his obsession with Moby Dick will cost
him to be cast into the same depths as the Jeroboam's captain.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">Chapter 72 involves the monkey rope
that will tie Queequeeg and Ishmael together, and it is on this
situation that Jeremy pins his hopes of killing his childhood bully.
In the Moby Dick chapter, Ishmael talks of how it makes them
brothers, and that if Queequeeg should fall, he should undeservedly
fall to his death, too.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">Chapter 73 Involves the killing of a
whale whose head is mounted on the side of the ship, but the brunt of
the conversation involves the claims that Fedallah is influencing
Ahab with his false promises that a ship adorned by two whales heads
can never founder, and that he is indeed the devil, with his hidden
tail. He seems to lengthen Ahab's shadow, hiding and crouching in
it, and encourage the obsession.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">Chapter 74 is relevant in describing
one whale's head – one that has eyes on both sides but can never
see behind or in front, even if an enemy were coming at it from the
front with “knife raised”. Clearly this is the inspiration for
Jeremy's frantic question: “Should I show him the knife?”</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">Chapter 75 describes the other head
mounted on the side, mostly in terms of its huge pouty lip, and
stresses its differences from the other whale. The ending
description, directly quoted in the text, says “The Right Whale I
take to have been a Stoic; the Sperm Whale a Platononian, who might
have taken up Spinoza in his later years.”</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">These two decapitated whales match
pretty well to Stursa and Jeremy: the Stoic Stursa who says he always
liked literary things but just went along with athletics because he
was good at it, and looks on the bright side of being moved back
upstairs: “It won't be so bad. I'll be able to see over the side
again, and it's good for your legs. I guess everybody was surprised
I came to the reading today … I always kind of liked that stuff,
only I didn't want to say so. You know how the guys are. … I
didn't want to interrupt your reading. I just wanted to say, you
know, that a guy does what he's good at. … You can't blame us, can
you? We were just kids.” This is more or less his attempt at
apologizing to Jeremy for throwing him, and it also shows that Stoic
take life as it comes attitude and accept it without much reflection.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">This is contrapoised against the world
of ideas and books that have a dualistic nature to some degree,
reflections of a higher world that seem literary and platonian in
nature … and in old age, bookish Jeremy has latched upon Spinoza's
form of ethics too – that things are not inherently good and evil,
simply good and evil for men in their outcome. Thus he has justified
his vengeance. From his perspective, it will be good for him, bad
for Stursa. Both whale heads are, however, decapitated, and soon to
be sunken before the Pequod itself founders below in its quest for
Moby Dick – this sterile island is doomed to crash into the earth
soon, too – coming too close the impossible dream of returning to a
livable earth, an earth ruined by man, will destroy it.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">PAUL OF TARSUS AND CHARLES STURSA:</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">The wolfe wiki also notes that Paul's
famous Civus Romanus Sum – “I am a Roman Citizen” to delay his
trail until he could be transported to Rome is mirrored in the title;
“I am a Citizen of Laputa” - Laputa being the floating island of
sterile and impractical intellectuals who can't do anything that
isn't abstract in Gulliver's Travels.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">While Stursa does not seem as
intellectual as Paul, he does say that as a Slav he has been stomped
upon, and he at first persecutes the academics (by throwing them into
a bush, for example) and then joins them, just as Saul persecuted the
Christians before his conversion. He makes a conciliatory gesture
with Jeremy. This will prove personally costly, though all of them
seem doomed anyway.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">In history, Paul is beheaded, a nice
little echo of the beheaded whale head on the side of the Pequod,
whose giant lip Jeremy imagines as Stursa's pouting lip pressing
against the wall before he cuts the rope.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">While Stursa is a legitimate Slavic
name, I could find no sure meaning attached to it, so perhaps the
rearrangement of the letters into Tarsus really does have some merit
symbolically. The German word stur indicates an obstinate or willful
man, but I do not know if there is any linguistic connection at all.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">ATTITUDE TOWARDS UNIVERSITY/SCHOLASTIC
LIFE</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">Wolfe's take on academics is given
voice in his introduction to <i>Storeys from the Old Hotel</i>:</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">"Civis Laputus Sum is one of my
periodic semiserious hits at academics, who often seem to feel that
the only good writer is a dead writer. I do it mostly to show that
I'm not good yet, and because it's such fun to see tenured professors
who've built whole careers on criticizing some poor bastard who had
to hustle to make the rent bluster and huff when they're criticized a
bit themselves.”</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">In “Morning Glory”, the soulless
misery and yearning for a higher truth in darkened tunnels showed
colleges as separate from the glory of the mystical and holy,
repetitious pattern and research expectations leading to an
inescapable maze. This look is much simpler: bitter, ineffectual
academics dreaming revenge on dim, more respected athletes, who will
age and be unable to play the games that mean so much to them in
time, and become relatively “useless” far sooner than their
academic counterparts – though here all aspects of the university
seem impractical – the people with the need to “do” have
already left in helicopters, and no one can repair the systems: “Have
you ever thought of what might happen if we were to drift into the
Antarctic? We could be driven to the ground by snow and ice. From
that standpoint the listing is actually beneficial, since it will
enable the island to shed the stuff more readily. Until we get our
guidance system back – if we ever do – I say list away.”</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">Both the Blazers who age and the
Disagreeables who recite their poetry and hollow academic ideas will
have no lasting impact, and their sterile Laputan University is
doomed to capsize soon. I think the narrative voice encapsulates the
attitude towards the inutility of the majority of study at the
university: derivative critics rather than artists, and so much
resource spent on meaningless games – and this is the future that
was deemed worthy of being saved above the fog? The head of the
academics is Professor Conne, with its obvious aural connotation.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">THE ATMOSPHERE AND THE TIMELINE:</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">Well, it sounds as if the world has
become cooler and more lush under the fog: the Arizona deserts have
become rainforests, with giant trees everywhere. This verdant future
has come at the cost of probably unlivable conditions under the fog
cover: “They released some finely divided substance that catalyzes
and maintains it. Fifty years ago they knew that pollution over St.
Louis was causing fine, dirty rains -”</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">The only confusing aspect of this is
whether that release was just accidental or intentional, since the
fog is not called by the more pejorative term smog. Intentional
release to combat pollutants and cool the earth gone wrong or
incidental result of poor pollution control? Jeremy's claims to see
a whale below are somewhat dubiously considered.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">St Louis actually experienced a “day
the sun didn't shine' in 1939, a dark fog which lingered for 9 days.
If Jeremy is referring to this event, this could place the timeline
of the story in the mid 1990s, though it seems the island has been
floating for about 15 years. (Obviously a post-1975 publication date
launch).</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">There is an odd statement Jeremy makes,
saying his murder will be “the first time in five thousand years
one of us has taken the life of one of them.” If taken literally,
this really complicates the time line. More likely he is just
exaggerating the importance of their animosity. Is he talking about
Biblical creation? Certainly a scholar has defeated an athlete
through indirect means before, but to attribute “Disagreeables”
and “Blazers” as having a 5000 year animosity is quite
subjectively skewed. The “us” and “them” dichotomy is
probably 15 years old, or, in a more collegiate sense, at best a few
hundred years old in terms of ill will between athletes and scholars.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">UNANSWERED QUESTIONS:</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">How literally will the existential
filming of Moby Dick be made? (On the doomed island about to crash,
existentialism seems a pretty good philosophical backdrop). If it is
at all accurate to the set up of the book, Ishmael and Queequeeg will
actually be tied together, but in the text Jeremy indicates that “It
would be I, Ishmael, who would pretend to hold the rope.” If
Jeremy were to show the knife at that point and it were faithful to
the book Moby Dick, it is quite clear Stursa is as strong as he ever
was and might be able to stoically cast them both over the side. If
it is less faithful to the book and the monkey rope is tied to an
object instead, then Jeremy is safe, though he must fear the obvious
murder being filmed and might be tossed over the side as well in
reaction, as the Platonian/Spinozan whale head was in Moby Dick.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">What is the book that Jeremy has found
and talks to? Can it be deduced? Is it a volume by Wolfe? Something
by Hawthorn or Poe, in light of the gloating murderous “Should I
show the him the knife? ... Should I show him the knife?” as he
reads by the hawthorns? Probably not, but he speaks to the book as
if it were alive – the story is the “you” he addresses.</p>
</div>
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<br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div dir="ltr"><div>F.P. Kiesche III</div><div> </div><div>Husband, Father, Good Cook. Reader. Keeper of abandoned dogs. Catholic Liberal Conservative Militarist. Does not fit into a neat box or category. "Ah Mr. Gibbon, another damned, fat, square book. Always, scribble, scribble, scribble, eh?" (The Duke of Gloucester, on being presented with Volume 2 of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.) Blogging at Bernal Alpha. On Twitter as @FredKiesche<br>
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