But sadly, I regret to inform you that neither one played professional baseball. A-and, Picasso never was expert at writing novels. As for Pynchon, who knows? He might be Yogi Berra in “real life.” Or Mark Rothko. Have you seen his photo lately?

Now Jeff, we all have our notions about who is good, who is great, etc. I’d venture to say these are more about how much the opinionator understands about the art under discussion. For me, and that means me and not you or any other Pope, the process of discovery regarding my first youthful encounters with and attempts to understand the art of both Picasso and Pynchon was exactly the same, and the results of that process were also, delightfully, the same. I suggest you take Gravity’s Rainbow off the shelf and try to get through it this time. Bless your soul.

S&R fans — see how this thread has devolved? Anyone for furthering the mysterious ways of Entropy?

Jeff

I have Pynchon in my book case and Picasso on my wall…..Pynchon is a Single A Minor League utility player, and Picasso is Joe DiMaggio.

Jeff

Jeff

I initially got through the Fellini-like imagery and plot-jumping which makes it so unique by enjoying Pynchon’s riffing on each of the above items, and at the thirdattempt, “got it” and read it through. I knew there was more there than I did “get” so I started researching and reading criticism on Pynchon. This was also amply rewarded.

To me, Pynchon is on a level with Picasso as an artist.

With careless force
each thought’s destroyed
in effort to create

-’94

Here’s a real bad piece of poetry for you if you’re a fan of QM.

I don’t know where I got this, but it popped up on my hard drive one day.

I was studying the workings of a star,
Quantum mechanics, nuclear fusion,
From which is borne all life from afar,
This reality of dreams and illusions.
But there was no magic to the physics,
The cold, hard equations of description,
Couldn’t convey the feeling so mystic,
To be living with her in a fiction,
A dream it must have been under the stars,
Her eyes closed, and her wet hair swept on back,
Oh, lost in reasons we fight all our wars,
So just give me a piece that’s free from fact.
I no longer care what makes the wind blow,
There are things that a child should never know

Jeff

PS: I’ve been working on a unified field theory in my spare time for the past 25 years, but have been stuck on a particular problem. If you’d like, I wouldn’t mind sharing notes.

And thanks for the author suggestion, Jim. Entropy is one of those things I find to be very cool on an intellectual level, so I’ll give it a shot.

Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday’s homeopape. When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you to go bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up there is twice as much of it. It always gets more and more.

No one can win against kipple, except temporarily and maybe in one spot.

Of course, the first law tells us that “kipple drives out non-kipple,” right?

Then there’s Gibson’s stunning short story, “The Winter Market,” which I recall assigning to you in a class one time, right? I write about this in my dissertation, and went back to remind myself what I said at the time. Turns out there’s some interplay between entropy, technology and the pursuit of the divine – through religion, through creativity; in other words, the struggle to overcome entropy.

Here’s what I wrote:
- – - – -
Gibson is not unaware of the religious implications in the story, his refusal to negotiate the question on institutional (or even recognizably Judeo-Christian) terms notwithstanding. In Rubin we have not just the oldest and wisest character in the story, but also one of the most thoroughly actualized characters in the entire corpus of Gibson’s writing. As an artist who has attained international acclaim, he occupies a privileged position as the cast’s elder, and as a collector of gomi – or junk, he is an expert on both the intended and unintended uses of things.

Rubin, in some way that no one quite understands, is a master, a teacher, what the Japanese call a sensei. What he’s the master of, really, is garbage, kipple, refuse, the sea of cast-off goods our century floats on. Gomi no sensei. Master of junk (118).
…
He has nothing to say about gomi. It’s his medium, the air he breathes, and something he’s swum in all his life. He cruises Greater Van in a spavined truck-thing he chopped down from an ancient Mercedes airporter, its roof lost under a wallowing rubber bag half-filled with natural gas. He looks for things that fit some strange design scrawled on the inside of his forehead by whatever serves him as Muse. He brings home more gomi. Some of it still operative. Some of it, like Lise, human (120).

That Rubin can consider questions like those posed by Lise’s situation without resorting to conventional religious dogma is instructive. He doesn’t appear to dismiss the idea of God – his evocation of divinity in “God only knows” seems earnest. But whatever God he believes in is a distant one, and not one to whom he can appeal for answers in circumstances such as this.

So Rubin goes about weaving cultural myths out of found bits and pieces, and despite himself becomes the closest thing to the voice of God in a story that cries out for divine pronouncement. In the moment which comprises the story’s thematic pivot, Rubin appears to draw a line between animation and life, and if we read it on its most obvious symbolic level we can’t help reaching a dystopian conclusion about Lise’s impending phone call.

Once he was showing me a book of twentieth-century art he liked, and there was a picture of an automated sculpture called Dead Birds Fly Again, a thing that whirled real dead birds around and around on a string, and he smiled and nodded, and I could see he felt the artist was a spiritual ancestor of some kind (137).

The phone might ring, and it may or may not be Lise calling from the other side, but the dead birds whirling around, ever in motion, suspended and animated by mechanical device, yet ever stuffed and lifeless, hints at the ultimate soullessness of the machine.
- – - – -

So there you have it, for whatever it’s worth….

If entropy fascinates you this much, you have to read Thomas Pynchon. I suggest you start with his short story “Entropy,” then look at his novel GRAVITY’S RAINBOW.

You won;t be disappointed…

Physics of the cosmology and quantum mechanics varieties is a hobby of mine.

Brian, I can’t comment on your musings on the eventualities of all things as represent in literature, being a literary neophyte myself. However, I do want to address the “heat death” part, since I feel I have some competence in that area.

This question has long been debated. Where do we come from and where do we go? Since the advent of thermodynamics in the 19th century and in particular the 2nd Law, the “hopeless option” (my terminology) of eventual universal heat death has seemed unavaoidable. However all is not lost. Consider the Bible verse quoted above:

“… a time to break down, and a time to build up”

I would argue that the latter part of the verse is as important as the first part which you emphasized. Recent developments in physics and in cosmology in particular seem to indicate that the universe (or at least the highly simplified cosmological models) likely has an oscillatory behaviour, reminiscent of the cyclic cosmology in Hindu philosophy. Naturally the entropy question is one of the biggest obstacles in truly understanding how the universe can die and be reborn over and over. Now physicists are realizing that our present understanding of entropy and the 2nd Law is incomplete. The 2nd law remains valid for any closed system. For an open system however the ballgame changes. Our planet is a great example of this. Now over time the earth emits as much radiation as it absorbs from the sun. The amount trapped due to the greenhouse effect etc. is likely negligible compared to the even the earth’s daily dose of solar heat. If this wasn’t the case we would be toast long ago. This is an example of a system in (approximate) dynamic equilibrium. It is this equilibrium which allows earthly systems to exhibit such complexity. This conflicts with our naive understanding of equilibrium which is based on considerations of closed systems and leads to the heat death ending for any closed system.

Before I get long-winded, I’ll summarize. We cannot determine if our “universe” (a term lacking a precise definition even in physics) is a closed system or not. I suspect it is not. This belief and present research in cosmology and computational science as applied to physical phenomena, strongly suggests a “hopeful” alternative. A cyclic universe which is one in a family of many universes and which cannot therefore be treated as a closed system doomed to an eternal sleep. I hope this will let folks go to bed feeling reassured