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Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
#31
Constantine mentions the death of INXS frontman Michael Hutchence and alleges that the singer was targeted due to his participation with an East Timor documentary. An INXS fan-site has the transcript of a chat Hutchence did in 1997, in the months before he died, and the issue was clearly on Hutchence's mind -

http://www.inxsmusic.hu/webbook/INXS/Art...ichael.htm


[B]From C303103B@Juno.com: Dear Mr. Hutchence, Do you have any political party affiliation. If so, what is it?
Michael Hutchence Says: I vote Labor in Australia, (and too bad they're not in anymore!) As far as my views go, Amnesty Interntional, everyone should support them, and a little known fact is that East Timor needs all the help they can get. They've been overrun by the Indonesians.


[/B]Constantine seems to be a longtime source of compelling, convincing but hard-to-verify info (such as an earlier piece linking 9/11 with Adnan Khashoggi) and I'd love it if he put his research into books more frequently, rather than leaving them hidden in various blogs online. Anyway, the specifics Constantine gives regarding MK-Ultra in that interview from more than a decade ago are startling.
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#32
Gravity's Rainbow was written in the 1960s and finally published in 1973.

MK-ULTRA was brought to public attention by the Church Committee in 1975, and was essentially unknown until then.

Thomas Pynchon moved in the same circles as Mimi and Joan Baez.

He was a very bright and original researcher of dusty tomes and hidden history, as the Herero material earlier in this thread clearly demonstrates.

Quote:In a dream from this time, his father has come to find him. Slothrop has been
wandering at sundown by the Mungahannock, near a rotting old paper mill,
abandoned back in the nineties. A heron rises in silhouette against luminous
and dying orange. "Son," a falling tower of words tumbling over and over
themselves, "the president died three months ago." Slothrop stands and
curses him. "Why didn't you tell me? Pop, I loved him. You only wanted to
sell me to the IG. You sold me out." The old man's eyes fill with tears. "Oh
son ..." trying to take his hand. But the sky is dark, the heron gone, the
empty skeleton of the mill and the dark increase of the river saying it is time
to go . . .

Quote:Better behave yourself or we'll send you back to Dr. Jamf !

When Jamf conditioned him, he threw away the stimulus.

Looks like Dr. Jamf's been by to set your little thing today, hasn't he?

Neil Nosepicker's Book of 50,000 Insults,
§6.72, "Awful Offspring,"
The Nayland Smith Press,
Cambridge (Mass.), 1933

PUDDING.-But isn't this
POINTSMAN: Sir?
PUDDING: Isn't it all rather shabby, Pointsman? Meddling with another
man's mind this way?
POINTSMAN: Brigadier, we're only following in a long line of experiment
and questioning. Harvard University, the U.S. Army? Hardly shabby
institutions.
PUDDING: We can't, Pointsman, it's beastly.
POINTSMAN: But the Americans have already been at him! don't you
see? It's not as if we're corrupting a virgin or something
PUDDING: Do we have to do it because the Americans do it? Must we
allow them to corrupt us?
Back around 1920, Dr. Laszlo Jamf opined that if Watson and Rayner
could successfully condition their "Infant Albert" into a reflex horror of
everything furry, even of his own Mother in a fur boa, then Jamf could
certainly do the same thing for his Infant Tyrone, and the baby's sexual
reflex. Jamf was at Harvard that year, visiting from Darmstadt. It was in the
early part of his career, before he phased into organic chemistry (to be as
fateful a change of field as Kekulé's own famous switch into chemistry from
architecture, a century before). For the experiment he had a slender grant
from the National Research Council (under a continuing NRC program of
psychological study which had begun during the World War, when methods
were needed for selecting officers and classifying draftees). Shoestring
funding may have been why Jamf, for his target reflex, chose an infant
hardon.
Measuring secretions, as Pavlov did, would have meant surgery.
Measuring "fear," the reflex Watson chose, would have brought in too
much subjectivity (what's fear? How much is "a lot"? Who decides, when
it's on-the-spot-in-the-field, and there isn't time to go through the long
slow process of referring it up to the Fear Board?). Instrumentation just
wasn't available in those days. The best he might've done was the
Larson-Keeler three-variable "lie detector," but at the time it was still
only experimental.
But a harden, that's either there, or it isn't. Binary, elegant. The job
of observing it can even be done by a student.
Unconditioned stimulus = stroking penis with antiseptic cotton swab.
Unconditioned response = hardon.
Conditioned stimulus = x.
Conditioned response = hardon whenever x is present, stroking is no
longer necessary, all you need is that x.
Uh, x? well, what's x? Why, it's the famous "Mystery Stimulus" that's
fascinated generations of behavioral-psychology students, is what it is.
The average campus humor magazine carries 1.05 column inches per
year on the subject, which ironically is the exact mean length Jamf
reported for Infant T.'s erection.
Now ordinarily, according to tradition in these matters, the little
sucker would have been de-conditioned. Jamf would have, in Pavlov-ian
terms, "extinguished" the hardon reflex he'd built up, before he let the
baby go. Most likely he did. But as Ivan Petrovich himself said, "Not
only must we speak of partial or of complete extinction of a conditioned
reflex, but we must also realize that extinction can proceed beyond the
point of reducing a reflex to zero. We cannot therefore judge the degree
of extinction only by the magnitude of the reflex or its absence, since there
can still be a silent extinction beyond the zero.'1'' Italics are Mr. Pointsman's.
Can a conditioned reflex survive in a man, dormant, over 20 or 30
years? Did Dr. Jamf extinguish only to zerowait till the infant
showed zero hardons in the presence of stimulus x, and then stop? Did he
forgetor ignorethe "silent extinction beyond the zero"? If he ignored
it, why? Did the National Research Council have anything to say about
that?
When Slothrop was discovered, late in 1944, by "The White Visitation"
though many there have always known him as the famous Infant Tyrone
like the New World, different people thought they'd discovered different
things.

Quote:But one day Milton Gloaming popped in to deliver him from his
unmoving. Gloaming was just back from a jaunt through the Zone. He'd
found himself on a task force with one Josef Schleim, a defector of
secondary brilliance, who had once worked for the IG out of Dr.
Reithinger's office, VOWIthe Statistical Department of NW7. There,
Schleim had been assigned to the American desk, gathering for the IG
economic intelligence, through subsidiaries and licensees like Chemnyco,
General Aniline and Film, Ansco, Winthrop. In '36 he came to England to
work for Imperial Chemicals, in a status that was never to be free from
ambiguities. He'd heard of Slothrop, yes indeed . . . recalled him from the old
days. When Lyle Bland went out on his last transmural journey, there'd been
Green Reports flapping through the IG offices for weeks, Geheime
Kommandosache, rumors coupling and uncoupling like coal-tar molecules
under pressure, all to do with who was likely to take over the Slothrop
surveillance, now that Bland was gone.
This was toward the beginning of the great struggle for the IG's
intelligence machinery. The economic department of the foreign office and
the foreign department of the economic office were both after it. So were the
military, in particular the Wehrwirtschaftstab, a section of the General Staff
that maintained OKW's liaison with industry. The IG's own liaison with OKW
was handled by Vermittlungsstelle W, under Drs. Dieckmann and Gorr. The
picture was farther confused by the usual duplicate Nazi Party offices,
Abwehr-Organizations, set up throughout German industry after 1933. The
Nazis' watchdog over the IG was called "Abteilung A" and was set up in the
same office building asin fact, it appeared perfectly congruent withthe
IG's own Army liaison group, Vermittlungsstelle W. But Technology, alas,
braid-crowned and gold-thighed maiden, always comes up for grabs like
this. Most likely the bitching and bickering of Army vs. Party was what
finally drove Schleim over the hill, more than any moral feelings about
Hitler. In any case, he remembers the Slothrop surveillance being assigned to
a newly created "Sparte IV" under Vermittlungsstelle W. Sparte I was
handling nitrogen and gasoline, II dyes, chemicals, buna rubber,
pharmaceuticals, III film and fibers. IV handled Slothrop and nothing else,
exceptSchleim had heard tellone or two miscellaneous patents acquired
through some dealings with IG Chemie in Switzerland. An analgesic whose
name he couldn't recall, and a new plastic, some name like Mipolam . . .
"Polimex," or something. . . .
"Sounds like that would've come under Sparte II," was Gloaming's only
comment at the time.
"A few directors were upset," Schleim agreed. "Ter Meer was a
Draufgängerhe and Hörlein both, go-ahead fellows. They might have got
it back."
"Did the Party assign an Abwehr man to this Sparte IV?"
"They must have, but I don't know if he was SD or SS. There were so
many of them around. I can remember some sort of rather thin chap with
thick eyeglasses coming out of the office there once or twice. But he wore
civilian clothes. Couldn't tell you his name."
Well now what'n the bloody 'ell. . . .
"Suveillance?" Roger is fidgeting heavily, with his hair, his necktie, ears,
nose, knuckles, "IG Farben had Slothrop under surveillance? Before the
War? What for, Gloaming."
"Odd, isn't it?" Cheerio boing out the door without another word,
leaving Roger alone with a most disagreeable light beginning to grow, the
leading edge of a revelation, blinding, crescent, at the periphery of his brain.
IG Farben, eh? Mr. Pointsman has been chumming, almost
exclusively these days, with upper echelon from ICI. ICI has cartel
arrangements with Farben. The bastard. Why, he must have known
about Slothrop all along. The Jamf business was only a front for . . . well
say what the hell is going on here?

Infant Tyrone.

Infant Joan.

Victims, not perps.

Of something that would have seemed unbelievable before Paperclip and MK-ULTRA were revealed...
"It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted...."
"Proverbs for Paranoids 4: You hide, They seek."
"They are in Love. Fuck the War."

Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon

"Ccollanan Pachacamac ricuy auccacunac yahuarniy hichascancuta."
The last words of the last Inka, Tupac Amaru, led to the gallows by men of god & dogs of war
Reply
#33
The fear balloons again inside his brain. It will not be kept down with
a simple Fuck You. . . . A smell, a forbidden room, at the bottom edge of
his memory. He can't see it, can't make it out. Doesn't want to. It is allied
with the Worst Thing.


He woke begging It nobut even
after waking, he was sure, he would remain sure, that It could visit him
again, any time It wanted. Perhaps you know that dream too. Perhaps It
has warned you never to speak Its name.



Quote:There is a fat file on Imipolex G, and it seems to
point to Nordhausen. The engineer on the customer end of the
Imipolex contract was one Franz Polder. He came to Nordhausen in
early '44, as the rocket was going into mass production. He was billeted
in the Mittelwerke, an underground factory complex run largely by the
SS. No word on where he went when the plant was evacuated in
February and March. But Ian Scuffling, ace reporter, will be sure to find a
clue down in the Mittelwerke.

Slothrop sat in the swaying car with thirty other cold and tattered
souls, eyes all pupil, lips cratered with sores. They were singing, some of
them. A lot of them kids. It is a Displaced Person's song, and
Slothrop will hear it often around the Zone, in the encampments, out on the
road, in a dozen variations:

If you see a train this evening,
Far away against the sky,
Lie down in your wooden blanket,
Sleep, and let the train go by.

Trains have called us, every midnight,
From a thousand miles away,
Trains that pass through empty cities,
Trains that have no place to stay.

No one drives the locomotive,
No one tends the staring light,
Trains have never needed riders,
Trains belong to bitter night.

Railway stations stand deserted,
Rights-of-way lie clear and cold:
What we left them, trains inherit,
Trains go on, and we grow old.

Let them cry like cheated lovers,
Let their cries find only wind.
Trains are meant for night and ruin.
We are meant for song, and sin.

Pipes are passing around. Smoke hangs from the damp wood slats, is whipped
out cracks into the night slipstream. Children wheeze in their sleep, the
rachitic babies cry . . . now and then the mothers exchange a word. Slothrop
huddles inside his paper misfortune.

The Swiss firm's dossier on L. (for Laszlo) Jamf listed all his assets at the
time he came to work in Zurich. Apparently he had satas token scientist
on the board of directors of the Grössli Chemical Corporation as late as 1924.
Among stock options and pieces of this firm and that back in Germany
pieces to be gathered in over the next year or two by the octopus IGwas the
record of a transaction between Jamf and Mr. Lyle Bland, of Boston,
Massachusetts.

On the beam, Jackson. Lyle Bland is a name he knows, all right. And a
name that also shows up often in the private records Jamf kept of his own
business deals. Seems that Bland, during the early twenties, was heavily
involved with the Hugo Stinnes operation in Germany. Stinnes, while he
lasted, was the Wunderkind of European finance.

Based out of the Ruhr, where his family had been coal barons for generations,
young Stinnes built up a good-sized empire of steel, gas, electric and water
power, streetcars and barge lines before he was 30. During the World War he
worked closely with Walter Rathenau, who was ramrodding the whole
economy then. After the war Stinnes managed to put the horizontal electrical
trust of Siemens-Schuchert together with the coal and iron supplies of the
Rheinelbe Union into a super-cartel that was both horizontal and vertical,
and to buy into just about everything elseshipyards, steamship lines, hotels,
restaurants, forests, pulp mills, newspapersmeantime also speculating in
currency, buying foreign money with marks borrowed from the Reichs-bank,
driving the mark down and then paying off the loans at a fraction of the
original figure. More than any one financier he was blamed for the Inflation.

Those were the days when you carried marks around in wheelbarrows to your
daily shopping and used them for toilet paper, assuming you had anything to
shit. Stinnes's foreign connections went all over the worldBrazil, the East
Indies, the United Statesbusinessmen like Lyle Bland found his growth rate
irresistible. The theory going around at the time was that Stinnes was
conspiring with Krupp, Thyssen, and others to ruin the mark and so get
Germany out of paying her war debts.

Eland's connection was vague. Jamf's records mention that he had
negotiated contracts for supplying tons of private currency known as Notgeld
to Stinnes and colleagues, as well as "Mefo bills" to the Weimar
Republicanother of Hjalmar Schacht's many bookkeeping dodges to keep
official records clear of any hint of weapons procurement banned under the
terms of Versailles. Some of these banknote contracts were let to a certain
Massachusetts paper mill, on whose board Lyle Bland happened to sit.

The name of this contractor was the Slothrop Paper Company.

He reads his name without that much surprise. It belongs here, as do the
most minor details during déjà vu. Instead of any sudden incidence of light
(even in the shape of a human being: golden and monitory light), as he
stares at these eight ink marks, there passes a disagreeable stomach
episode, a dread tangible as vomit beginning to assert itselfthe same
vertigo that overtook him one day long ago in the Himmler-Spielsaal. A
gasbag surrounds his head, rubbery, vast, pushing in from all sides, that
feeling we know, yes, but. . . He is also getting a hardon, for no immediate
reason. And there's that smell again, a smell from before his conscious
memory begins, a soft and chemical smell, threatening, haunting, not a
smell to be found out in the worldit is the breath of the Forbidden Wing . . .
essence of all the still figures waiting for him inside, daring him to enter and find a secret he
cannot survive.

Once something was done to him, in a room, while he lay helpless. . .

His erection hums from a certain distance, like an instrument
installed, wired by Them into his body as a colonial outpost here in our
raw and clamorous world, another office representing Their white
Metropolis far away. . . .

A sad story, all right. Slothrop, very nervous by now, reads on. Lyle
Bland, eh? Well, sure, that fits. He can recall dimly once or twice having
seen Uncle Lyle. The man used to come to visit his father, affable, fairhaired,
a hustler in the regional Jim Fisk style. Bland was always picking
young Tyrone up and swinging him around by his feet. That was O.K.
Slothrop had no special commitment at the time to right side up.

From what it sez here, Bland either saw the Stinnes crash coming
before most of its other victims, or was just naturally nervous. Early in '23
he began to sell off his interests in the Stinnes operations. One of these
sales was made through Laszlo Jamf to the Grössli Chemical Corporation
(later Psychochemie AG). One of the assets transferred in this sale was
"all interest in Schwarzknabe enterprise. Seller agrees to continue
surveillance duties until such time as Schwindel operative can be relieved
by purchaser equivalent, acceptability to be determined by seller."
Jamf's codebook happens to be in the dossier. Part of the man's
personality structure, after all. "Schwindel" was his code name for Hugo
Stinnes. Clever sense of humor, the old fart. Across from
"Schwarzknabe," now, are the initials "T.S."

Well, holy cow, Slothrop reckons, that must be me, huh. Barring the
outside possibility of Tough Shit.

Listed as a "Schwarzknabe" liability is the unpaid remainder of a bill
to Harvard University, about $5000 worth including the interest, "as per
agreement (oral) with Schwarzvater."

"Schwarzvater" is the code word for "B.S." Which, barring the
outside possibility of Bull Shit, seems to be Slothrop's own father,
Broderick. Blackfather Slothrop.

Nice way to find out your father made a deal 20 years ago with
somebody to spring for your education. Come to think of it, Slothrop
never could quite put the announcements, all through the Depression, of
imminent family ruin, together with the comfort he enjoyed at
Harvard. Well, now, what was the deal between his father and Bland? I've
been sold, Jesus Christ I've been sold to IG Farben like a side of beef.
Surveillance? Stinnes, like every industrial emperor, had his own company
spy system. So did the IG. Does this mean Slothrop has been under their
observationm-maybe since he was born? Yaahhh . . .

The fear balloons again inside his brain. It will not be kept down with
a simple Fuck You. . . . A smell, a forbidden room, at the bottom edge of
his memory. He can't see it, can't make it out. Doesn't want to. It is allied
with the Worst Thing.

He knows what the smell has to be: though according to these papers
it would have been too early for it, though he has never come across
any of the stuff among the daytime coordinates of his life, still, down
here, back here in the warm dark, among early shapes where the clocks
and calendars don't mean too much, he knows that what's haunting him
now will prove to be the smell of Imipolex G.

Then there's this recent dream he is afraid of having again. He was in
his old room, back home. A summer afternoon of lilacs and bees, and
warm air through an open window. Slothrop had found a very old
dictionary of technical German. It fell open to a certain page prickling
with black-face type. Reading down the page, he would come to
JAMF. The definition would read: I. He woke begging It nobut even
after waking, he was sure, he would remain sure, that It could visit him
again, any time It wanted. Perhaps you know that dream too. Perhaps It
has warned you never to speak Its name. If so, you know about how
Slothrop'll be feeling now.


Attached Files
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"It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted...."
"Proverbs for Paranoids 4: You hide, They seek."
"They are in Love. Fuck the War."

Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon

"Ccollanan Pachacamac ricuy auccacunac yahuarniy hichascancuta."
The last words of the last Inka, Tupac Amaru, led to the gallows by men of god & dogs of war
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