Retrocholia

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Think I've got my etymology right here: χολή (kholḗ, “bile”).

I am sat in a café in London and they were just playing that Cardigans song from the Romeo And Juliet OST. This depressed me, as I was lately depressed by hearing the same old festive pop songs from the 80s in a Tesco's in the lead up to Christmas.

I had thought this was simply a symptom of getting older, having seen and heard it all before, and realising how limited the scope of life is, and I still suppose it is. But it's also the ever-presence of the past isn't it, in the streaming era?

I don't know that this is worth a thread, and no doubt Simon covers this in Retromania itself, but does anyone else find this sense of there being no future and even no PRESENT in the contemporary world?

A feeling of being trapped in a closed loop.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I was about to bring in the "sampling" of pop hits of yore in current RNB (Chris Brown's latest song, produced by Scott Storch, interpolates "I love your smile") as evidence of this, but then I suppose that is a sign of my age, too - because I didn't notice it with the bad boy records e.g., cos I couldn't remember the songs they were sampling.
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
I'm never sure with this sort of thing how much is an actual new phenomenon and how much is just me hanging out in different places as I get older - we spent an evening in a bar in Sheffield on a stag do last year where the music was basically wall-to-wall Britpop, but then it was a solidly middle-class 30-something kind of place, so that seems more like making an older demographic feel at home than just a dearth of new ideas.

On the other hand, it does seem like we've been stuck with the early eighties as a sort of tipping point of modernism for the last thirty years or so, so DJs and rappers and drum machines and suchlike are still treated as inherently a bit edgy. This is presumably because the gatekeepers of media and culture still tend to be baby-boomers who peaked in about 1970.
 

version

Well-known member
“Perhaps history this century, thought Eigenvalue, is rippled with gathers in its fabric such that if we are situated, as Stencil seemed to be, at the bottom of a fold, it's impossible to determine warp, woof, or pattern anywhere else. By virtue, however, of existing in one gather it is assumed there are others, compartmented off into sinuous cycles each of which had come to assume greater importance than the weave itself and destroy any continuity. Thus it is that we are charmed by the funny-looking automobiles of the '30's, the curious fashions of the '20's, the particular moral habits of our grandparents. We produce and attend musical comedies about them and are conned into a false memory, a phony nostalgia about what they were. We are accordingly lost to any sense of continuous tradition. Perhaps if we lived on a crest, things would be different. We could at least see.”
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
“Perhaps history this century, thought Eigenvalue, is rippled with gathers in its fabric such that if we are situated, as Stencil seemed to be, at the bottom of a fold, it's impossible to determine warp, woof, or pattern anywhere else. By virtue, however, of existing in one gather it is assumed there are others, compartmented off into sinuous cycles each of which had come to assume greater importance than the weave itself and destroy any continuity. Thus it is that we are charmed by the funny-looking automobiles of the '30's, the curious fashions of the '20's, the particular moral habits of our grandparents. We produce and attend musical comedies about them and are conned into a false memory, a phony nostalgia about what they were. We are accordingly lost to any sense of continuous tradition. Perhaps if we lived on a crest, things would be different. We could at least see.”

where's that from then?

Zygmunt Bauman?
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I always wondered why he chose the name Eigenvalue for that character. I find it somehow annoying every time I hear it but if there is some way in which his story arc justifies it then maybe it's ok. It's so long since I read it though.
 

Numbers

Well-known member
I always wondered why he chose the name Eigenvalue for that character. I find it somehow annoying every time I hear it but if there is some way in which his story arc justifies it then maybe it's ok. It's so long since I read it though.

Because an Eigenvalue is the value one becomes when an operation is applied to itself, ad infinitum, I would guess. Reminds me a bit of Faust, who was nauseated by the stream of finite representations (of representations of representations, etc aka culture) and begs the devil to bring him to the realm of the possible (which funnily enough is called the realm of the Mothers).
 

Numbers

Well-known member
That's not right though is it.
In fact it doesn't even make sense as a sentence, but if it did I think it would still be wrong.

Apologies for my glob-English and bad grammar. I am rather sure that’s what Eigenvalues are though. The most banal, but clearest example is taking the square root of an arbitrary number, then taking the square root of the outcome until you obtain stable value, ie 1. The concept was a minor hit in second-wave cybernetics.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Apologies for my glob-English and bad grammar. I am rather sure that’s what Eigenvalues are though. The most banal, but clearest example is taking the square root of an arbitrary number, then taking the square root of the outcome until you obtain stable value, ie 1. The concept was a minor hit in second-wave cybernetics.
Sorry, I was rude then. My understanding of the original meaning of an Eigenvalue is that if you have a linear transformation which acts on a vector then that transform will act on certain vectors (Eigenvectors) merely as a stretch (or squash or flip) in one dimension. The magnitude of that stretch is an Eigenvalue for that transformation. In some sense it is a measure of the magnitude of that transform.
Maybe the term was later used in cybernetics as you say but wouldn't that have been after Pynchon wrote V? Interesting that they would re-use the term to mean something that is sorta related (in that it deals with operations and constants) but also quite different in that it is the final, constant result, rather than the change itself. In your example the e-value would be 1, is that right?
nb if you keep taking the square root you will never reach one. Though you will approach as close to it as you like. Does the e-value have to be one that is attained or just the limit? If the former you could use the function "take square root and round down" in which case you would reach 1.
 
Last edited:

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
I would have agreed with Rich on this, but having checked, if you have a diagonalisable matrix with a unique largest eigenvalue, and you iteratively apply the matrix to a random nonzero vector and normalise the result then (subject to slightly more conditions on the original vector) you get a sequence of vectors that converges towards the eigenvector associated with the largest eigenvalue. Intuitively, I think this is because the normalise step means that the "apply and normalise" operation tends to shrink components of the vector that are in the direction of the other eigenvectors and keep the component in the direction of the dominant eigenvector, and as you go towards infinity, the dominant eigenvector ends up being what you're left with.

Not sure whether this is what Pynchon was thinking of, though. I'd have thought a more obvious association is what Rich mentions: an eigenvalue is associated with something that stays fundamentally unchanged in character during a transformation. Or it could be the literal translation: "self-value". Or he could just be deliberately disrupting the narrative with stupid names. It's too long since I read V...
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I was about to bring in the "sampling" of pop hits of yore in current RNB (Chris Brown's latest song, produced by Scott Storch, interpolates "I love your smile") as evidence of this, but then I suppose that is a sign of my age, too - because I didn't notice it with the bad boy records e.g., cos I couldn't remember the songs they were sampling.

my life = everybody loves the sunshine.

love to love you, well.

and it goes on and on.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Yeah, googling around it seems you can generalise the concept beyond linear and non-linear transforms. In every definition I find though it seems that the Eigenvalue is something associated with the transformation rather than the endpoint of that transformation. eg in your example Slothrop the Eigenvalue takes you to the Eigenvector.
Pynchon was from an engineering background wasn't he? So he would obviously be familiar with this.

Or he could just be deliberately disrupting the narrative with stupid names.
Like I say, if it's that it's kinda annoying. I hope there is more to it than that.
 
Top