Pondering Lot 49

[Alan Westrope]

On Sat, 15 Apr 1995 01:08:49 -0700, godot at rt66.com (Cal McInvale) wrote:

> But I'd like to ask you all ahead of time:  How does Lot 49 compare, in
> your opinion(s) to Gravity's Rainbow and Vineland?  Is it more "personal,"
> less epic?  (I notice it *is* slimmer.)

Those are dangerous questions to ask in this forum -- you may learn
more than you really want to know about our opinions!  But I'll jump
in and say that it's both less epic and less personal.  To me, it's
always seemed very academic, almost as though Pynchon wrote it to fulfill
an assignment in a creative writing seminar.  The characters seem pretty
2-dimensional compared to those in the other novels and most of the short
stories, at least to me.

Having said that, I still think the book stands head and shoulders
above the work of damn near every English-language novelist since Joyce.
But my first encounter with Pynchon was _GR_ -- I just finished it for the
fourth time -- and everything else has been a bit disappointing in comparison.

After hanging out in cyberspace, though, I find one aspect of _CL49_
quite intriguing.  Pynchon was writing in 1966 about

"a network by which X number of Americans are truly communicating
 whilst reserving their lies, recitations of routine, arid betrayals
 of spiritual poverty, for the official government delivery system;
 maybe...a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of
 surprise to life, that harrows the head of everybody American you
 know, and you too..."

Replace "Americans" with, say, "humans" and this sounds a bit like the
Internet:  the anarchic, decentralized stucture, beyond the power of
any government to censor or control; the use of pseudonymous or anonymous
accounts, like Julf's penet in Finland or the Cypherpunks remailers;
and the possibility of implementing even more advanced cryptographic
privacy-enhancing protocols like anonymous digital cash.

Another Pynchonesque aspect of the Internet is that in most mailing lists
and newsgroups, I frequently encounter examples of _hysteron proteron_:
reversals of cause and effect, like a film run backwards, or Yanks backpedaling
across the Atlantic to waste Webern.  They take the form of replies to a
message that arrive before the original message, presumably due to the
vicissitudes of Internet routers.  The ensuing confusion recalls the
condition of Government bureaucrats in Lord Blatherard Osmo's fantasy:

"communication among them is highly uncertain -- postmen are being snatched
 off of their rounds by stiff-pimpled Adenoid tentacles of fluorescent
 beige, telegraph wires are apt to go down at any whim of the Adenoid."

And since I'm already far off-topic, I'll mention that the new issue of
"Wired" has an article about Bianca's Smut Shack -- http://bianca.com/shack
-- on p. 53.  It's reportedly not *too* smutty, and anyone can leave graffiti.
If I drop by, I'll scrawl a "Fickt nicht mit der Raketemensch!" for y'all...


Alan Westrope                  <awestrop nyx10.cs.du.edu>
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