stencil mom/circularity

[Chris Stolz]

I'm very cynical about Barth, who I regard as a candy-floss
postmodernist (professors of English do not writers make) at
best.  _Lost in the Funhouse_ is an interesting exercise but
doesn't really have much weight to it, unlike Pynchon's book,
which has lots of political and epistemological questions neatly
intertwined.  I guess the main thing is that, unlike most other
"experimental" modern American writers, Pynchon doesn't take
epistemology more seriously than ontology.

I wonder about the madalas of _GR_.  One thing about rings is
that they represent both wholeness/return and narcissism (see
_Twin Peaks_ for a wild riff on narcissism and rings).  I think
that the rocket-as-mandala represents this sort of thing on a
technological level:  the dream of the perfect"whole" where
human, machine, math and religion all fuse is also navel-gazing
and complicit with evil...I think you're dead right about the
mandala-crosshairs connection.  Bang on, so to speak.  I'd never
thought of that.
 
-- 
chris stolz		16 oakview pl. sw calgary ab canada t2v-3z9
cstolz at acs.ucalgary.ca	(403) 281-6794


"But you must admit that our ignorance is manifestly of a very rich 
and varied sort?" said Ulrich.


			Robert Musil, _The Man Without Qualities_