Pynchon & Pop Music

[SGSMOOT at pwinet.upj.com]

Bonnie wonders:
"was the title an expression of Benatar's admiration for the novel, or mere 
chance?"

Being a relative newbie, I haven't seen it but I presume the Laurie Anderson 
reference has cropped up on this list before (song - "Gravity's Angel", 
collection - _Big Science_, Warner 1981(?)). Of course, I always consider 
Ms. Anderson to be a special case - anyone who can make song lyrics by 
paraphrasing an essay by Walter Benjamin has _got_ to be a special case...

It is possible, just possible, that the book title and its referent have 
made it into the pop-culture lexicon. After all, if people can laugh at a 
syllabus for a course called "The Difficult Novel" that includes _Don 
Quixote_, _Tristram Shandy_, _Finnegan's Wake_, and _Gravity's Rainbow_ 
without having read all of the above, it shows a certain extra-readerly 
awareness of the work.


As for copyrights - aren't titles a real problem, copyright-wise? Especially 
across disciplines?