What Pynchon Knew

[Mascaro at humnet.ucla.edu]

Bonnie,

I've been ill and away for more than a week from my messages, so I'm just 
skimming here along, fragmentarily following this GR and fractals 
discussion, i.e. not reading all the posts sequentially.  Threrefore, 
there's an even greater than usual chance that I'm about to discover how 
easily my foot fits into my mouth, but--(1) doesn't GR predate Mandelbrot's 
"discovery" of fractals by about 5 years? (or is this just wrong, 
factually--it does predate his first book on the subject I'm pretty sure, by 
about that long); (2) whether or not it does, doesn't it seem to be in an 
altogether different--paradigm--from what emerged in late 70s early 80s as 
chaos theory writ large?  As you know from our previous exchange, I see the 
frqactal/chaos paradigm as informing every phase of Vineland, but I can't 
but put GR into what can be called a "classical" quantum indeterminacy 
paradigm.  I acknowledge for my own stubborn binary patterns of thought (GR 
is X; Vineland is Y), and apolgize for using "paradigm" so often in this 
note.

John Mascaro

p.s. If you all have answered these very questions recently, forgive my 
redundancies, and point me towards the truth.