TRP and Gore Vidal

[MASCARO at humnet.ucla.edu]

Mes Pynchonelles--

Someone just mentioned Gore Vidal. Anybody read Gore Vidal novels out 
there?  I recently read DULUTH, which I enjoyed very much.  I came 
across an interesting tidbit.   As part of the novel's plot, a 
mysterious red spaceship has landed on the outskirts of town.  The 
spaceship's location is represented by a red pushpin stuck in a wall map 
at police headquarters.  Whenever police Captain Eddie Thurow picks up 
the pin and moves it to another location on the map, 
the--actual--spaceship moves to that location.  On p. 67, when we're 
first told about this, the phenomenon is attributed to:

"Pynchon's lesser corrollary to the law of gravity [whereby] whenever a 
spaceship (macro) is represented by an object (micro) on an EXACT chart 
of where gravity insists it rest when not under propulsion, then MACRO 
will move on its plane exactly as MICRO moves on its representational 
plane."


There's a later repeat reference in an aside, when one of the aliens 
dismisses the corollary as elementary knowledge.


Anyone familiar with Vidal's  (non-historical) novels knows the time- 
and space-warp games he plays.  My question to the group is, do we 
consider him a --serious--enough writer to --seriously--consider 
questions of influence, shared or divergent aims/methods, etc. with 
Pynchon?  (Obvious in the above example, for example,  is the idea of 
the map mapping the world, the interaction/imbrication of a 
representation and the thing represented.) Or is he just being catty?  

Know any other references to TRP in Vidal's work? 

john m.