Cartography

[Dkipen at aol.com]

Dear list,

I hate to break it to you, but there has already been a film made of
Gravity's Rainbow. It's called Map of the Human Heart, and it's directed by a
young Oceanian named Vincent Ward, who also made a terrific movie called The
Navigator. It's very good, I think, and occasionally brilliant, and I
encourage you all to go out and rent it and see if I'm wrong. I am, by the
way, but not by much.

While I've got you, the key text for me in any discussion of Pynchon and
baseball is the one on p. 75 of Vineland that erased all my early doubts and
let me know that TRP was truly back, viz.:

Her father, Jess Traverse, trying to organize loggers in Vineland, Humboldt,
and Del Norte, had suffered an accident arranged by one Crocker "Bud"
Scantling for the Employers' Association, in plain sight of enough people
who'd get the message, at a local ball game, where he was playing center
field. The tree, one of a stand of old redwoods just beyond the fence, had
been cut in advance almost all the way through. Nobody in the stands heard
saw strokes, wedges being knocked loose ... nobody could believe, when it
began to register, the slow creaking detachment from the lives around it as
the tree began its slow descent. Voices found at last only reached Jess in
time for him to dive out of the way, to save his life but not his mobility,
as the redwood fell across his legs, crushing them, driving half of him into
the earth....

Pardon me while I go give up writing completely.

Love
David