Autobiography cntnd.

[Paul Mackin]

On Tue, 16 Jan 1996 MASCARO at humnet.ucla.edu wrote:

 
> You folks all oughtta read DeLillo's MAO II w/ its portrait of--Bill Grey, 
> who is obviously TRP.  It's a real good imagining, methinks.


I'd forgotten about Bill. Surpised he hasn't come up here before.

Remember when Charlie tells Bill, "I always thought I understood precisely 
why you went into isolatiion. . . . You have a twisted sense of the 
writer's place in society. . . . Every government, every group that holds 
power or aspires to power should feel so threatened by writers that they  
hunt them down, everywhere."

"I've done no dangerous things."  (sez Bill)

"No. But you've lived out the vision anyway."

"So my life is a kind of simulation."

"Not exactly. There's nothing false about it. You actually
became a hunted man."

Also there's the idea in the book that novelists and revolutionaries
compete for public attention. Bill says, "For some time I have had the 
feeling that terroists and novelists are playing a zero-sum game. . .  .
The degree to which they influence consciousness is the extent of our
decline as shapers of sensibility and thought."


				P.