suggested reading

[TERRY CAESAR]

     One of the best things about the list for me is the mention of all sorts
of books. Here's a couple that would be especially provocative for readers of
Pynchon, in case anybody's missed them.

     The first is Frederic Jameson's The Geopolitical Aesthetic (Indiana, '92).
His long first section, "Totality as Conspiracy," is wonderfully heady stuff.
Mostly on movies--as is the whole book--but interestingly on Pynchon, glancing-
ly, if merely in order to conclude that Lot 49 disappoints because "the moments
of fear are derived from what we already know about the Nixon/Reagan years and
their internal conspiracies, rather than the other way round, prejecting a freshbreath of hiterto unexperienced anxiety into their own plots that seem as com-
ically inept as they may be prophetic. It is a question that will have to be
posed again when we come to *All the President's Men*"

     Come to this movie we duly do. The nice thing is how shrewdly by then
Jameson has worked through a number of movies in order to argue how the very
possibility of conspiracy is inseparable from the intelligibility of the social
order itself.

       The other book, which I also just finished, is Allucquere Rosanne
Stone's The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age
(MIT, '95). No mention of Pynchon, but lots of much of the vocabulary by which
GR is discussed--interfaces, alternative identities, couterforces, tecnological
interventions, and so on. Stone's book represents a writing of computer tech-
nology that strives to be adequate to a wide range of discursive registers--
communications theory to personal memoir.

       At one point, for example, Stone remarks upon how n"narrowing the band-
with" for "symbolic exchange originating at and relating to the surface of the
body" has revealed the need "to create extremely detailed images of the absent
and invisible body, of human interaction, and the symbol-generating artifacts
which are part of that interaction." One wonders--just to mention a quich
thought--if at least some of the pressure behind our recent gestures at the
possibility of a Pynchon biography isn't precisely the Absent Body who rather
necessarily haunts our electronic occasion here.

                          yrs in greater bandwidth,
                                   Terry Caesar