Lurker,COL49/Net

[EHREH at aol.com]

My reading of Pynchon is sequenced with a series of Pychonesque
 coincidences-tell me if I am paranoid.  I received as a gift a copy of V in
'75?   I decided to tackle it one summer when I was sharing a house with a
group of students from Brown who had slacked off and hadn't finished their
reading for a  course on "The beat Generation."  Simultaneous to my reading
of V I picked up someones copy of "Been Down so long looks like up to Me" and
went Woa!!!  I ammediatley saw a connection between the spider monkey that
appears in the ice at the pole (V) and the LSD monkey vision  in Farina.  I
also recognized  Farina's campus as Cornell. I saw the bio that Pynchon had
gone to Cornell and I then saw the inscription to Farina of V and well-I was
hooked for life.  (At this time the connection was well known however it was
an epichpany of sorts to put it together myself-the Pynchon journey had
begun)

I'll skip the GR part for now, but just last last week while sick I decided
to  reread CL49 which I had always dismissed as too slapstick- I too had
never really connected with Oedipa Maas.  Well my opinion has radically
changed, there are some brilliant prose riffs and much more- Anyway
coincidence #2:  I Iwas in bed reading CL simultaneously (literally) to
watching the movie "The Net".  I thought the Net pretty tired thriller
stuff-however I realized that the female protagonist who lives in LA makes a
discovery of a secret band of (at first) intdeterminate underground.  People
around her start "disappearing" as does her shrink (and ex-boyfriend) She
goes on a journey to search out the meaning of this underground who  are
calle Praetorians and are recognized by a symbol-(Pi ) on the net.  Her
search takes her from LA to SF and there is even a scene of her wandering
into a software company among the "engineers"- just the way Oedipa wanders
into Yoyodyne.

I dindn't catch any of the writers credits but I wonder who it was and why
that decided to borraow from CL49.  In any case a simultaneous reading of the
two only offsets Pynchon true brilliance.  When you turn the plot inside out
to make it fit the TV/film /thriller formula you end up with a pretty flat
tire in comparison to the originality and truly uncopiable aspects of Pynhons
structure and prose.