Yes, Virginia

[David Casseres]

[Paul Mackin sez]

>But it seems to me we don't need a genius of Pynchon quality to tell us 
>brainwashing is wrong (not to say genocide and all the rest). But he
>does serve to drive home the essential truth of that old Murphy's Law.
>
>And Pynchon makes life more pleasant for us while we await our preterite
>doom. So ho, ho, ho.

Well yeah.  But isn't it true that any time you take a work of literature 
and boil it all the way down, you get truisms?  My own boildown of 
Pynchon is that he is telling us Everything Is Connected.  We knew that, 
right?

So I'm not sure I'd call it "making life more pleasant," but goddamn, the 
fellow can WRITE like an angel and he can invent a whole narrative style 
of his own as he goes along, in little bits and flashes until you realize 
suddenly he's the most innovative storyteller around as well as one of 
the best prose-makers.

And by doing all that he can wind up showing us, instead of just telling 
us, that brainwashing is wrong and everything is connected and things go 
wrong usw, and show us in such a way that maybe we find ourselves 
thinking about those things in new ways.

Cheers,
David