From Energy to Information conf.

[hankhank at ccwf.cc.utexas.edu]

On Sat, 5 Apr 1997, Mike Weaver wrote:
> Hey Hankhank,
>         Can you post some kind of report on Ilya Prigogine's plenary speech
> at the UT Energy and Information conf.  

Mike: "to cut a longer story short", "for reasons beyond my control", and,
"to my great sorrow", I could not attend the Prigorine speech. I'll check
out if the local student paper has something on it.

However, Meg Larson asked if there is anything on Lot 49 and parody. 
Hmm, I know something on the novel as a parody of detective stories.
A chapter in Stefano Tani's _Doomed Detective_, which outlines the
genre of "anti-detective" novels in recent Italian and American fiction;
hmm, not very good, applies quite unimaginatively Russian formalist
theories of generic evolution (which are, admittedly, quite mechanistic
themselves). As I remember it, Tani tries to show that the narrator of 
Lot 49 is Trystero; consequently, Oedipa will be murdered after the end,
most probably. Eh?

Eric's Wallace Stevens message brought to mind Molly Hite's _Ideas of
Order in the Novels of TP_, whose starting point is WS's "The Idea of
Order at Key West", and how the pomo TP differs from the mo WS. I think 
it is still  one of the best Pynchon books. Maybe more than anyone, Hite
regards Lot 49 as a parody of the Grail tradition. The consequences are,
intertwiningly, at once aesthetic and social. 

Oh yes and "The Rock" of WS makes me remark: Allen's last name is/was 
the rocky GinsBERG, not the burgerlich GinsBURG, as in some mailings. 

Heikki