Whatcha Readin?

[Alan Westrope]

On Thu, 9 Jan 1997, Craig Clark wrote:

>Alan Joyce <caj3+ at pitt.edu> asks:

>> On a more specifically Pynchonian note: one thing I've often been curious
>> about is whether anyone has ever written music for and recorded any of the
>> songs in TRP's books -- anybody know?  I have this wish for someone like
>> Tom Waits to do a "Gravity's Rainbow" album someday...

>There is Laurie Anderson's song "Gravity's Angel" on the _Mr 
>Heartbreak_ album, which is dedicated to TRP

The nascent web page at
http://www.microserve.net/~thequail/libyrinth/pynchon.html
has info on this song, as well as Insect Trust and other Pynchonian
musical endeavors.  The site has several other good literary pages.
I stumbled onto it while following a Borges link from Tim Ware's
Pynchon site, which should be declared a national monument.

What I Reread Over My Xmas Vacation:  Beckett's _Molloy_.  I'm
currently rereading Barth's "4 1/2 Lectures:  The Stuttgart Seminars
on Postmodernism, Chaos Theory, and the Romantic Arabesque."  Barth
quotes N. Katherine Hayles quite a bit, including this passage
that always reminds me of the closing pages of GR:

"The rhythm of our century [had come to seem] predictable.  World War
I at the second decade; World War II at the fourth decade; World War
III at the sixth decade, during which the world as we know it comes to
an end.  But somehow it did not happen when it was supposed to.  By the
ninth decade, we cannot help suspecting that maybe it happened after all
and we failed to notice.  Consequently time splits into a false future in
which we all live and a true future that by virtue of being true does not
have us in it."

Off to water my garden of forking paths; in a sense, I am

Alan Westrope     PGP public key:  http://www.crl.com/~awestrop
<awestrop at crl.com>
<awestrop at nyx.net>
PGP 0xB8359639:   D6 89 74 03 77 C8 2D 43   7C CA 6D 57 29 25 69 23