Yo, V-Land Freaks, a challenge

[Steelhead]

Henry snips and smirks:

>> Rich, hard to say. But people out here tell me I bear a remarkable
>> likeness to Tantivy Mucker-Maffick. I'm like there, but not there.
>> Know what I mean?
><snip>

>Steely, are you saying there is no there there? <smirk> Actually
>reminds me more of the infinite improbability drive in the Hitchhiker
>Guide to the Galaxy series.

No, not the Hitchhiker's Guide. Gravity's Rainbow. If my cite of Tantivy's
re-apparition didn't clue you in, how about this gem:

"For a moment, Slothrop, in his English uniform, is alone with the
paraphernalia of an order whose presence among the ordinary debris of
waking he has only lately begun to suspect.

"There may, for a moment, have been some golden, vaguely rootlike or
manlike figure [I love that, don't you? the allusion to the mandrake root,
which will later become so closely aligned with Tyrone] figure beginning to
form among the brown and bright cream shadows and light here. But Slothrop
isn't to be let off quite so easy. Shortly, unpleasantly so, it will come
to him that everything in this room is really being used for something
different. Meaning things to Them it has never meant to us. Never. Two
orders of being, looking identical...but, but...

[cut, the wonderful song, THE WORLD OVER THERE]

"Why here? Why should the rainbow edges of what is almost on him be
rippling intense here in this amply coded room? say why should walking in
here be almost the same as entering the Forbidden itself--here are the same
long rooms, rooms of old paralysis and evil distillery, of condensations
and residues you are afraid to smell from forgotten corruptions, rooms full
of upright gray-feathered statues with wings spread, indistinct faces in
dust--rooms full of dust that will cloud the shapes of inhabitants around
the corners or deeper inside, that will settle on their black formal
lapels, that will soften to sugar the white faces, white front shirts, gems
and gowns, white hands that move too quickly to be seen...what game to They
deal? What passes are these, so blurred, so old and perfect?

"Fuck you," whispers Slothrop. It's the only spell he knows, and a pretty
good all-purpose one at that."

Different layers of time, power, and place, Henry. Stratigraphies.

All you V-land freaks. I challenge you to come up with a better passage
than the above.

All you who say Pynch never dropped acid. Read the above again, closely
this time. But perhaps you have nothing to compare it. In which case, I'd
recommend. No. Someone may be listening. Someone my have their tape
recording running. Newt, I'm with you on that one buddy.

Steely