Pynchonian Rorschach

[Vaska]

David Casseres takes me to task:
>>David Caseras wrote:
>
>Casseres, actually.  If you can take people to task for not figuring out 
>you're female (with no visible evidence as far as I can recall), I'll 
>take you to task for not knowing the spelling of My Name, when it's 
>displayed on ev'ry post.

Sorry, David.  Won't happen again.  As for visible evidence, no, there's
none.  Verbal evidence, though: plenty.

>>Let's do some
>>justice to the amount of labour, of sheer dogged work, Pynchon put into
>>those novels.
>
>You mistake my intent.  I am just as impressed as anyone by Pynchon's 
>research in his earlier work, and I didn't even *need* academic 
>fact-checking to tell me how much work it must have been, or how much it 
>does for the novels as literature.  

Well, good for you.  I just don't have that sort of erudition myself and
tend to appreciate it when others help me out in my areas of ignorance.

>I just don't see any justification 
>for jumping to the conclusion that Mason & Dixon is slacking off.

It seems to me that no amount of persuasive argument will budge you from
that position.  Fair enough.  

>A small koan: if no scholar had ever checked Pynchon's facts in the 
>earlier novels, would the novels be any less wonderful?

If the details were not what they are, yes.  Scholars checking them has
nothing to do with it.  

Vaska