More Koanstuff and A Modest Proposal (was Koan Answered?)

[Rick Vosper]

At 02:34 PM 7/10/97 -0300, Vaska writes, re my Modest Proposal: 

>Rick, this in on the run, but oh boy, them's deep waters indeed.  I mean,
>how do we even start doing what you propose?  Any suggestions?

having earlier said: 

>>As part of our ("our", as in The List) exploration of Pynchon's relative
>>depth of understanding of many, many theoretical and religious systems, we
>>may want to attempt a sort of "Pynchonian Epistomology"...trying to define
>>the boundaries of P's knowledge. 
>>
>>Yikes. I just typed that sentence, and it scares me already.
>>
>>We know the man's darned smart, and even the most devout among us will
>>admit there are limits to his encyclopedic understanding, so perhaps the
>>next question should be...what are they?


Like yourself, I was on the run when I typed it. But the hour-and-a-half
drive to San José (the things we do for money!) gave me pause for thought.

Either I was having one of those Drug Flashbacks they kept promising us all
those years, or I was toying with the hubris-infused notion of constucting
an epistomological map of Pynchon's knowledge as manifested in The Canon.
(Of course, we could just stamp "Here be Dragons" over the entire surface
and be done with it).

It's kinda what we do all the time on this group. We dredge up some bit of
Pynchonia (recent examples include the intricacies of Yiddish grammar and
the likelihood of a Mu/µ connection) and try to see how it "maps" into
other things we know about what Pynchon knows (how grammatically fastidious
was he in other researched languages?"  "Would he given a knowingly
incorrect koan interpretation?").

Models for fairly comprehensive knowledge-maps exist, of course...the Dewey
Decimal system and Yahoo! being just two such. They even scale pretty well.

So what we'd do is choose a system and see where the continents and oceans
of Things Pynchonian show up on it. TRP doesn't show a whole lot of
interest in cooking for example, altough a closer look would turn up such
dainties as Mucus Muffins, a-and that Fart Fondue...

But before I get too carried away here, it should be pointed out that I
never really meant to suggest we construct such a thing.The idea was more
of a thought-problem: were there such a map, what would it look like? What
WOULDN'T it look like? And how useful might it be for P-list purposes?

--rick