Have finished, but will never be done with M&D (was M&D yea/boo)

[Meg Larson]

>Doc T. sed:
 
> The devaluing of _Vineland_ here has been by contrast with the other 
> works--pretty much any other contemporary US writer would be proud to 
> claim it, I should think.
I say:
_Vineland_ is NOT _Gravity's Rainbow_ and I truly believe it wasn't meant
to be.  I've read it three times now, and I enjoy it more each time.  Why? 
'Cos Pynchon's trying to tell us something, or at least say something,
about the way we delude ourselves into thinking that we can affect a
meaningful change in the way things work but, at the same time, we fail to
realize that we're pretty much at the mercy of those who are bigger than
we; in other words, it's kinda hard to Fight the Power when ya ain't got
none.  People--Brock, Hector, DL--get corrupted, and manipulated, and so do
ideals and that's all a part of the game, IMHO.  So all we can do is take
our ideals and apply them to our own lives, and I think that's what Zoyd
tried to do.  It's also what Frenesi tried to do, but they just got tripped
up by what?  Human-ness.  And in the end, being human is not such a bad
thing, not if we have people in our lives that we can love and care for and
feel connected to.  It's like this list: we forget that there are *human
beings* behind these posts.  Ideals are nice, but there are contingent.

And if all we do is judge every new Pynchon work by what he has done
before, then we aren't really listening to TRP, are we?

Think what you will--_Vineland_ is a TRP work and I'd rather have that than
the alternative.

M.

"I try to play my music, They say my music's too loud
I tried talkin' about it, I got the big runaround
And when I rolled with the punches
I got knocked on the ground 
By all this bullshit goin' down"
The Isley Brothers--1975