(Fwd) Re: Trust-Love, Paranoia-Chaos, Leni

[ray gonne]

Meg Larson wrote:
  Paranoia is, on
> one hand, a heightened sense of awareness and an incredibly fine-tuned
> attention to detail.  There has been talk lately of writers as
> spys/observers and paranoids in general are a lot like that--they eavesdrop
> and window-peek not so much b/c they think they're the object of a
> conspiracy, but moreso, that IN CASE there _is_ a conspiracy, they can
> protect themselves.
> 
> And ultimately that seems to be what Pynch's paranoiacs are
> after--self-protection/preservation.  And although they tend to exhibit a
> lot of the same symptoms, paranoiacs are not necessarily sociopaths.


nice tie-in with pynchon at the end of your post--point well put. wrt
credit cards, drivers license, etc, it seems to me the really
interesting paranoids might find those all to easy to be concerned
about. by interesting i mean in this case complex, beyond run of the
mill fears that our desires are tracked by credit card purchases or
video interests. i agree with what was said earlier re the paranoid's
sense that somehow the plot points directly to them, or that the
paranoid is somehow vital to the scheme (in a way the paranoid cannot
know, or at any rate is not meant to know). pynchon toys with this
nicely in GR with the fear of a rocket with one's name on it, a
complication (paranoid) of the knowledge that a rocket can strike at any
moment, completely unexpected, further complicated by the (seeming)
randomness of strike. makes me think also of gulf war bombs painted
"this one's for you, saddam." as i read GR it occurs to me that
slothrop's tendency to get a hardon when he thinks about a rocket
falling close enough to kill him will be manipulated by pynchon and/or
the characters that surround slothrop as a sort of early-warning radar
system.
at page 83 now,
ray