M&D chapter 35: TRPs Phizz, POMO, and a nod towards VL

[Greg Montalbano]

       Facts are but the Play-things of lawyers, -- Tops and Hoops, forever
a-spin....  Alas, the Historian may indulge no such idle Rotating.  History
is not Chronology, for that is left to lawyers,-- nor is Remembrance, for
Remembrance belongs to the People.  History can as little pretend to the
Veracity of the one, as claim the Power of the other,-- her Practitioners,
to survive, must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc, spy and Taproom
Wit,-- that there may ever continue more than one life-line back into a
Past we risk, each day, losing our forbears in forever,-- not a Chain of
single Links, for one broken Link could lose us All,-- rather, a great
disorderly Tangle of Lines, long and short, weak and strong, vanishing into
the Mnemonick Deep, with only their Destination in common.
                   
                          --The Rev'd Wicks Cherrycoke

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Much more interesting (to me) than some pixels allegedly representing the
face of a "recluse" author is the true face of Pynchon THE WRITER grinning
up out of this paragraph -- in the best tradition of post-modernism, we
have here in a few sentences the fictional narrator (and above that, the
author) speaking to us directly about what he's (they're) doing with this
book...  not to mention an explanation/defense of VINELAND (the subject
matter of which so many of you found so "trivial").

So there.