the name's Diana

[Diana York Blaine]

I never said anything about a matriarchate--what a bizarre leap that is!
Murthy's post most elegantly covers what I didn't bother to do:  assert
the existence of peoples for whom survival does not equal genocide in the
name of progress.  And hey, Steve Maas, sorry if I implied you venerate
Andrew--I guess it was the "best brief description of Pynchon" remark that
you made.  Maybe I was just jealous, but it seemed that as a thumbnail
blurb it seemed to misrepresent what Pynchon's focus seems to be on, not
human nature but the inhumane nature of our supposedly civil civilization.
I don't think he essentializes humanity--hardly!  And yes Mittelwerk I
think it's perfectly ok to be critical of *science* as a totalizing
metanarrative. The usual attempts to shut down that debate seem just as
reactionary as ever. Oh, whoops, I didn't realize I was criticizing
*science.*  God knows we need microwaves and clones of ourselves so we can
spew twice as much gibberish onto the Pynchon list.

As for the possible dismissal of CoL49 because it has a heroine and not a
hero, this was suggested to me by someone at the recent conference and I
thought I'd send it out.  If this is untrue, then BFD, who cares?  But it
does seem weird to dismiss that book if you like Pynchon, which presumably
to one degree or another we all do. So there's one explanation.

And that's part of the problem--if this is a fan club then there's not
much to say, is there?  He doesn't have an expansive enought oeuvre to
justify daily postings in support of Pynchon-ness and yet any time we move
towards something vaguely critical the bombs start falling.  Does the man
have feet of clay?  Duh.  Are his works intriguing?  Duh.  Somewhere in
between there perhaps we can find a way to talk about the literature
without getting defensive.  But until people stop pretending that growing
up in racially and sexually stratified cultures hasn't affected them in
the least, I fear we cannot.

Diana