The Italian Wedding Fake Book

[David Casseres]

Greg sez

>>In Lot 49 and Vineland, the We-system turns out to be mostly a forlorn 
>>wish, natch.  It doesn't really manage to be a Counterforce after all.  
>>One reason they're short books.  But as Mason and Dixon comes up over my 
>>horizon, I am wondering if it will turn out to be, at last, the paranoid 
>>synthesis that Pirate proposed -- achieved only by going back two hundred 
>>years to find out who We might be and *how* Everything Is Connected.  
>>That would be nice.

>Going to the next level, there are hints, clues & suggestions throughout
>V and GR that the "They-system" may not be as organized or intentional as
>it's victims might think.  Part of the defining character of Pynchon's
>paranoia is the possibility that it's all a construct of characters who
>cannot imagine the universe as random, as impersonal as described in the
>mechanistic Age of Reason.  The oppression of Everything being Connected (in
>such a manner that it works against "us") is somehow never as terrifying as
>the idea that NONE of it is connected;  that "shit just happens."
>
>Paranoia, and then some.

That's right.  A-and the closing Song seems to me to express the hope 
that there is an Order to things, an order that is perhaps not the doing 
of Them after all.  I wonder whether M&D will lead toward such an order 
-- the "natural" order longed for in Vineland -- or toward shit Just 
Happening.

Well, pretty soon I'll be finding out.  Saturday was my first chance to 
go get my copy; I headed on down to Printer's Ink, the nearest 
independent bookstore (eat your hearts out, New Yorkers, I had *five* 
others to choose from if necessary).  Looked for the prominent display of 
big shiny books, but no, it wasn't there.  Asked the Information lady, 
who didn't know from Pynchon but got the computer to say that there was 
one copy in stock.  "Well, I want it!" sez I, and she took me on a tour 
of store but no, it wasn't in sight.  She was just about to call their 
other store for me, when a guy walks past carrying a stack of maybe six 
copies of this big fat book clad in an Imipolex jacket-jacket, about to 
put them on Prominent Display.  So I got one.  The cash register guy did 
know about Pynchon, sez he knows a guy who once bought Pynchon's car from 
him, sez M&D is selling "like hotcakes."

Now I just have to finish up Gravity's Rainbow, and theeeeeeennnnnn...


Cheers,
David