Who is Thomas Pynchon? What is M&D?

[Eric Alan Weinstein]

Andy's post about Pynchon- as- Cherrycoke helps me imagine 
them both as a shadow-Boswell.  Haunting on our behalf,
scribbling in dark corners of what perhaps must not be called 
history. Rending a truer conception of time's conceiving.
 A nation, an empire,  a system, a simultaneously shared and 
divided history.

     Our history (but should we call it history?)  full of both 
stardust and cruelty. 

   Our greatest achievement, friendship,  forged amidst a parallelogram of 
ignorance, curiosity, need and greed.

    A blade of right lines and  arcs across the back of 
a living critter  beyond scope at whose centre is yet birth and magic.

A Shared and divided Story ours to claim only if we
can  listen to a richer (too-rich for our low-fat age?) 
less integrated multi-tale. Begin to imagine lives before 
ours without pretending to master them. Welcome those
far-off parents who shared our (lack of ) custodianship for the earth, 
our imperfect love and insufficent hate for Being as we know it and
fail to know it.
Those far-off parents whose shared our desire for 
the bueaty of far-off stars.

  Ordinary folks and their extraodinary tales---
"which else would have been lost forever to the great Wind of Oblivion...
...how much shapely Expression, from the tittl'd Gambler,
the Barmaid's Suitor, the offended Fopling, the gratified Toss-Pot, is sadly
fading away upon the Air, out under the Door, into the Evening and
the Silence beyond. All those voices. Why not pluck a few words from
the multitudes rushing towards the Void of forgetfulness?"
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Thus PIPSter Jeremy Cranswick  on BBC radio 3
last week, remaining Newton and the RS in light of their, shall we
say, less conventional interests and intellectual contexts?
Eric Alan Weinstein
University of London
E.A.Weinstein at qmw.ac.uk