GRGR: Pynchon's urban architecture

[jbor]

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millison:

snip
> And isn't it in 
> COL49 where he or his narrators compare a city to an integrated
> circuit design?

There's that early image too, Oedipa approaching LA:

   ... Oedipa resolved to pull in at the next motel she saw, however ugly,
   stillness and four walls having at some point become preferable to this
   illusion of speed, freedom, wind in your hair, unreeling landscape -- it
   wasn't. What the road really was, she fancied, was this hypodermic
   needle, inserted somewhere ahead into the vein of a freeway, a vein
   nourishing the mainliner LA, keeping it happy, coherent, protected from
   pain, or whatever passes, with a city, for pain. But were Oedipa some
   single melted crystal of urban horse, LA, really, would be no less
   turned on for her absence.  (16)

Quite brutal.