another Pynchon mention

[Doug Millison]

Journal of Consciousness Studies:

William Irwin Thompson, Speculations on the City and the Evolution of 
Consciousness (Volume 7, No.7)

This article is available as a PDF download linked from the journal's 
home page at http://www.imprint.co.uk/jcs/, scroll down the page to 
the section with the header, Full Text of Selected Articles.

Thompson writes:

"Three novels that embody the distinct kairos of their chosen cities 
are Proust's A la
Recher che du Temps Perdu for Paris, John Dos Passos' Manhattan 
Transfer for New
York, and Thomas Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49 for Los Angeles. With 
Proust, perception, memory, and the nature of time are part of a 
concern that is part of a vast
Parisian thought-complex, one shared by Bergson, and the new media of 
photography
and film. With Dos Passos, the writer per forms self-consciously 
modernist fiction in
the narrative techniques of collage and quick cuts of simultaneity 
that focus on the
phase-space of the 'now' and pre figure the narrative techniques that 
have taken over
television story-telling, from Hill Street Blues to ER. With Pynchon, 
the chaotic
informational overload of the megalopolis generates a new landscape 
of fantasy-identity, conspiracy theories, and paranoid reintegration. 
Paranoia as a mad system of informational integration is a 
shadow-formation that paradoxically throws light upon the shift from 
post-industrial to informational society; it is a caricature of the 
cultural transition from the world metropolis to the planetary noetic 
pol ity in which the territorial nation-state dissolves in visions of 
globalist associations."


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