Not Pynchon related

[Terrance]

Muchasmasgracias at cs.com wrote:

> Again, gone from what?  I mean as bad as things are nowadays, haven't there
> been a lot of ugly and scary living conditions for humanity for a long long
> time?  Kinda 'nasty, brutish, and short'?  Although I guess there are many
> more people nowadays...  and there may have been a larger portion of humanity
> living under peaceful agrarian circumstances in the past....  whereas
> nowadays many of their progeny no longer farm or work or eat too much or feel
> so great about being alive...  But shit, I'm no anthropologist so how can I
> PROVE statements that?  I just got it all out of books and scattered
> photographs, what do I know?

The economic Kartel's control of the world economy has not
put children first. The abuse of children in Pynchon's
fiction is not so fantastic. The mall rats and tube addicts
in the States have nothing on the rest of the world. You
mentioned Blake. I don't know if you were serious, but
Blake's children are very much like Pynchon's--"locked up in
coffins of black, in chimneys, in war, abused by adults,
sold, but they have the lightness you mention: Blake's
chimney sweeper--"hush Tom never mind..." or Pynchon's
suffocating child in Morrison shelter--"Any gum, chum?" and
there are lost more, innocent and experienced.   In any
event, now I'll really get cynical, "the more dynamic it
seems to you, the more deep and dead, in reality it grows.
Look at the smokestacks, how they proliferate, fanning the
wastes of original waste over greater and greater masses of
city. Blake's London spreading over the continent, over the
earth. The proliferation of machines, is Not about life, its
about death and money. The smokestacks can generate Slothrop
money and money can generate money while humans cannot
generate. "It is the Night's Mad Carnival." The War needs
electricity. It's a lively game, humans are for work and war
and are subjected to a process of losing their individuality
and humanity for the Grid. 

Lightenup Byron, 



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