Back to the books

[Ian Demsky]

I'm at work so I don't have time to flesh this out as much as I'd like,
but I do want to open up discussion if possible.

My last semester in college I worked on a Indepent Study Project on
Gravity's Rainbow and Transcendentalism (Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott,
etc.).  I found a similarity between Paranoia (looking for the hidden
connections) and Emerson's idea that reality was a tapestry... and we
could only see the backside of the tapestry, the threads and knots and
stitches that connect everything... and we look at the back of the
tapestry and imagine what the front (the truth) must look like...

I also think that Gravity's Rainbow encourages modes of reading that are
Transcendental, i.e. Paranoid.  The way the book it written it demands a
type of reading that I believe was demanded by the Transcendentalists: a
suspicous reading, where we are aware of the way the text is written (and
woven) as much as we are of the "story line".  Pynchon demands that
everything be examined, questioned, tasted... from the characters' names
to historical & literary references.  This program of "active" reading was
emphasized by the Transcendentalists in quite a few places (cf. Emerson's
"Self-Reliance" & "The American Scholar").  

I also believe that M&D picks up this theme and runs with it... but I
wan't to examine in more fully in GR before I try to go back through M&D
with an eye to it.

More on this soon...

4/16 of a toke over the line,

Tegwar00