V.V.3--McClintic McClintoc

[Dave Monroe]

Not so sure we understand each other here, Terrance.   "Left-handed
compliment"? Certainly not intentionally, though, of course---and this
is a point I've at least attempted to make here, elsewhere,
often--authorial intentions do not necessarily guarantee their
reception, cannot enforce meaning.  Am I on the receiving end of a
right-handed insult here?  Not entirely sure, but that paranoia ... but
I THINK we agree on much of importance, or, at any rate, to a great
extent on what might prove to be important.  Religion, politics,
relativism (and a critique thereof), and so forth ...

That Berger paper you hyperlinked, @

http://www.rpg.net/quail/libyrinth/pynchon/papers_berger.html

(and thanks again, Great Indeed Quail!), I agree, nostalgias, not
Nostalgia.  Though I don't know that I'd necessarily suggested that
putative (on my part, but it does seem suggested not only by the
"Luddite?" essay, but by V. as well) Pynchonian nostalgia for the
precybernetic is a Bad Thing.  But I do think Pynchon, those Pynchonian
texts, quite reasonably, quite rightly, quite responsibly, display a
certain ambivalence toward, problematization of, that nexus of binaries,
animate/inanimate,  organic/inorganic, human/inhuman, which aren't all
QUITE the same thing, which aren't all QUITE--and I think this is
Important--life/death (and, again, think Wiener, Schroedinger, maybe
even Heidegger, might have written underappreciated intertexts here) ...

Though we are all Borg nonetheless, certainly here, certainly
everywhere, always already technologized.  Me, I wouldn't be doing even
what little reading I can were it not for my (owlish, even) glasses,
but, think, language, memory, even (mnemotechnics, e.g., Frances Yates,
The Art of Memory [q.v.], but also that ineviatable tropology of storage
and retrieval, or writing and reading, as noted by, say, Jacques Derrida
in Disseminations, "impressions," the tabula rasa, the mystic writing
pad, and so forth), as technology, technique, technic, techne.  That
fine, flickering line ... but there should indeed prove a difference
(...) betwixt Pynchonian deconstruction and the deconstruction of
Pynchonian texts, so ... again, I envy those who have the time to do
this properly, is all ...