V.V.3--McClintic McClintoc

[Dave Monroe]

... 'course, having been slapped around, presumably by parties of either
chirality, like a red-headed stepchild (and I'm a brunet[te]).  But
particularly responsive to that Benjaminian, utopian "nostalgia for the
future" identified in that James Berger paper ("Cultural Trauma and the
'Timeless Burst': Pynchon's Revision of Nostalgia in Vineland, again, @
http://www.rpg.net/quail/libyrinth/pynchon/papers_berger.html).

Have been, er, "theorizing" my own particular interests, obsessions,
even, and there's a "nostalgia for the future," or, more precisely,
"nostalgia for a future that never quite came to pass" on my part that
lends productions like Beethoven's Ninth, "Telstar" by The Tornadoes,
and the works of various neglected American (pre-WWII) and French
(postwar) abstract painters a certain poignancy for me.  Am reminded
here of William Gibson's "The Gernsback Continuum" (collected in Burning
Chrome) as well.

And I recall Doug (?) making reference to, posting a citation from, if
not this paper, something a la Walter Benjamin in re: the traumatic (and
there's something no doubt to be said about the pathological origins of
all those terms, sign, symptom, nostalgia, et al. ...) (re)marking of
the past (or, for that matter, the present) in those Pynchonian texts.
Very good ...