more Re: pynchon-l-digest V2 #1446

[Paul Mackin]

On Fri, 29 Sep 2000, Mark Wright AIA wrote:

> Millions? Have there been as many as that? How come I have still,
> *still*, only ever met one single female human being who has ever
> finished GR outside of an academic context? (And she's a peach, let me
> tell you...) I think that P's sales are consistent because of folks
> like you and me who buy copy after copy and give them away to people we
> hope will read them but don't.  And in the context of a wild-ass
> fiction like GR people don't so much "learn...ugly truths" as toy with
> the possibilities -- tingle with joy at the very idea of our cozy
> corporate "evil" loose in the world and rubbing shoulders with the real
> article -- indeed, we are "dizzy with it's grandeur". 

I like the way Mark puts it. Wild-assed fiction can open the
minds of youth to the existence of "ugly truths" (or beaultiful ones)
but youth would be ill-advised to take fictional reality, even if informed
by or inspired by actual reality, to be the truth itself.  Not to put too
much hope in ever finding the "truth"  but it seems to me a person who, to
an excessive degree, filters what he hears or reads on a topic through his
necessarily individual interpretation of a work of fiction is asking for
trouble.

			P.