$2.4 million for Kerouac scroll

[Doug Millison]

Swing:
"If he's really as smart as you think he'll burn them first."

I don't think P is that anal. If he's the money-grubbing capitalist 
as some of our P-list colleagues would have him (and if he's not) 
surely he's reading the news today and realizing once again that his 
manuscripts and notebooks and letters and other papers represent a 
substantial legacy for his children above and beyond rights to his 
published work.

Hammerswing:
"In P's religion, Life doesn't tell death to fuck off, that's just a 
paranoid way of looking at it, like magic spells."

What does it mean to tell death to fuck off, anyway?

We're bound to die. But, Pynchon reserves his severest critique for 
those techno-loving folk who would seek to deny the natural cycle of 
life-death-return, turn everything into lifeless, eternal plastic and 
toxic by-products.

He talks, in the Slow Learner intro I believe (my copy's packed 
away), about a writer's attitude towards death. "Fuck off" is an 
attitude.  "Let me be" is what it means, to me anyway, "let me focus 
on life while I'm alive." Death will come soon enough.

-- 
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