SLSL Intro "The Shallowness of My Understanding"

[Dave Monroe]

"But do not underestimate the shallowness of my
understanding.  For instance, I chose 37 degrees
Fahrenheit for an equilibrium point because 37 degrees
Celsius is the temperature of the human body.  Cute,
huh?" (SL, "Intro," p. 13)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0211&msg=72779&sort=date

>From an interview with William Gibson in Across the
Wounded Galaxies: Interviews with Contemporary
American Science Fiction Writers, ed. Larry McCaffery
(Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1990), pp. 130-50 ...

   WG: ... I always feel like one of the guys inside
those incredible dragons you see snaking through  the
crowds in Chinatown.  Sure, the dragon is very
brightly colored, but from the inside you know the
whole thing is pretty flimsy--just a bunch of old
newspapers and papier-mache and balsa struts. (p. 135)

   LM: The various ways you use the dance metaphor in
Neuromancer suggests a familiarity with the
interactions between Eastern mysticism and modern
physics.
   WG: I was aware that the image of the dance was
part of Eastern mysticism, but a more direct source
was John Shirley, who was living in the East Village
and wrote me a letter that described the thing about
proteins linking.  That's just another example of how
pathetically makeshift everything looks from inside
the papier-mache dragon.  It was the same thing with
the voodoo gods in Count Zero: a copy of National
Georgraphic was lying around that had an article about
Haitian voodoo in it. (p. 139)

A dozen-plus Pynchon mentions in the index, by the way ...

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