VLVL2: Preliminary- Canis Major, the epigraph

[Bandwraith at aol.com]

Runnin' with the big dogs now...

[What was the name of that African tribe that somehow
figured out that Sirius was actually a double star without
aid of enlightened european lensmen?]

What I'm actually wondering is whether that second Fido 
(canis minor) alluded to in said epigraph might not have 
been a little authorial aknowledgement of the nostalgia we 
were all feeling for Canis Major (GR)?  After eighteen years, 
by the time VL finally came out, didn't we have the right to 
feel a little nostalgic for GR? 

Vhat vere ve ekshpecting? Salivating for, even!

(All the while, of course, P had M&D- and the L.E.D- waiting in the wings.
That dog!)

See here:

    For a literary standard by which we can measure Pynchon 
    in this book we must turn to Nabokov, the master of fictional 
    chess, magus of Anti-Terra, mirror world to our own, the 
    realist-surrealist of fabulous skills. The operative emotion
    in Nabokov's work is nostalgia, a melting sentimental remembrance 
    of Russian things past, which is converted into the total 
    intellectual possession of a compensatory (and grander) verbal 
    world, combining past, present and future, ruled by its only 
    creator, the omnipotent author. (In its more grandiose and
    querulous manifestations, such as "Ada" and the recent gray 
    conceit "Transparent Things," Nabokov's self-preservative 
    and self- celebrating elaborations are repellently narcissistic.)

(From Locke's NYT Book Review of GR-)

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-rainbow.html

It's their different reactions to nostalgia, after all, that seems 
to be one of the more interesting lines of comparison between  
P &N.

respectfully