NPPF -- no need to relate to Pynchon....?

[The Great Quail]

My thoughts on a topic that keeps popping up....

With all due respect to Doug and SlothEnvyPride, I for one feel no
obligation to continually link Pale Fire to Pynchon during this reading.

There is a substantial number of people on this list who wish to read Pale
Fire. To believe that we have to labor to make arbitrary connections to
Pynchon in order to please a vocal minority is misguided. When functioning
well, this list supports some rather intelligent, witty, and creative
dialogue. As a literary community tied together by a shared love of Pynchon
-- and all the literary tastes he represents -- I think that a group reading
of Pale Fire gives us a chance to renew our vitality, to apply our amassed
intellect, crankiness, and imagination in a different but related field.
Policing the discussion so that all Pale Fire and Nabokov discussions
connect directly to Pynchon is a limitation that defuses any real freedom of
communication. It dampens the expression of ideas, and it does a disservice
to the people on the list. To engage in a literary discussion of this nature
-- well, that's part of the reason we all joined the List, magnetized by the
promise of Pynchon's prose. Obviously we all have some common passions for
literature; and those passions are restless, searching, and free: we are not
robots programmed to connect everything to Pynchon. In fact, I think the
last week or so of PF "preliminary" has been one of the better discussions
we've had in a while. (And again, thanks to Jasper for really getting the
ball rolling.)

So again, I ask you few dissenters, please stop wasting bandwidth by
insisting on the necessity for a VN/TP connection. For my own part, I find
it bitterly frustrating; it only deflates my enthusiasm for both the
discussion and the List in general. I invite you take part in the PF
discussion on its own merits, or allow us to continue without censure. If
this annoys you, you can always filter out posts beginning with NPPF.

Respectfully, 

--Quail