Goofy Mustaches

[Terrance]

Malignd wrote:
> 
> It's Pynchon's citing only his foregone conclusion of
> social control in the Internet's future that struck me
> and others as cranky.

Is this Pynchon bashing? 

How does a fellow end up a captive forced to read Dickens? 
Well, if he's Dostoyevsky ... but isn't crankiness sort of a good thing
for an author to be if he/she wants to write satire? Maybe not. I like
cranky fiction. I think it's a blast. Cranky prose is another matter.
The Pynchon Foreword is not fiction, it's prose. 
Circumlocution and comfy pillows. There is another, sort of companion
short story to "Tyrant's Destroyed" by  Nabokov, "Cloud, Castle, Lake."
A fellow wins a pleasure trip at a charity ball. It was 1936 or 37, a 
cold and wet in Berlin summer and really didn't want to go on a trip,
but when he tried ticket at the Bureau of Pleasentrips he was told that
he would need special permission to do so from the Ministry of
Transportation. There is found that he needed to get a special petition
from a notary and also a "certificate of nonabscense from the city" from
the police. and so on ....

Wonderful stuff. Start talking about the Bush administration and all is
lost. Fiction is fairy tale and that is why we read it. No instructions
are included, no theoretical companion text is required. 

Goofy? Of course. I can't imagine a world without pleasant trips. can
you?