Shutting down New York

[Bandwraith at aol.com]

In a message dated 2/1/04 7:27:15 PM, lycidas2 at earthlink.net writes:

<< True. However, Pynchon's satire doesn't target the civil-rights movement
or the anti-war protesters. You were on to something when you were
looking at the females in this novel. That's where Pynchon's satire hits
its mark. Frenesi and DL are both the same age, both are born right
after W.W.II. Prairie is born in 1970. The novel is set in 1984. The
Japanese stuff doesn't demonstrate that Pynchon has been to Japan or
that he knows a lot about Japanese culture of films or TV, but that
Pynchon couldn't quite finish his novel about a Japanese Insurance Agent
and M&D at the same time and the Takeshi stuff  been dropped into the
middle of the novel and is set in 1978. The Takeshi stuff doesn't quite
make a banker's sandwitch, but it's still essential to the novel because
of the Karmic Adjustment business. >>

I think the whole novel, of course, is a not so stealthy attempt at
KA. The "worms of song" episode is a pretty good example of this.
For example, the assymetric scales of the tell-tale worms visiting 
the snout of Weed AND the halls of justice. Something was rotting, 
but rotting is a natural process. Long live the wormies!

The retro and anti-retrograde movement of Pluto mimic the nested
flashback of the plot itself. The embodied "consciousness" of the
day is being given a pynch-o-tron treatment in VL. If VL was hurried
into publication, which I don't necessarily believe, I think that it was
the monumental collapse of the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe,
and the fall of the Berlin Wall- weeks away from publication- which, 
more than anything, threatened to make a re-visitation to the 60's
irrelevant- not to mention the trouble brewing in the Persian Gulf.

But, what goes around comes around, and here we are considering
the possibility of some large scale protest activity washing over NYC
during the upcoming RNC- by the measure of postmodern attention 
spans light years away- just around the karmic corner.

Another day, same old dog...

respectfully