Out of left field

[Michael Bailey]

This isn't an attempt at critical analysis, but just a little riff out
of left field

On page 300 of Vineland, Brock is negotiating with Zoyd:
"Somewhere down the road from this federal facility,  carried by the
midnight wind from a bikers' bar called Knucklehead Jack's, came live,
loud rock and roll, ever-breaking waves of notes in squealing
screaming guitar solos that defied any number of rules, that also
lifted the blood and reassured the soul..."

It struck me a few weeks ago, when I was looking through that book
again, that could be construed as a tribute to the fiction of John
Barth

and that got me thinking on that whole literary allusion trip; they
say classical Chinese literature is so fraught with allusions to other
classical Chinese literature as to be labyrinthine and hard to
learn...
but that wasn't my point so much as how maybe you could map characters
in IJ, or GR, say, to other authors -
well, maybe that wasn't really my point either, but I did read an
article in Popular Science recently where a stellar scientist had all
Barth's books in his library
and we were talking about hommages to TRP in DFW
so FWIW...