AtD - Anarchy vs Terror

[John BAILEY]

Me too, partly - and perhaps, at a stretch, the reader's skepticism ("of
course there was never *really* a hole in the antarctic pole!") a
literary refraction of contemporary denial about climate change, most
obviously the ozone hole of which people living around my neck of the
woods are all too immediately aware. 

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On
Behalf Of kelber at mindspring.com
Sent: Friday, 1 December 2006 1:28 PM
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: RE: AtD - Anarchy vs Terror

SPOILER, p.114-118










I took this description to be sort of a negative (photographically
speaking) image of what's actually happening in the modern world: the
shrinking of the polar icecaps due to global warming.

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: John BAILEY <JBAILEY at theage.com.au>

More interesting to me was the way
>P describes the polar entry points to the Telluric interior as freezing

>over, sealing up, and the interior itself as being a far darker, more 
>dismal place than it was in M&D. It's easy to infer that soon enough 
>those icecaps will be solid, and the interior will be inaccessible.
>
>It does a nice job of extending that M&D theme of modernity 
>rationalising away the possibility of magic, of wonder, of the 
>impossible. Which of course is something that runs through every one of

>P's novels.
>
>