ATDDTA (3) Aether Dreams, 57-58

[Ya Sam]

Great posts, Tore and Monte!

Of course the conspicuous absences are the hallmark of Pynchon's poetics. He 
makes very much present what few of his readers knew about (I knew zilch 
about the Herrero genocide and Remedious Varo before I read V and Lot 49) at 
the same time thwarting our expectations by not focusing on the things we 
feel SHOULD be there. There is just a passing reference to Hilbert and Sofia 
Kovalevskaya, and how many of us rushed to read about these mathematicians 
after the German culture minister's interview? Einstein, of course, is 
another case in hand. We don't get much on what we perceive to be the 
contemporary 'mainstream' science, whereas many pages are dedicated to 
aether and quaternions, the marginal and the underdog from today's 
viewpoint.

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