ATDDTA (3): Control issues, Chums, They

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

It's not that I think that your take is an attack on my own values, 
it's that I'm constantly encountering readings of Pynchon that 
paint him into a neat little box called 'Postmodernism', and 
I don't think his work fits all that neatly into the Postmodern box. 
As far as I can tell, Pynchon has always taken sides. The whole 
"Keep Cool but care" stance has a lot more to do with providing the 
finer points of how to survive as a rebel---a freak, using language 
that the author just might identify with hisself---how to continue to 
"kick against the pricks" while reducing the chances of getting 
caught by "the man", than it has to do with calling these various 
movements "failures", or pointing out specific faliures of the left.
I don't think the author considers leftest activism as a failure but 
as a constant, necessary, struggle. Again, a place: " . . . .where 
any wish that can be made is at least addressed, if not always 
granted. . . ." doesn't sound like cloud-cuckoo-land to me, it
sounds like addressing the day to day concerns of a community that
has a genuine commitment to realizing the potential of a true democracy. 
And addressing every wish that can be made is hard work, not 
some sort of easy answer but an enlargement, a greater 
encompassing of addressing  real, personal concerns that need 
to be dealt with within one's community.I think that's what the 
man has  been talking about all along, and frankly I'm sure the 
author feels like Byron the Lightbulb most of the time: It hardly
matters that Byron knows how to turn the system around, no one's
listening anyway. Folks start asking the wrong questions, doesn't 
matter what sort of answers you come up with anyway.

Monte Davis:
I'm sorry you take questions about what a book "espouses" as an attack on
your own values. That was not what I intended at all.

Me, I think "Pynchon brings to life tough questions that may not have
answers" is more interesting in the long run than "Pynchon validates what I
believe," but... whatever.