Back to the Future

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

          Paul Mackin:
          Let me ask this question.

          Other than name identification what 
          persuasive reason would author 
          Pynchon have for being so obsessed 
          by  the downfall of a Wall Street 
          brokerage firm  (who for all we know 
          might have been a bunch of cheating 
          scoundrels) that he would let it direct 
          his writing? It's not as if P's own family 
          fortunes had been compromised in 
          any way.  George M. Pynchon (head 
          of P and company) wasn't  a close 
          relative.  Does anyone know what kind 
          of cousin he actually was. Third, 
          Fourth, Fifth?
            At a certain point we're all related.

          Of course, nothing is inconceivable. 
          Joyce wasn't that closely related
          to Odysseus and Penelope either.

I suppose what I'm pointing to when I mention 'Pynchon & Company' has
two rather distinct meanings. One is the Wall Street firm that developed 
out of Raymond, Pynchon & Company. The other is the larger East-Coast 
'blue-blood' clan and their associates. I don't really know why
the author chooses the larger story of his family as the 'spine' of work.
And I don't really need to. All I really need to do is show just how many 
of these things we've been reading all these years reflect back on the 
author's genealogy. Because William and John and Edwin and George M. 
and another Thomas Ruggles, and another William and another John and 
a Susan---what they were doing way back lands in the author's books. 
Why? That's speculation. But it happened, those fingerprints are all over
the novels.

If I were to indulge in wild spectulation I'd look high, not low, and 
read the those Tarot cards for Whiteman. I'd be looking at the so 
called 'Intelligence' agencies and how they got established. But that 
would be speculation. William Slothrop's 'On Preterition' is not 
speculation. William Slothrop's 'On Preterition' is a parody version 
of William Pynchon's "The Meritorious Price of Christ's Redemption."

http://tinyurl.com/ynsgyw

Because 'The Meritorious Price of Christ's Redemption' is the first 
book banned and burned in Boston, somebody ought to find the 
subject interesting. If only for the alliteration. Alliteration is always 
a safe subject in Pynchonalia, eh? And comma counts, for Gawd's 
sake let's not look for content or political discourse in these satires, 
that'll just fubar traffic flow on the p-list. Hey, even if's it's kinda 
interesting that a book that's nominally about World War Two 
happens to pile on the references to Hollywood and film, or the 
next book's obsessed with Hollywood and film, no reason to ask 
if something in the Pynchon family history might have anything to 
do with the movies. My bad.