AtD (37) p.1050[+ 409], Paranoia runs deep....more musings prob. for nought

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

Well, not to get too hoit-toity and all that, but seriously—read Proust.
Get the Linda Davis translation of "Swann's Way." We all have become 
accustomed to Pynchon's supersized sentences but the all time master 
is Marcel Proust. Which reminds me, not having read any Henry James,
which of his books would be most on-point [mimiced, parodied]
in OBA's writing?

At the same time, note just how much the present, the theoretical "Now" 
that we are collectively undermining here out on the far western frontier
of the web, is folded into Against the Day, how much Pynchon relies on
audacious fraud in order to set up truly awful puns, like Webb Traverse 
[what we are doing right now]. It reminds me of Genghis Cohen's Philatelic 
freakout in CoL49:

          Cohen smiled, blew his nose. "You'd be amazed how much 
          you can sell an honest forgery for. Some collectors specialize 
          in them. The question is, who did these? They're atrocious." 
          He flipped the stamp over and with the tip of the tweezers 
          showed her. The picture had a Pony Express rider galloping 
          out of a western fort. From shrubbery over on the right-hand 
          side and possibly in the direction the rider would be heading, 
          protruded a single, painstakingly engraved, black feather. 
          "Why put in a deliberate mistake?" he asked, ignoring—if he 
          saw it—the look on her face. "I've come up so far with eight in 
          all. Each one has an error like this, laboriously worked into 
          the design, like a taunt. There's even a transposition—U. S. 
          Potsage, of all things." 

Pynchon's melodramatic set-up—someone back there cited 
D. W. Griffith's "Intolerance"—allows for multiple happy endings
and there's plenty of cliffhangers [it all goes along with TRP's 
penchant for chase scenes]. Iceland Spar—rotate the crystal, see 
different layers of time including the ones you didn't enter this time 
around, look to your left: there's a death you'll miss this time around, 
there's countless others but you're far too distracted to die just yet—
not all the time going on right now is contained in all the time that is 
potentially available once we work out all the kinks:

      . . . .Up and down the steeply-pitched sides of a ravine lay the 
      picked-over hulks of failed time machines—Chronoclipses, 
      Asimov Transeculars, Tempomorph Q-88s—broken, defective, 
      scorched by catastrophic flares of misrouted energy, corroded 
      often beyond recognition by unintended immersion in the terrible 
      Flow over which they had been designed and built, so hopefully, 
      to prevail. . . .A strewn field of conjecture, superstition, blind faith, 
      and bad engineering, expressed in sheet-aluminum, vulcanite, 
      Heusler's alloy, bonzoline, electrum, lignum vitae, platinoid. 
      magnallium and packfong silver, much of it stripped away by 
      scavengers over the years. Where was the safe harbor in Time 
      their pilots might have found, so allowing their craft to avoid such 
      ignominious fates?
      AtD page 409.

           Mark Kohut:
          Is TRP, in the Remembrance of Things Past strain that 
          has been seen in AtD, offering a vision of a non-
          deterministic Time Past, metaphorically?

          Remembrance of a Bilocal Past?, so to speak?...

           In GR as remembered by some below nothing can 
          change, and more than once in AtD we have heard---
          'we can't go back the way we came"-----yet in part of 
          this working metaphor, change IS possible????

          Paul Mackin:
          A remembrance or recordation of what MIGHT have happened.

          Or even sorta  happened.

          Might we want to think that there is a completely different reality 
          out there AN EIGHTH OF WHICH HAPPENED?

          Admit that the current reality is only 87.5  percent true.

          Apply quantum level thinking to our macro world.

          So what does it mean that we are only PROBABLY here talking to each 
          other.

          Does Pynchon know?

          Does he expect us to figure it out?

          P.

"Maybe, possibly, perhaps . . . .

Do You Know What THIS Is?????"

". . . .why yes, that's a b-b-b-rown paper bag"

"Verrrry good, now I Think you're ready for—THIS ! ! ! [organ stab.]