Pynchon sighting

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

From: "Still Crazy After All These Years"
The New York Times
14 January 1990
By Salman Rushdie
  
         . . . .Other things, too, have remained constant in the 
     Pynchonian universe, where these are days of miracle and 
     wonder, like ''Doonesbury'' written by Duke instead of 
     Garry Trudeau, and the paranoia runs high because behind 
     the heavy scenes and bad trips and Karmic Adjustments 
     move the shadowy invisible forces, the true Masters of the 
     Universe, 

           ''the unrelenting forces that leaned ever after . . . into Time's 
           wind, impassive in pursuit, usually gaining, the faceless 
           predators . . . [who] had simply persisted, stone-humorless, 
           beyond cause and effect, rejecting all attempts to 
           bargain or accommodate, following through pools of night 
           where nothing else moved wrongs forgotten by all but the 
           direly possessed, continuing as a body to refuse to be  
           bought off for any but the full price, which they had 
          never named.''

               That's what we're up against, folks, and what Mr. Pynchon 
     used to set against it in the old days was entropy, seen as a slow, 
     debauched, never-ending party, a perpetual coming-down, 
     shapeless and meaningless and therefore unshaped and 
     uncontrolled: freedom is chaos, he told us, but so is destruction, 
     and that's  the high wire, walk it if you can. And now here we are
      in ''Vineland,'' and the entropy's still flowing, but there's something 
     new to report, some faint possibility of redemption, some fleeting 
     hints of happiness and grace. Thomas Pynchon, like Paul Simon's 
     girl in New York City, who calls herself the Human Trampoline, is 
     bouncing into Graceland. . . .

Grace is the difference between pre- and post-GR Pynchon.