Thanks and

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Mark,

You really seem to have taken the reference to McTaggert on a very personal level.  Far from being accusatory here, I'm interested in why this is such an issue for you.  How did the reference in this anarchist context change your perceptions of McT?  I saw the passing reference to him as Yashmeen's dismissal of anarchism -- as maybe no more real than McT's concept of Time.

The whole Yashmeen, Cyprian and Reef in the Balkans sequence was the hardest part of the book for me, mostly because it's the most spiritual.  Frank in Mexico, peyote visions or not, is material and pragmatic:
"If I shoot Person X, Y will result."  Reading the Balkans section (both first and second times around) made me anxious, because I suspected the whole thing was a metaphor to complex mathematics beyond my understanding.  Math, in this case, being Yashmeen's religion, and a highly spiritual undertaking.  ANd we're heading into Cyprian's spiritual conversion.  Between spirituality, math and math-as-spirituality, this is very tough going.

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
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>   
>  major parts of this book make one rethink one's initial feelings when one has a 'revision' of original perceptions. Here, that was mcTaggart for me...whom I saw thru establishment eyes
>  and now think was stupid about therefore....Pynchon sees him differently (in AtD), I now think....
>   
>  So, maybe I need to revise some other attitudes to the maths section, the math characters.
>  Relearning that McTaggart was a kind of Hegelian, I remember this:"that most of Hegel's arguments come down to puns on the word 'is.'"-----which certainly applies to McT's notions of time...and was uttered by "Mad Dog" Russell, whom I thought was thoruoghly dissed by
>  OBA.......still thinkin'
>   
>  O well, next read, best read.
>   
>  And given the "revolutionary" section you hosted, I stumbled upon this by Trotsky, we all remember him, who according to Andre Breton co-authored the Surrealist Mnifesto with him---and, of course, surrealism was a mind-chaging discovery by OBA, he wrote in 'Slow Learner":  
>   
>  Trotsky:  "f the revolution in the interests of developing material production is obliged to set up a centralized, socialist system, so must it at the same time, and from the very first, establish and assure an anarchistic regime of intellectual freedom".....
>   
>   
>   
>   
>  , 
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>