Jonathan Lethem + Janna Levin

[Simon Bryquer]

In view of their exchange may I suggest 'The Mystery of the Aleph' by Amir 
D. Aczel.  This book is subtitled: Mathematics, the Kabbalah, and the Search 
for Infinity.  In it Aczel follows the life of the mathematician Georg 
Cantor, very interesting man who went mad. I guess searching for Infinity 
via mathematics can do that.

Simon Bryquer


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dave Monroe" <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
To: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, November 09, 2008 2:52 PM
Subject: Jonathan Lethem + Janna Levin


> Jonathan Lethem + Janna Levin
> The novelist and the cosmologist meet up to talk about reality.
>
> by Edit Staff • Posted March 6, 2007 12:00 AM
>
>
> When theoretical cosmologist Janna Levin began writing A Madman Dreams
> of Turing Machines it was a work of non-fiction. But she realized, as
> her subjects Gödel and Turing had, that the tools of non-fiction—or
> those of scientific inquiry—were insufficient for discerning truth. As
> a novelist, Jonathan Lethem traffics regularly in different degrees of
> truth and is similarly fascinated with what constitutes reality.
> Recently the two met for lunch at the National Arts Club in New York
> to talk about this elusive concept—its guises, its enchantments, and
> how we know it when we see it.
>
> [...]
>
> Lethem: Well, one of the underrated aspects of novels per se, one of
> the forms of pleasure that we readers derive from reading fiction that
> is least discussed in traditional literary criticism, is factual
> material. People thrive on finding great chunks of information on how
> the world works in their fiction. One of the great secrets to the
> crime drama is that readers are almost always inadvertently thrilling
> to descriptions of how, for instance, a bank operates. These are the
> sorts of things that ordinary novelists feel that they're not allowed
> to talk about or get interested in—they're supposed to be concerned
> with the emotional or psychological lives of their characters and
> would never stop to tell you at what hour the teller counts her drawer
> and moves it to the back of the bank. And yet we're all hungry for
> those pieces of information about our world. We're nourished, without
> even noticing it, by this genre that's devoted to telling us quite a
> lot about them.
>
> http://seedmagazine.com/news/2007/03/jonathan_lethem_janna_levin.php
> http://seedmagazine.com/news/2007/03/seed_video_feature_jonathan_le.php
>
>