IVIV touch

[Doug Millison]

Gotta agree with Mark the K on the importance of these special, rare  
moments when characters touch in Pynchon's fiction, the skin interface  
seems an important one in his fiction.

I've known some hard-charging professional women in my lifetime, a  
high school classmate became assistant DA in a rural Arizona county,  
and I don't think Penny reduces easily to that single dimension.   
She's similar in some ways to Doc, enjoying her "hippie" kicks and not  
letting that get in the way of working her straight job as a cog in  
the big Justice wheel. The 1970s made it obvious, to me at least, that  
people could smoke pot and have long hair and listen to rock 'n' roll  
and otherwise look the part of a hippie and still be working for The  
Man.  That was the "Me Generation" after all, when people seemed to   
decide to forget all that political nonsense and focus instead on  
personal pleasure.