[Michael Bailey]

Joseph Tracy  wrote:

>Ugh. I wish I could strike that last sentence.

that's how I feel about my Krishna thoughts...

back to the text:
171 - "checking the edges of the frame for lines of withdrawal and
additional Thanatoids"
- what frame?  It's almost as if he's doing a storyboard for a movie
or even a comic book (or graphic novel)

174 - "In traditional karmic adjustment...sometimes it had taken
centuries.  Death was the driving  pulse - everything had moved as
slowly as the cycles of birth and death, but this proved to be too
slow or enough people to begin, eventually, to provide a market
niche."

How about karmic adjustment as what Pynchon does: storytelling at a
pitch heightened to near-religious intensity (in a way they are the
same, except that storytelling admits it is made up - well, actually -
does it? perhaps not all that insistently, although frame tales and
auctorial interpolations are partial admissions), thus leading to
Takeshi as a possible stand-in for Pynchon inside the story?  Thus in
ancient times a great tale might depict history and adjust individual
viewpoints w/r/t "official versions" adequately for a lot longer...but
there wasn't any real money in it and the practitioners had to either
seek patronage as a skald or scold in somebody's court or if they
really were into it, starting a religion...but as a former insurance
adjustor - Takeshi's "experience...and...immunity" were shaped by that
career which dealt in hedging financial bets and the consequences when
grand plans either went awry or affected bystanders without completely
eliminating them (or their heirs and assigns)...

sorry, can't concisely (or even windily) verbalize what I'm trying to
think about karmic adjustment
as related to the craft of fiction, religion viewed as fiction (not
dismissively, but respectfully), and so forth

--
"...some rib joint, huh?" - Takeshi Fumimota