Very Half-Totally Wrong, imho.

[Monte Davis]

Ian Livingston SEZ:

> ...what we really find is our own views projected into the work.

Ya think?

>From the introduction to Slow Learner, on "sources" -- his scare quotes --
for the Egyptian episode in V: "Loot the Baedeker I did, all the details of
a time and place I had never been to, right down to the names of the
diplomatic corps. Who’d make up a name like Khevenhüller-Metsch? Lest others
become as enchanted as I was AND HAVE CONTINUED TO BE [emphasis mine] with
this technique, let me point out that it is a lousy way to go about writing
a story."

I'm ambivalent about this, because he's REALLY good at selecting and
deploying the details that make me think he's nailed that place and time: my
father, who'd been in England in 1942-43, found no false notes in the
look-and-feel passages I read him from GR. It's a trick, it's sleight of
hand, but he's better by far at it than many historical novelists for whom
it's their main stock in trade.

Think of his technology, science and math (and history of TS&M) in much the
same way. Pynchon is more interested in the manifold interpretations and
implications of "entropy" that Henry Adams and a thousand other
non-physicists came up with than in the quantity defined by Clausius,
Boltzmann and Gibbs. Ditto for relativity and spacetime, as I wrote during
AtDDTA. (And BTW, Robin, not one in a thousand practitioners of CGI knows
jack about quaternions per se -- while there is a continuity of concept, the
formalism and terminology have morphed greatly.)   

W/r/t the crisis in mathematics, I agree with Ray that P has nothing
substantive to say about it. But that's not a problem for me, because I
think he's talking about what the larger culture made of *the idea that math
could HAVE a 'crisis'* -- that the "pros" were no longer as sure about basic
notions of number, continuity, commensurability etc. as we had been led to
believe in elementary school.

-Monte