[Michael Bailey]

Kai Frederik Lorentzen wrote:
>
>  But if the dialogues in
> "JR" do please you, I have no problem with that. And if the list goes on and
> on and on and on to do 'group reads', I most certainly cannot stop that.
> This is a free list. It's just the Social Foo-Foo around 'group reads' which
> is turning me off profoundly.

I'm not real sensitive to that, so I'll take your word for it.
Seems to me like the management of an online persona is part of the
fun?  Some of the people get together physically even, although that's
beyond my means where I'm at, but I am up to a general indication of
friendliness once in awhile, and expressions of emotion about the
works, current events public and personal, etc - some perhaps
shareable in a way unique to this particular format.
As if the list were one's own personal Stencil.
Or somebody.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OcoDIrbMtY

>Not your fault, Erik, I know. And it's true
> that once a 'group read' has started, I now and then throw in a dime.
> Wouldn't be possible in this particular case, though. But hey, an
> US-sociologist predicted the death of mailing-lists already in 2007, yet the
> Pynchon-list still keeps on rocking, so maybe this kindergarten game called
> 'group read' has some "latent function" that escapes me in
> this very moment ...
>

eenhyeh, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, websites are all ok,
but for good non-commercial text-based asynchronous one-to-many
sequential online conversation with continuity and no
word-count-limits, none of them beats the list (imho)

seems reasonable that at least one of the things a Pynchon list would
do would be to consider each work and the actual components of each
work, in manageable-size bits and sequential format