"He thinks he's hallucinating"

[alice wellintown]

P wants the American TV  talk and he needs the punctuation to get it.

On page 3, "How much of the rent's he been picking up?"

If he drops the punctuation, something is gained, perhaps the
ambiguity you seek, but something is lost too. He uses the marks to
tell us how to read the text.  There is no ambiguity there. She talks
and he listens and reposnds.

Why does she talk to the gods? or the third party not in the room? She
doesn't. She is talking to Doc. Grover talks to the walls when he
fights with old man about German Politics. Oedipa talks to the TV-God.

But Shasta, here, is talking to Doc.

Are they on a TV set? Does the frame of the window light make a Tube?
No. Is this GR? A deconditioning of the reader? No.

Itz just Pynchon trying to do what Robin thinks is so great about this
novel, write dialogue. I think itz crap.

Pynchon works better at a distance. His Mondaugans are his best stuff.
IV has some corn in it, but it sinks to the bottom of the bowl.


>> Do people talk like Shasta? Do people, when engaged in a conversation
>> with only one other person, say, "Thinks he's hallucinating"? Oh,
>> sure they do.
>
> right, and what does that say about our society?
> that within an affectionate relationship one of the parties addresses
> an imaginary personage - who is it supposed to be?  how comes such a
> custom to be?  Is there a specific free-floating incarnation of common
> sense, tantamount to a spiritual presence, available for address?
>
> Having volubly called into question many practices in the course of
> his fiction, the author may have primed the pump or jump started a
> process of questioning of
> phenomena both on and off the page
>
> The consensus reality that Shasta appeals to, is that not tantamount
> to a wire or puppet string which to some extent Doc has chosen to live
> free of?
>