BEER Group Read. "How is this day different from any other day?

[Robin Landseadel]

Pynchon is always cognizant of Dating, seeing as that can be also  
considered a fourth dimension that needs to be mapped as much as the  
meridians of the globe. Dating is central to both CoL49 and BE.

Everybody's memory of an intrusion of another world into the one we  
used to know is going to be different. A point that TRP makes in this  
book is that the agreed upon narrative was fixed for most of the  
country by the Televisual version of the event, driving out the  
alternate narratives. This happened immediately, Pynchon couldn't help  
but notice. If you really lived it, if you were really there, of  
course your memories would be different. The fact that the story was  
"Settled" in the "Newspaper of Record" and Cable "News" so quickly is  
central to this novel,—kinda the point if you catch my drift.

On Oct 13, 2013, at 6:48 AM, Bekah wrote:

> But in BE I think fixing the date specifically in the first sentence  
> is vital to any "correct" reading because the availability of the   
> tech stuff and 9/11 are fixed dates historically.  I looked up a  
> whole lot of the techie stuff to see what was and/or what was not  
> available by late 2001.  (I didn't get so far as exact month.)  -   
> If P is going to fix a date like that he has to live up to it in the  
> rest of the novel - anachronisms are not acceptable.    As far as I  
> was able to find,  he got it all right.   This might be part of the  
> "peek into history" that classics (down the road 50 years)  often  
> provide.  On the downside, it's not quite history to many of us as  
> we read it  - we lived it and our memories differ.
>
> Bekah

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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l