Chabon on BE

[Michael Bailey]

On Oct 19, 2013 7:09 PM, "Monte Davis" <montedavis at verizon.net> wrote:
>
> Chabon is careless there. Ernie's capsule history is not *historically*
> baseless: yes, DARPA did fund some of the IT research leading to TCP/IP
and
> packet switching. And yes, the Cold War justification for that funding
*was*
> to develop a network technology that could "work around" servers knocked
out
> by enemy attack, so that government could keep communicating.
>

One of my other favorite authors, John Crowley, in _The Translator_
made the female protagonist's dad a darpa dude and evoked those times
wonderfully.

If we were gonna get crazy and do a non-p group read like we did a few yrs
back - I guess I finally thought of the one I'd suggest (-:

But getting back to BE, I sort of have a question about this deep web where
Deep Archer resides - does that correspond to anything nonfictional?  I
mean are we talking about using a browser to navigate to some bare IP
address known not to dns at all but only to the cognoscenti? Afaik there
were bbses, ftp and gopher, and then all of a sudden there was yahoo and
aol and urls but nowhere was there anything like deep archer which is
sophisticated, ambiguous - nothing like the games I'm aware of - plus it's
more and less than a game, possibly even a place that responds to users'
emotional and spiritual states of mind and even a place where a person can
be said to reside while accessing it.  Maybe a mmorpg or a Second Life type
environment?

A development of the angelic realms alluded to at the beginning of Vineland
and the amazing things computers - the ideal readers with the ideal
insomnia - can do with mere 1s and 0s by stringing enough of them together.

Also on a different note a compare/contrast between Maxine and March,
Maxine having the annointing (though somewhat revoked) to do a little
something about fraud while March is more a John the Baptist voice in the
wilderness - strictly speaking there's no real need to say they represent
stances that an author could take in depicting a social scene, but if a
choice like that is evident in BE, it seems to me Pynchon - whose Sistine
Chapel, Gravity's Rainbow, could be described as more March-like - is
aiming more at a Mona Lisa effect in bringing Maxine to the fore.
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