The implausibility of Maxine's "What" (p. 419)

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

But isn't "Where does it come from?" the most natural (and necessary!) 
question to ask here? And this information wasn't classified or 
anything. Well, "(i)f they get you asking the wrong questions, they 
don't have to worry about the answers" ...

On 10.07.2015 10:44, John Bailey wrote:
>
> I had no idea about DARPA then, in any form, really.
>
> On 10 Jul 2015 6:35 pm, "Kai Frederik Lorentzen" <lorentzen at hotmail.de 
> <mailto:lorentzen at hotmail.de>> wrote:
>
>
>     I understand that Pynchon wants to make Ernie's explanations more
>     interactive by giving Maxine a line to throw in but how could she
>     not know about DARPAnet and its function to enable communication
>     after a nuclear war? When the Internet went through the roof by
>     the mid 1990s every second media report on the issue had that
>     story in extended version. How could an intelligent and educated
>     person like Maxine have missed it? How could we imagine her not
>     being interested in the historical origin of such a game changer?
>     No, this is not plausible at all. Future editions should have,
>     instead of "What," something like "But Pop, that's so long ago,"
>     an argument Maxine ("The Cold War ended, right?", p. 420) is
>     trying to develop later in the conversation anyway. But the "What"
>     damages the whole character.
>
>     -
>     Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>

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