For Smoak--and those who still care about the Read. Remember, Pynchon has never stopped.

[ish mailian]

Ernie is both ridiculous and sympathetic. He can't quite get his head
around the fact that his daughters, though he grounded them for
watching cop shown on TV, ended up involved, intimately,
psychologically, economically, and so on...with cops. He wonders why?
What went wrong? Did they simply rebel against the old man? Was the TV
just too powerful. Was it in their DNA? In their Nature? Was it, a
little like Frenesi's attraction to Brock, a fatal feminine harmatia,
a Vness...what? Maybe this is just Pynchon's really bad idea about
women and love in the western world?  But Ernie, as ridiculous as he
is, and as much as we laugh at him for trying to understand and raise
his kids and his grand kids through media, is sympathetic. we like the
old Lefty. He's got healthy paranoid view of power and its abuses. But
quoting him as if he's a mouthpiece for Pynchon....well....it makes
Pynchon look stupid. Pynchon keeps his distance from Ernie and March.
Though sympathizes with some of their paranoid views of power, he also
satirizes their obsessions and their ridiculous ideas.

On Sat, Mar 31, 2018 at 4:36 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> Everybody is satirized in a Pynchon book. And everybody draws their own conclusions.  The list is dead, no one talks about the texts, no tolerance for group reads. The world of online communication is increasingly reduced to tweets. By 2035 the storms will be upon us if we  are lucky enough to have avoided the nuclear forecast of GR.
>
>
>
>
>> On Mar 31, 2018, at 2:30 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> IM> [Ernie's] satirized, as is his daughter, by the narrative
>>
>> This, emphatically. Only after Vineland did some readers wonder “maybe
>> Pynchon isn't, y'know, totally aligned with my nostalgia for les glorieuses
>> années 1960, championing the Counterforce 'n stuff."
>>
>> Only after M&D did some look back at the science and technologists in GR
>> and see along with the anger and warning (which are there) the attraction
>> and engagement (which were also there all along).
>>
>> On present trends, people will stop citing Ernie's speech as proof of P's
>> hatred and fear of the Internet about... oh, 2035?
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Mar 31, 2018 at 5:54 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Ernie is a fool.  He's right about the obvious,  about the history of
>>> the Internet and how we spend too much time on it,
>>> but his grasp of the world we actually
>>> live in is warped by his political obsessions, his nostalgically
>>> negative view of America.
>>> He's satirized, as is his daughter, by the narrative.
>>>
>>> He's Oedipa Mass, only older, not wiser.
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sat, Mar 24, 2018 at 3:49 PM, Thomas Eckhardt
>>> <thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de> wrote:
>>>> This discussion thread might be of interest to you:
>>>>
>>>> https://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=1310&msg=
>>> 177333&sort=thread
>>>>
>>>>> I'll end my sad rant
>>>>> with Ernie's words in BE (pg. 419):
>>>>>
>>>>> "You serious? Believe that while you still can, Sunshine. You know where
>>>>> it
>>>>> all comes from, this online paradise of yours? It started back during
>>> the
>>>>> Cold War, when think tanks were full of geniuses plotting nuclear
>>>>> scenarios. Attache cases and horn-rims, every appearance of scholarly
>>>>> sanity, going in to work everyday to imagine all the ways the world was
>>>>> going to end. Your internet, back then the Defense Department call
>>>>> DARPAnet, the real purpose was to assure survival of U.S. command and
>>>>> control after a nuclear exchange with the Soviets."
>>>>>
>>>>> BE (pg. 420 (he-he)):
>>>>>
>>>>> "Yep, and your Internet was their invention, this magical convenience
>>> that
>>>>> creeps now  like a smell through the smallest details of our lives, the
>>>>> shopping, the housework, the homework, the taxes, absorbing our energy,
>>>>> eating up our precious time. And there's no innocence. Anywhere. Never
>>>>> was.
>>>>> It was conceived in sin, the worst possible. As it kept growing, it
>>> never
>>>>> stopped carrying in its heart a bitter-cold death wish for the planet,
>>> and
>>>>> don't think anything has changed, kid."
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>> --
>>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>>
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>
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