CoL49 group reading - a dreaded meta comment

[Michael Bailey]

Well, I dunno if this is really meta, but -

It’s like the main McGuffin of the whole book could spring from like,
Pynchon walking around San Francisco and sees a garbage can labeled WASTE.

So he does a little humor experiment, like what if that was a secret
mailbox - and then that germinates in the fertile soil of the “meta” idea
that was going the intelligentsiary rounds as of 1964 with Susan Sontag’s
essay “Against Interpretation” -

Which I interpret (mangle) thusly:
That when you bundle up the meaning of a work or a war or a life into an
interpretation, it’s like a lossy compression algorithm…

You unavoidably throw out things - so the artist, eg, may be like a WASTE
courier picking them up and shunting them back into the community
communication system.