CoL49 group reading - a dreaded meta comment

[Joseph Tracy]

Surely a fair amount of fiction and humor starts that way, he could even have been wasted when it all began.. Shall I project…? 

> On Jun 21, 2024, at 11:02 PM, Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l