Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2003 13:50:43 +0000 (UTC) From: anonymous <tlewis-AT-sdf.lonestar.org> Subject: Re: Who is thomas pynchon and what is he doing with my life? > > > > Pynchon, alas, will probably never write another work equal to it in > > scope. (I still wonder if the rumors are true that Salinger is > > writing all this great stuff, which will only be released once he > > dies. There are also rumors that Salinger and Pynchon are the same > > person, perhaps like anon and Paul.) > > While it's true that Pynchon will probably never equal GR, Vineland has its moments. At the risk of overdoing this hypertext work in progress: "The sensei ran DL all over the map on incomprehensible, some would some would say pointless, fool errands. He blindfolded her with tape and dark glasses and took her on the Yamanote Line, riding around for hours switching subways, at last unsealing her eyes, and leaving her well lost, with instructions to get back to his house before nightfall, using only the stone. He gave her messages she didn't understand to take to people she didn't know, at addresses harshly drilled in, that would turn out either not to exist or to be something else, like a pachinko parlor.... Takeshi had in fact tried to entertain this upbeat scenario, though it hadn't entertained him much because he couldn't help seeing how wishful it was. What if, wild and unreasonable hope, he'd only been putting her on all this time, and this was her eccentric, even weird idea of flirting with him? Most of the time he couldn't believe she'd really Done It to him, because even this long way down the line he still had trouble believing in his own death. If she'd killed him, why stick around? If she hadn't, why put him, a complete stranger through all this? It was driving him toward what, in fairly close to it now, he could detect as some state of literally mindless joy. There was no way he knew of to experience such joy and at the same time keep his mind. He wasn't sure this wasn't her real mission - to make of his life a koan, or unsolvable Zen puzzle, that would send him purring into transcendance."
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