From: Jezzaroona
Category: Amis's Contemporaries
Date: 9/5/99
Time: 5:54:07 AM
Remote Name: 195.44.7.178
Eh oh!
i) From the *Norton Anthology of US lit.*: "Thomas Pynchon has managed to remain the the most private of contemporary American Writers...A few facts are known: born on Long Island, graduated from Cornell University (where he was a student of Vladimir Nabokov's)..."
ii.i)From Rachel Cusk's *The Temporary* (a scene where the heroine of the novel arrives at yet another new, and palpabaly grim, typing assignment): "She moved behind her desk and saw that it put her in view of the whole room. From beyond the plastic plain of the desktop, a chirping forest of computers appeared to monitor her movements with their single unblinking eyes. She wrestled for a moment with her faint-heartedness, knowing that if she cowered from this coporate ecology she would disable herself for survival within it, becoming victim to a new range of cruelties whose invisibility did not lessen her faith in their existence."
ii.ii) From *Vineland*: "And DL guessed that Moody'd known about it all along, too. The Captain would have kept him reminded. Men had ways. She'd been living her childhood in a swamp full of intrigue, where, below, invisible sleek things without names kept brushing past, barely felt sliding across her skin, everybody pretending that the surface was all there was."
iii) From *The Crying of Lot 49*: "She [Oedipa Maas] drove into San Narcisco on a Sunday, in a rented Impala." - Amis says he isn't familiar wih Pynchon, but doesn't one of his characters drive an Impala, in *Money* perhaps?
iv) Sorry to the Jim M! school of "anti-quote" posting - for my part, I'm trying to avoid raking over MA's ashes again and again, regurgitating the same "mad love" (as R'n'B stars say). But this style of "intertextual mapping" does beg the question: if we all did it, who'd be *saying* anything? Is this Jim M!'s point?