Maneuvers such as the Horizontal Fold, the Topiary Cut, the Unfurling Poster, and so forth
First of all, not only have I read the text in question, but I was dead serious. The future perfect isn't about what will happen, but what will have already happened: much more of a dead looming weight than the mere future, or, for that matter, any of the past tenses. It doesn't seem wrong at all to say that Against the Day is concerned with that ineluctability, and I would go so far as to lay it down as a general rule, that every novel in which there's an element of time travel is concerned as a matter of tense not with the future, but the future perfect.
Second: at a cafe near my house lives a table set out with the usual stuff—sugar, cream, stirrers, and the rest—as well as butter and what seems to be some sort of drupy jam, to deck out the bread which they also purvey—but also with a bowl of gherkins, each neatly sliced in half. For what? Savory things from the kitchen come with garnishes and whatnot already supplied, they charge for other salty things such as dishes of olives, and there can't be many people who think that what would really complement their coffee would be half a tiny pickle. Other than me, anyway: I adore gherkins, counting them an excellent example of the class of foods which, despite being vaguely disgusting, are simultaneously delicious and impossible to stop eating. I fear, though, that if I were to walk over and take ten or fifteen at a go, the people working there would be displeased, and I want them to think well of me.
Third: Parts & Labor really suck.
Comments
on 2007-07-12 19:18:31.0, Po-Mo Polymath commented:
Aw man, first Sifu Tweety and now you? What is it that people hate so much about Parts & Labor?
and, further, on 2007-07-12 19:21:37.0, ben wolfson commented:
I can't speak for ST, but I don't like their suckiness.
and, further, on 2007-07-12 19:47:26.0, Po-Mo Polymath commented:
I suppose that, in the least helpful way possible, that is an inarguable statement.
and, further, on 2007-07-12 19:53:07.0, ben wolfson commented:
I don't know if it's possible to be more helpful. If you're not already inside the valuational system according to which Parts & Labor suck, there's simply no helping you: you were raised wrong and that's that, you sensible knave, you.
and, further, on 2007-07-14 4:13:22.0, The Modesto Kid commented:
Fatalism has been a strong thread in Pynchon's writing -- well at least in the three books with which I'm most familiar, GR, Vineland, ATD (this last because I read it so recently, the other two because I read them so repeatedly). It is clear -- and may well be stated explicitly -- that part of the paranoid world view is disbelief that one's choices will have any effect on one's outcomes.