Who's crying? What's a lot? Why 49?

Taking a step back from the book a bit, the underlying current is one of trying to determine what is real, and what is not. Oedipa spends the entire course of the novel trying to figure out the Tristero are real. Which is why we have the entire title for the book; her necessity to try to determine the authenticty of the Tristero leads her to cry for lot 49, the stamp collection.

So again, taking a step back, what does this have to do with science? With feminism? With science, we spend our time trying to figure out what is real and what is not. We need tangible proof to determine authenticity. So often we forget that the belief that there is something whose existence we can prove is relaly what drives us, NOT necessarily the object itself. It is the pursuit, not the evidence, not the Truth, that really makes science what it is.

I think it's important to note that the protagonist is a woman. How many of the other characters are women? Exactly. The people who tote her along on this journey are all men. What does -that- say for the feminist perspective?

I had a similar reaction to the first half of the book as Flora, Rebecca and Sam. While I am actually really enjoying the book - I have found myself laughing out loud a few times and then smiling at the silliness of some of the scenes - the connection to science (gender has found its way in subtly) is still a bit over my head. I suppose that my problem is transitioning from Properties to 49. Whereas Properties literally hit me over the head with physics and philosophy, 49 seems quite distanced from the topic at hand. Perhaps I am looking too hard and need to be patient. 

I have picked up on some interesting themes of perspective and alternating lenses...but my desperation for something to connect to the class may have caused me to see something that actually is not there. So, needless to say i don't feel confident discussing my ideas yet until i have read some more. I hope that reading further will shed some light on these ideas and then i can share them with you all....or you know, with serendipity.
Odile

When I first started reading this book, I had some trouble figuring out what was going on, and what the point was. I haven't quite gotten through the entire novel (almost there), but I'm actually seeing a lot of connection to what we've been talking about. The famous line from the book is Oedipa's "Shall I project a world?" She is charged with weaving a story from the evidence Inverarity ("untruth") has left behind... She expresses throughout her fact finding endeavors that she's afraid her obsession is simply that and nothing more... Pynchon's pretty brilliant -- I know when I'm reading that there is a ton of stuff that I'm not catching on to - once I resolved to just plow through the fact that I didn't understand rather than try to interpret every line, I started to get more out of the story.

There's a lot I could say... so let me focus on a couple things. I think agency plays a huge role in this novel. On page 65, the narrator talks about Oedipa's "growing obsession, with 'bringing something of herself' - even if that something was just her presence - to the scatter of businsess interests that had survived Inverarity. She would give them order, she would create constellations." She would project a world. She's sees herself in her investigations -- she's not an objective eye. The same is true of Pynchon himself. As far as I know "Tragedy of Courier" is not an actual play -- he creates a fictional play within his own fiction (A true Shakespearean trick). He sees himself in his own writing. He also designs the story so that Oedipa is trying to gain some truth from this fictional play, which is fictional on two counts from our perspective as the reader. His layering is pretty awesome.

Then there is this whole business with the Demon sorting machine and entropy... and I have to say this was a little lost on me. It might make more sense as I continue to read. Oedipa is (for our purposes) a female researcher surrounded by mystery... she is trying to deduce truth from multiple evidence sources.... In the case of the Demon machine she is not " a sensitive" -- she is incapable of deriving information from this source (much like the physics preist metaphor).

Anyway these are some thoughts. I apologize for the disconnected nature of this entry -- it reflects my own thought process in deciphering this text!