It might seem a bit excessive to have the Omega’s harmless little initiation brought to a close by the noisy appearance of an FBI tactical team. – amusing mock violence of a fraternity replaced with the terrifying real violence of the state.   But I guess that’s a reflection of the Gnosis College world.  I mean, after all, I grew up during the Cold War and am now living through something called the War on Terror, and what is more I grew up reading the likes of Thomas Pynchon and Joseph Heller, so I suppose that paranoid melodrama would almost of necessity be my most natural literary mode.  You might be seeing a lot of it in Gnosis College tales to come…

Gravity’s Rainbow probably should have been in my manifesto, as it happens.  I read it for the first time at seventeen and I must say it likely made a lot of difference in the evolution of my cheerfully warped mentality.  Not only is it a touchstone of paranoid melodrama, to say nothing of my sense that history is a vehicle driven by technological progress and steered by bureaucratic incompetence, but it’s a splendid touchstone for the aspiring thaumatophile.  There are any number of mad scientists, beginning with the behaviorist Dr. Laszlo Jampf, a central character whose orgasms are somehow connected with the strikes of V-2 rockets on London, and of course, a long series of dirty limericks about men who have sex with various rocket parts.  A rare example of a work of fiction that deserves its high reputation.

But is my writing here just paranoia?  As journalist Radley Balko would doubtless be eager to point out at this juncture, there does seem to be rather a lot of abusive use of police tactical teams on no-knock raids these days.  So maybe I’m being a little bit more realistic than I know.