Brand names

[Gillies, Lindsay]

Teen Age Riot writes:
> I'd consider brand names one of
> the trademarks of Pynchon's prose, one more indication of his seemingly
> endless knowledge of, and obsession with, pop culture. Sure, lots of the
> products named in GR aren't familiar to me, but I'm assuming that they 
were
> household in the forties.  The GR Companion cleared up a lot of these for 
me.

thus Andrew Dinn:
|The most immediate one which springs to mind from GR is of course
|Shinola. And what about Thayers as in Thayers Slippery Elms? Vineland
|too has some brand names - Cheetos is foreground detail to a British
|ear. I don't recall Pynchon using many such names, even in
|Vineland. It's more his parodies of branding and advertising which
|stick e.g. Count Chocula, The Marquis de Sod, The Cucumber Lounge. Now
|what was the make of that petite little ladies saw with the
|mother-of-pearl inlay on the handle and guard?

"parodies of branding and advertising"...absolutely.  Just as the song 
lyrics suggest synaesthetic music in one's head, the obsession with 
propaganda in all its forms throughout GR I think stimulates us to recreate 
the consumer-bondage world we currently live in.  TRP may not mention many 
specific brands, but the entire apparatus of marketing, advertising, 
thought-control and secret messages is baroquely elaborated.  An example is 
the stunningly paced episode of the hard candies...Slothrop is dosed (market 
tested) again and again, we hear his stream of conciousness, this is market 
research, focus group, new product intro (to a foreign market), and satire 
of English modes of consumption among other things...and as Gore Vidal has 
pointed out, for example, English films the late thirties and early forties 
were nothing if not Allied advertising.

Loose lips,
Lindsay