Several sick birds; one stone

[David L. Pelovitz]

On Thu, 11 Jul 1996 MASCARO at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU wrote:
> 
> o I was struck by Jester's VINELAND remark of a  couple days ago, to whit: 
> 															> In my opinion, there is almost TOO MUCH TV in the novel.  
> 
> I have been pondering this TV/VL thing for a while, frustrated specifically by those 
> parenthetical dates for every show mentioned.  Something feels out of whack w/ 
> them.  Even the parentheses seem loaded somehow, but I can't figure out what 
> disturbs me about them.  Are they like Slothrop's stars in some weird way?  
> Mapping out temporally something akin to Slothrop's spatial record of Certain 
> Strange Events With Many Dark Implications?  Has anybody looked at them 

I can't help but think that the television/film division is reinforcing
a larger analog/digital division in Pynchon's work.  After all, film is
digital, operating at 24 fps with absolute demarcations.  Videotape
is analog, just a continuous stream of information.  It's the films
that get dated in _Vineland_ - being digital once again by having
release dates.  But no dates on the television in the novel, cause
that's an analog continuum that may have an absolute starting
point, but the information stream just keeps going after that
as the pilot moves into series format.

David Pelovitz - dqp5805 at is4.nyu.edu