PYNCHON IN PULSE

[Hartwin Alfred Gebhardt]

Steely writes:

> That the Lotion interview wasn't even up to Esquire's pathetic standards,
> that it is yet one more piece of evidence that TRP is continuing the long
> slide toward premature senility (or, perhaps, perpetual DTs) first
> manifested in the Tinasky letters,then reprised, full-blown, in the
> embarrassingly bad Vineland, the trivial NYT's piece on sloth (from a real
> expert, it appears), the incoherent review of Garcia Marquez's haunting
[...]

I'll have to find the piece on sloth (I'm also a real expert). I've 
been doing a little research on Vineland recently, and I've now 
decided that it is even better than I thought at first. Sort of a 
GR/COL49 cross, with TV* taking the role of the V2 (and the sixties 
being Their WW2-like phase shift) and Prairie taking the reader on an 
Oedipa(l) journey of discovery. I find Vineland's surface wholly 
appropriate for a readership TRP seems to think as caught in chronic 
adolescence - on that one level it is just as good as GR.

hg
* PS. Did someone already mention that we could then think of the 
three long novels as V, V2 and TV (and COL49 as V-and-a-half, or 
V(alium), maybe ....)
hag at iafrica.com