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[Andrew Dinn]

LBernier at tribune.com writes:

[re Vineland as essentially American]

> You snob! ;-)  No, seriously, the point about Vineland being very American 
> is a good one, but should this limit its audience?  Why is this less 
> "credible?"  I don't believe that it is necessary to "adopt a comparative 
> stance" in order to write about the American experience.  Deep and 
> meaningful != European.  A-and I would argue that Pynchon in GR is 
> critiquing Europe from a stateside point of view, not the other way around. 
>  You've got the Yossarian-like image of the American serviceman fornicating 
> away with less sexually repressed Euro-babes seduced by chewing gum and 
> stockings.   Not to mention the association of European culture with 
> decadence and death.

I wasn't being (very) snobby, which is why I put `credible' in rabbit
ears. The charge of snobbery may well be appropriate against those who
rejected Vineland early on, although I'd be more generous and look on
it as an outgrowth of disappointed expectations.

The question of which culture is being critiqued in GR is a real
interesting one. I always saw it your way for a long time but on
reading N I began to rethink and I think America is a much bigger
concern than Europe. Same goes for Catch-22, in spades, while we are
on the subject.

[re Indians, thanatoids and Godzilla]

> Maybe I'm oversimplifying, but I didn't find any of this really 
> mysterious, again, maybe because of my Murrican sensibilities, but all 
> of these are fairly obvious to me,  i.e,  Thanatoids = tv zombies = 
> Thalidomide babies, the Japanese stuff = guilt for incarceration + 
> basic fascination with Japanese economy + complicated Japan-American 
> relations + Saturday morning CREATURE FEATURE (bad horror movies shown 
> sat. mornings) etc.  Brock into hell?  mmm, that's one's tougher - 
> Nixon, maybe?  In other words, it's pop-culture out the wazoo!

Well, I don't think it's so simple. For example, I cannot help seeing
some sort of Persephone myth in the triangle between Brock, Frenesi
and Prairie. And that might explain why Brock in his chariot gets
dragged down to hell at the end (and the menacing threat of return).
But it doesn't really add up. And the thanatoids are not just TV
zombies. Weed Atman (favourite TRP name of all time - even beats Dewey
Gland) is a thanatoid, only he got killed, right? So how come he
appears in the action. Is he a ghost? Gilligan's Island is obviously
chock-a-block full of noises from all those spirits (and there's
another story I'd love to tie in, being a real sucker for Mirandas,
but...).

[re america losing all sense of history, religion,
 mythology, ritual, tradition]

> Whoa!  We know our place in history, we are the supreme rulers of the 
> Universe.  Exterminate, exterminate! ;-)  Again, America does have a 
> culture, although I would agree that is not rooted in a lot of the 
> things that GB and Europe hold dear.  But oh boy, is there mythology, 
> and history, and tradition:  there's the mythology of the Pioneer and 
> the West, the lone individual against the world, and there's Vietnam.

Uh, forgive me for appearing snobby but `the mythology of the Pioneer
and the West' - isn't that something DisneyCo invented? Same as all
those neatly reconstructed Puritan villages in the East. None of this
is real. In Britain our history has been allowed to accumulate dirt,
intermingle across the ages, incorporate the practicalities of
everyday living and has been so for centuries. In the US what has been
preserved is not part of a living, organic tradition. It is dead,
pickled, preserved in aspic (or, in the more tacky versions, in
plastic). In fact preserved is the wrong word because a lot of it has
had to be reconstructed.

A-and Vietnam is hardly a tradition. Well, I suppose you might count
it as a historical continuation from Korea but that's recent history.
And, what is more, in both cases the war and its effect on US culture
was not so much an incorporation of new experience but an abrupt
stopping in ones tracks. Nett result was more bewilderment and
psychosis than growth.

> There's the puritan, the scandinavian, the african,  the chinese, the 
> irish, pushing onwards, pushing westward,  building railroads, 
> building towns, building industry.  There are shameful things:  
> slavery, native americans, civil rights, and there are beautiful 
> things:  the super highway, the skyscraper, fields of corn in July in 
> Indiana.

Yes, there are these things and they are mostly external, fragmented,
special interests. They are not really built into US life, part of a
shared community. They have not dominated US experience in the way
that tradition has *over-determined* European day-to-day
existence. That is why the Disney version can exist and why it seems
so phoney to us Europeans. There is nothing to `correct' DisneyCo's
mythmaking because there is no real community from which such myths
can be drawn. Of course, I'm not arguing that this is all bad or good
on either side here either. Here in Britain we are subject to all
sorts of stupid myths about our tradition - Little Englanders
despising Johnny Foreigner, Scots Nationalists wanting `our oil' back
from the colonial English etc. The real point is that the notion of
community and how it is maintained, or rather (re-)constructed, is one
of the keys to what `Vineland' is about.

[re the 60s and 80s]

> The 80's were like the total antithesis of 60's ideals.  Money, money, 
> money.  Power, power, power.  But who had that money, and who had that 
> power?  Guess.  Joe Jackson says it best "And all the hippies work for IBM 
> . . ."

Well our boy might use a PC (although I'd put my money on a better
box, a Mac or maybe, just maybe, a Linux box) but he certainly isn't
working for big blue - nor is Zoyd, nor is Prairie, for that matter.
And TRP is hardly naive about hippies.

> So this whole group, like Frenesi, sells out to the power trip, then sits 
> around and gets nostalgic as hell about those days of revolution and 
> outrage.  Boo hoo hoo.  I guess I am ultimately ambivalent about Vineland, 
> because I hate the way the surface images of the SIXTIES continue to cast a 
> shadow over our culture.  All that peace love shit was a bunch of kids who 
> wanted to sit around baked out of their minds all the time - granted, a 
> state I was often in between 1982 and 1988 or so, BUT, I don't go trying to 
> create a fucking philosophy out of it.  Pop culture has not canonized the 
> people who were really doing something then, those kids killed while 
> working for civil rights down in Alabama, for example.  

I don't think TRP tried to create a philosophy out of getting stoned
or out of pop culture. Surely this is entirely the opposite of what
Vineland is about. I mean he does make Frenesi sell out the PRRR, get
Weed killed and screw off on Zoyd and her kid. And even the good guys
get it wrong, like say DL who fucks up ODing on ego.

> Anyway, enough ranting - I'm gonna piss somebody off, if I keep going.

Heh heh, not even close.

                            Keep posting!
  (by way of a motto for PA attendees who are also on the Wallace list)


Andrew Dinn
-----------
And though Earthliness forget you,
To the stilled Earth say:  I flow.
To the rushing water speak:  I am.