GR's Chipco Stomp Preview

[Steelhead]

Finally found a new modem for my Powerbook so that I can frolic through
this list from the unnerving portal of the hospital, where Nat's battle
with pneumonia seems to be turning in our favor. I told him that diseases
of the lungs often poets make, but he only cares about entry passes, full
court traps, and emulating Gary Payton.

At some point, of course, it will be necessary to tackle Mascaro's latest
AK-47-style outburst. But I haven't the energy today. Plus I tend to think
some of his comments might provide an interesting springboard for an
article in the LA Weekly on the attitudes of professors toward the students
they are hired to teach.

Following Mascaro's unfortunate remarks on his loathing of children and
students raised by overbearing parents such as myself (one would think such
a cruel twist of fate would engender sympathy not derision), one can
predict that in a university controlled by Mascaro-ites in addition to SAT
scores, high school portfolios, and assists-to-turnover ratios one might
have to submit to genetic testing, psychological profiles, urine samples,
Halcyon tablets, et al.

Mascaro U.: the Benthamite Panopticon of Education.

But on the intolerable subject of academic books:

My friend and former professor Charles Larson, wrote one of the campiest
campus novels back in the late 70s, Macademia Nuts. But Chuck can be
forgiven this transgression because he is a peerless scholar of African
Literature--where academics, such as Wole Soyinka, understand that part of
their role is to challenge the Hegemony of the Masters.

(Interesting side note: Mascaro, the bedizened Pynchon scholar, claims that
one of his favorite passages in GR is Proverbs for Paranoid's Number 5,
which he quotes as follows: "The immorality of the masters is in inverse
proportion to the  innocence of the slaves, (wording prob'ly a little
off)."

A little off?

First, this is not Proverb 5, it's Proverb 2. Second, it reads as Pynch
wrote it: "The innocence of the *creatures* is in inverse proportion to the
immorality of the *Master*." The entire construction of the sentence (and
thus its meaning) is reversed.

And it's creatures, not slaves. BIG difference to us working class stiffs,
though probably meaningless to the critical handgranades of the PoMos,
where anything that comes close is passable, and often publishable, work.

The parallel here is to a creature like Frankenstein, or, in this case,
some Godzilla-like thang, which, interestingly enough, rematerializes
all-too-fleetingly in Vineland to stomp the bejeezus out of that Chipco
plant.

This becomes obvious only a few sentences below, when Tyrone gets the
shivers: "Worried, all right. By the jaws and teeth of some Creature, some
Presence so large nobody else can see it--there! that's that monster I was
telling you about.--That's no monster, stupid, that's *clouds!* --No, can't
you *see!* It's his *feet*--Well, Slothrop can feel this beast in the sky;
its visible claws and scales are being mistaken for clouds and other
possibilities...or else everyone has agreed to *call them other names* when
Slothrop is listening."

And, oh yeah, t-that's Master, singular. Making it plural is to commit an
err on the order of the Albigensian Heresy. The dualist Albigensians, btw,
were Bulgarians and therefore Buggers--though not to be confused with the
closely related Bogomils and other Catharist heretics who also faced
Inquisition and Torture by St. Bernard of Clairvaux, then doing the dirty
work of Pope Eugenius III. This may seem like a totally irrelevant--even
insane--discursion but some (nonacademic) readers of CoL 49 believe that
Pynchon is in that slim work pointing back to the cultural importance these
rather unseemly events.

Now, back to the academics.

Andrew (who, along with the AWOL hag,is the most lucid and entertaining
writer on the P-list) Dinn recently wrote: "Even if there is a Pynchon
industry in academia (and judging by the Warwick conference it's a pretty
low-budget
industry) I don't see the foax on this list as cigar-smoking
capitalists creaming it off the sweaty brows of our fellow-workers in
journalism, the education industry or anywhere else."

Andrew then advises that the real culprits are the University Boards, those
academic Puppet Masters who make Mascaro feel he's up to something Rilly
Risky by writing a dissertation on Pynchon. I wouldn't argue this point
except to say that tenured profs are not nearly as low budget as Pynchon
has been for most of his writing life--at least until that MacArthur
Award--which he had the good sense enough to accept.

In Oregon, for example, the average salary of a tenured professor at a
state university is $48,000. And Oregon ranks in the bottom tenth of states
in terms of renumeration for college professors. By comparison, Pynchon's
annual income in the early 80s is reported at around $10,000. This means
that college professors who are teaching TRP's work are earning 4 to 5
times what TRP received for writing his three major (and most (over)written
about) books: V., Col 49, and GR. Multiply the annual salary by the number
of professors teaching Pynchon, using his writings to earn their PhD's, and
you are quickly into the millions of dollars a year. Why shouldn't he
receive a cut of this massive hemorrhage of money? Isn't it an infringement
(and in many cases a debasement) of his intellectual property rights?

Sitting in the lounge I picked up a copy of the Wall Street Journal, which
as Chomsky sez is one of the few places to get unfiltered news (since the
Elites need straight information) and found an excerpted paragraph from a
recent column on the state of American education by Nicholas Von Hoffman.
Von Hoffman is one of the country's most irreverant and best writers. His
reporting on Mississippi Freedom rides stands as some of the most chilling
and powerful prose produced in the 1960s. His weekly column is now picked
up by the New York (and Texas--available even in inhospitable Lubbock)
Observer.

Here's what Nicky V.H. had to say on American Universities:

"Between 1980 and 1995, four-year college tuition rose 256 percent--three
times the rate of inflation during the same time. If we used the same tools
of analysis that are being brought to bear to show that the cost-of-living
index is overstated, we would point out that the real costs of college are
much higher, because adademic standards have continued to slip since 1980
and we are, therefore, paying much more for a service that is constantly
slipping in quality. In terms of equivalencies, a bachelor of arts degree
in 1997 may not even be the equal of a graduation certificate from an
academic high school in 1947."

Steely