crying

[Jules Siegel]

At 07:41 PM 06/4/97 -0400, Keith Brecher <Keith_Brecher at brown.edu> wrote:
[responding to Cary Libby's "tell me why I should read both GR and M&D."]

>I don't think you should read either of those ponderous tomes. Instead,
read VINELAND and a couple of the stories in SLOW LEARNER (though not all of
them). In other words, Pynchon-Lite. Fewer calories, less filling, better
for you. 

When I mentioned this thread, my beautiful wife, Anita Brown, said, "Read
Gravity's Rainbow for its sociological information on the late '60s and
early '70s post-Vietnam mentality." I think she's on to something. I feel
that although Gravity's Rainbow may be set in late WWII, it's really about
the crash of the Psychedelic Revolution -- "What goes up, must come down."

Pynchon once told me that Cold War science fiction was a medium of
communication for scientists on both sides of the Iron Curtain, who were
exchanging information in what appeared to be harmless fantasy stories. I
find him closest as a writer to Jorge Luis Borges. He's a fabulist. That's
one of the reasons his books have only minimal plots. They are emblematic
epics, like Spenser's Faerie Queene. The characters move through a series of
tableaux.

During periods of repression, satire and fables become the primary means of
conveying truth. When I read Gravity's Rainbow, I see the very same
landscape I saw at the time and recorded in my journals -- the demolition
derby of the American ego, as everything collapsed in guilt and smog and
toxic mire. Pynchon saw this too, maybe even more forcefully because he was
living in Manhattan Beach, right near the oil refineries, while I was living
in underground locations in the redwoods and, when I at last fled, in the
hippie heaven of Yelapa, Mexico, reachable only by boat from Puerto Vallarta.

Although we think of the this period as opening, it was actually shutting
down at the same time. Tommy Smothers warned me about it in 1968 just before
the Smothers Brothers show was cancelled. Pynchon was very dubious, too.
Kent State signalled the end of toleration. Only the weakening of control
resulting from the internal civil represented by Watergate delayed the final
burial, which took place under Ronald Reagan.

There's no doubt that it was not wise to write about these things too
openly. When I tried, I was shut down fast at both Rolling Stone and
Playboy. When I complained to Arthur Kretchmer (Playboy Editorial Director),
he urged me to write a novel. I said it would not allow me to record the
historical truths I was seeing. He replied, "Jules, sometimes to tell the
truth you have to turn to fiction."

The Zone isn't just a place they made rockets. It's the high-energy zone
where the ego fuses with the id when you get into highly adrenalized states.
Time collapses. People become their archetypes. You see how something can
have more than one meaning, more than one identity. It's as if they are
wearing symbolic disguises with "reality" showing through like a moire. This
doesn't just happen on drugs, but in states of extreme terror or alertness.

"I don't think we're in Kansas anymore, ToTo."

Showing Chrissie and me to our room looking into the forest when we returned
from Palm Beach in 1971, Jim Brewster said, "There's no room for jive-ass
warriors in the Zone, Jules," and he handed me a machine gun.


--Jules Siegel Apdo 1764 Cancun QR 77501
http://www.yucatanweb.com/siegel/jsiegel.htm