Pynchon on JFK, characterisation &c

[rj]

>From the 'Introduction' (1984) to _Slow Learner_

re. "racist, sexist and proto-Fascist talk" in 'Low-Lands':

"... for its time, it is probably authentic enough. John Kennedy's role
model James Bond was about to make his name by kicking third world
people around, another extension of the boy's adventure tales a lot of
us grew up reading." (p. 11)

re. intimations of 1950s complacency:

"One year of those times was much like another. One of the most
pernicious effects of the '50s was to convince the people growing up
during them that it would last forever. Until John Kennedy, then
perceived as a congressional upstart with a strange haircut, began to
get some attention, there was a lot of aimlessness going around." (p.
14)

re. his characters:

" ... I am less annoyed with 'Under the Rose' than with the earlier
stuff. I think the characters are a little better, no longer just lying
there on the slab but beginning at least to twitch some and blink their
eyes open ... " (p. 19)

"By the time I wrote 'The Secret Integration' ... I believe I was also
beginning to shut up and listen to the American voices around me ...
towns and Greyhound voices and fleabag hotels ..." (p. 22)

re. his literary "genre":

"I wasn't the only one writing then who felt some need to stretch, to
step out. It may have gone back to the sense of academic enclosure we
felt which had lent such appeal to the American picaresque life the Beat
writers seemed to be leading. Apprentices in all fields and times are
restless to be journeymen." (pp. 21-2)

best