grgr (34): pinball wizzard?!

[Thomas Lundvall]

Cf. also "V" where Profane is called a human yoyo, another popular game, 
although a yoyo is more controlled by its string than a pinball. Does this 
mean that Profane is more strictly controlled by outside forces than the 
characters in GR, who are bouncing around in the Zone? Just a thought, and 
maybe something to discuss more carefully when we get to V.

Thomas


>From: Mark Wright AIA <mwaia at yahoo.com>
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: Re: grgr (34): pinball wizzard?!
>Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 06:05:41 -0700 (PDT)
>
>Howdy
>I wrote:
> > Howdy
> >
> > This is an old movie convention.  If an audience was to be invited to
> > sing along with the character on screen the lyric would be subtitled
> > and a little dot (the "bouncing ball") would hop from syllable to
> > syllable in time with the music.  I remember it was used in old Max
> > Fleischer cartoons dating from the 1930's, when sound in film was
> > still
> > a novelty and movie palaces still competed with live burlesque and
> > vaudeville.
> >
> > Mark
> >
> > P.S. Check out all the lewd old Betty Boop cartoons you can put your
> > sweaty hands on!!
> >
>
>Or did you know this already?  I assumed a cultural gap here where
>perhaps I shouldn't have.... Didn't mean to sound condescending. (Did
>you note my artful use of both kinds of ellipsis, there?)
>
>You posed some questions which I rushed passed:
>
> > --- Lorentzen / Nicklaus <lorentzen-nicklaus at t-online.de> wrote:
> > >                       "follow the bouncing ball:" (760)
> > > does this, also refering back to 583, somehow suggest that the
> > > pinball machine
> > > is a, well, "epistemological model" for the novel?! & if so: can
> > this
> > > be
> > > observed as a pop-cultural meta-framing of the text? how is gr's
> > > pinball machine
> > > related to the video-games in vineland?
>
>Certainly some of the characters behave as though they are inanimate
>pinballs rocketing back and forth under the guidance of forces beyond
>their comprehension.  I'm not sure you could work it up into a
>full-fledged framing device, although it does work as a recurring
>metaphor.  Given my automatic reading of "bouncing ball" as noted above
>the pinball connection never occurred to me in this specific instance.
>
>RE: pinball/video games in "V", V2" and "Vineland" this would be an
>interesting little study.  I suspect that P would present videogames as
>more death-oriented and inanimate because great pinball play depends on
>"body english," of a sort, and video games are somehow colder and more
>disconnected.  This quite apart from their imagery which has also
>devolved towards mayhem and dismemberment.
>
>Mark
>P.S. I tried out the Star Wars "Pod Racer" game on a friend's PC last
>weekend, and boy was it fun...
>
>
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