Sontag, "Happenings"

[Richard Fiero]

Judith A. Panetta wrote:
>Help me out here.
> . . .
>My fellow contributors...why does it seem that you seem to
>be reacting to Mr. Pynchon's work vicariously through other
>writers. I'd be much more interested in how you feel about it. 

I have to agree with Judy.

The whole tone of this list is weird and uncomfortably so.
For starters, Monk and Coleman are not little things. They are big
things from the 50's that had enormous stature.
Secondly, the 60's wasn't just hula hoops and a few mouthy chicks. The
feminist revolution was a real revolution. The 60's evolved and have
been absorbed. We see it reenacted in WTO and IMF demonstrations with
the European style being far more confrontational than the American. 
The 60's was hollowed out from within and from without by concerted
spook effort -- NSA, CIA, DIA, your local cops, etc. Seldom mentioned,
the Pentagon Papers ends with a request by President Johnson for
200,000 more troops in Vietnam. The Pentagon declined and stated that
those 200,000 were being kept in the country to quell possible civil
disturbance. This is where the national security apparatus fine tuned
its marketing of fear so nicely portrayed in Vineland. Hence the
current whitewashing of US hegemony worldwide, the Drug War, and all
the stuff that eludes the grasp of the masses by appearing as
Spectacle. Specific items: a couple million dead in a peasant army;
eleven million gallons of agent orange spread over several million
acres of forest land to which dioxin had been added to increase the
lethality and persistence of genetic defects; an undeclared war based
on the lie of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution; a war which cost almost as
much as the Savings and Loan bailout. No civilized nation does this.
Spooks everywhere and television reporting nightly for years that the
US was winning.

The 60's brought into play new concepts of tragedy (alienation through
toil, ratiocination and mortality), new approaches to myth and
archetype by filtering pop culture and folklore (all of religion).
This guy Pynchon is in touch with this stuff and continued to grow,
which is remarkable just in itself.

I cite for example the recurring faulty notion of splitting the sun
with a mirror so that a planetary half-revolution is doubled in the
mirror. Of course it is faulty. It doesn't work. So what? It can be
taken as a virus which infects the characters of V. who often perceive
things this way. Pynchon jumped the gun on memes and urban legends by
just twenty years. By the time of M&D he's got it down perfect and of
course GR is without error. My final bitter complaint is that I have to
mentally exchange the name "Benny Profane" with "Benny Smith" in order
to be free of infectious preconceptions this list harbors.

No surrealism is required when describing events as they are.

-- Richard Fiero