pynchon-l-digest V2 #1923

[Doug Millison]

>You admit that they "pass along influences" and then say they're "vastly
>different" all in the one breath!


Easily.  As it is with musicians, so it is with writers. Pynchon is 
influenced by writers who come before and yet P's work is new and 
strange -- compare the Bible and GR, for example, or Moby Dick and 
GR, or any of the very many books that we see reflected, echoed, 
quoted, in GR or any of P's novels or stories.  Pynchon manages to 
receive influences from a long chain of writers and other artists and 
at the same time create his own unique work, you can easily see the 
influences and the breaks with tradition. Hardly a startling 
observation.

With a teenaged son in the house I listen to rap music everyday,  and 
have some (very) small insight into an internationally-influential 
Oaktown, Richmond, Vallejo rap music scene, through local radio, 
public access cable TV, club performances.  Some of it manages to 
communicate a sense of emotional intensity, of life lived in 
neighborhoods just a few blocks from my house where people die in 
drive-by shootings.  Some of it is just commercial pap, as is the 
case in all musical genres.   I also spend time in neighborhood 
churches where preaching and singing and instrumental music combines 
in an uplifting gospel blend that might be seen as the bright, flip 
side of the life of which rap music captures the grit and groan and 
pain -- you can hear the gospel influences in rap, and yet it's 
obvious that the rappers are doing something quite different.

One of the things I like best about   Pynchon is the way he manages 
to include a broad spectrum of musical experience in his books, yet 
still make meaningful distinctions about which of those experiences 
(same goes for TV, film, other works of art) really have soul (the 
ability to touch us deeply and make us feel somehow more than human) 
and which are just tools of an oppressive System.   Vineland is a 
good place to see this wrt music-- rock and roll as BOTH liberating 
AND oppressive
-- 
d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n  <http://www.online-journalist.com>