SLSL Intro "alternate lowlife data that kept filtering insidiously through"

[pynchonoid]

I believe that Dave Monroe plans to discuss Helen
Waddell's _The Wandering Scholars_ at some point
during this SLSL session, and I'm studying up in my
copy of that book, too, so I'm happy to wait on that. 
But in the same paragraph where Pynchon mentions that
book, he goes on to say, "Some of us couldn't resist
the temptation to go out and see what was happening.
Enough of us then camee back inside with firsthand
news to encourage others to tray it too -- a preview
of the mass college dropouts of the '60s."

I don't know as much about the details of Pynchon's
bio that are available as I would like to know -- I'm
assuming that here Pynchon refers to leaving Cornell
to go into the Navy, then coming back to Cornell to
finish his undergraduate work. That would cover the
period he mentions in the following paragraph, when he
talks about picking up a copy of Evergreen Review in
Norfolk, a Navy town -- it's not clear if he's saying
that publication was his first exposure to Beat
culture or not.

I've heard that a vast archive exists Out There,
literally thousands of documents relating to Pynchon's
Navy career, but that seems to rest in private hands
now, no telling if it will ever become publicly
available.  

Still, I wonder what else he might have done during
that "dropout" interlude that would cause him to
mention it as something inspired by reading _The
Wandering Scholars_.  Or maybe -- in this not at all
straightforward essay -- he's conflating it with other
experiences he might have had at other times. 

-Doug



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