SLSL Intro "The Wandering Scholars"

Sat Nov 9 11:13:34 CST 2002

   "A collateral effect, for me anyway, was that of
Helen Waddell's The Wandering Scholars, reprinted in
the early '50s, an account of young poets of the
Middle Ages who left the monasteries in large numbers
and took to the roads of Europe, celebrating in song
the wider range of life to be found outside their
academic walls.  Given the university environment of
the time, the parallels weren't hard to see.  Not that
college life was dull, exactly, but thanks to all
these alternative lowlife data that kept filtering
insiduously through the ivy, we had begun to get a
sense of that other world humming along out there. 
Some of us couldn't resist the temptation to go out
and see what was happening.  Enough of us then came
back inside with firsthand news to encourage others to
try it too--a preview of the mass college dropouts of
the  '60's." (SL, "Intro," pp. 7-8)

"Turn on, tune in, drop out" --Timothy Leary (1966)

http://home.swipnet.se/~w-40977/coolpeople/sounds/turnon.wav

http://www.why-not-posters.de/stars%20posters/timothy_leary_turn_on_tune_in_dr.htm

http://members.tripod.com/~lysergia_2/LearyESP_front.jpg

http://members.tripod.com/~lysergia_2/lamaLSDdocLPsLeary.htm

http://www.lib.virginia.edu/speccol/exhibits/sixties/leary.html

http://www.leary.com/Biography/QuickBio.html

http://www.roninpub.com/turnon.html

"Poets are an endangered species.  That's what Tom
wanted to be, a poet." -- Christine Wexler, in Jules
Siegel et al., Lineland (p. 53) ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9610&msg=7135&sort=date

>From Helen Waddell, The Wandering Scholars (6th ed.,
New York: Barnes & Noble, 1966 [1927]), Ch. VIII, "The
Ordo Vagorum," pp. 177-213 ...

"... the mediaeval church had never much approved of
wandering.  'Sit in thy cell,' said the Blessed
Antony, 'and thy cell shall teach thee all things. 
The monk out of his cell is a fish out of water.'" (p.
177)

"... the natural state of a clerical soul is
static....  The stability of the Church goes far to
stabilise Europe ...." (p. 178)

   "If one wished to abuse an antagonist, one called
him a gyrovagus....  The word was consecrated.  St.
Benedict had used it in a stern chapter of his rule,
ofv those monks whose whole life is spent, three days
here, four days there, in the hospitality of different
monasteries, ever wandering and never in one stay, and
minding only their own pleasures anmd their wretched
gullets: 'of whose unhappy conversation it is better
to be silent than to speak.'" (p. 179)

N.b. ...

"The working title of his draft was Mindless
Pleasures, a phrase which occurs twice in the final
novel."

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_grintro.html

E.g. ...

"... infected with the prevailing fondness out here
for mindless pleasures" (GR, p. 270)

"... remember that these are mostly brains ravaged by
antisocial and mindless pleasures." (p. 681)

See also ...

http://www.pd.org/topos/perforations/perf18/pink-what-1.html

http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/gravity/extra/gr-what.html

Back to Waddell ...

"... as for the reason of their wandering, a
pilgrimage, we'll say? or perhaps captivity....
pilgrims for their bellies' sake rather than their
souls'...." (p. 180)

   "Isidore of Seville with his monumental common
sense goes to the root of the matter.  The clericuus
is like the Levite, who had no allotment of land: his
portion was the Lord.  But there are two kinds of
clerks: those who live in obedience to their head, the
bishop; those who owe no allegiance to any man, but
follow their own will: they are a hybrid, like the
hippocentaurs: they have neither religion to restrain
them, nor the ordinary business of the world to occupy
them; solutos et arrantes, free-lances and vagabonds,
they embrace a life of baseness and wandering." (pp.
181-2)

Isidore of Seville

http://www.catholic.org/isidore/

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08186a.htm

"no allotment of land"

"His constant theme, disinheritance." (Lot 49, Ch. 6,
p. 160)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0108&msg=59035&sort=date

"Pynchon's short works can be viewed as one opus and
as a test case for the following hypothesis: Pynchon
views himself as part of a family that has been
disinherited by a century-long conflict involving the
waxing of new and the waning of old American dynasties
..."

http://www.vheissu.be/art/art_eng_SL_hollander.htm#chap_7

And, again, Waddell ...

   "One sees the making of a vagus in a good many
stories...." (p. 195)

"So in his first story Pynchon tries out techniques he
will use later: misdirection, indicative naming,
fragmented quotation, emphasis on parables,
enthymemes, and layering of pagan, Hebrew, and
Christian mythologies. He also introduces some
thematic material he will return to: subcultures of
the disinherited, fraternizing of Yankees and Jews,
oblique references to American politics, and
sensitivity to dynastic succession and civil wars."

http://www.vheissu.be/art/art_eng_SL_hollander.htm#chap_7

http://www.vheissu.be/art/art_eng_SL_hollander.htm#boven

   "Pynchon, concerned with history as he is, often
writes about the sadness, the tristesse, of the
disinherited, the victims in the various situations of
his fictions ...."

"... in his art Pynchon's sympathies are repeatedly
with the losers, the victims, the disinherited ...."

http://www.ottosell.de/pynchon/inferno.htm

Q.v. ...

http://store.doverpublications.com/0486414361.html

"alternative lowlife data"

"that other world humming along out there"

Cf., e.g., ...

   "'You receive Messages from us, by way of your
Magnetic Compasses.  What you call the "Secular Change
of Declination" is whatever dim'd and muffl'd remnant
may reach you above, of all the lives of us Below,--
being less liv'd than waged, at a level of Passion
that would seem, to you, quite intense.  We have
learn'd to use the Tellurick Forces, including that of
Magnetism,-- which you oddly seem to consider the only
one.'" (M&D, Ch. 75, p. 740)

>From Pierre-Yves Petillon, "A Re-cognition of Her
Errand into the Wilderness," New Essays on The Crying
of Lot 49, ed. Patrick O'Donnell (NY: Cambridge
UP, 1991), pp. 127-70 ...

   "The Tristero underground has so far been implies
to be a motley crew of eccentrics and bohemian
drop-outs, an archipelago of 'isolates' having
'withdrawn' from the Republic, a lunatic fringe in
tatters.  But suddenly, in this last rhetorical leap,
the Tristero broadens its scope to include, in a
grand, almost liturgical gesture, all the outcasts of
American history....  By the end of the novel the
Tristero, shadowy as it still remains, is no longer a
ghostly underground (perhaps entirely phantasmatic)
but a real, 'embattled' underground about to come out
of the shadows.  No longer hovering on the edge as a
cryptic plot, the 'Other' that the Tristero has thus
far represented is almost revealed as a version of
'the other America' that Michael Harrington described
....  This America is 'the America of poverty,'
'hidden today in a way it never was before,'
'dispossesed,' 'living on the fringes, the margin,' as
'internal exiles.'" (pp. 149-50)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0209&msg=70538&sort=date

"outside their academic walls"

>From James Clifford, "Notes on Theory and Travel,"
Inscriptions 5 (1989) ...

"The Greek term theorein: a practice of travel and
observation, a man sent by the polis to another city
to witness a religious ceremony. 'Theory' is a product
of displacement, comparison, a certain distance. To
theorize, one leaves home. But like any act of travel,
theory begins and ends somewhere. In the case of the
Greek theorist the beginning and ending were one, the
home polis. This is not so simply true of traveling
theorists in the late twentieth century."

http://humwww.ucsc.edu/DivWeb/CultStudies/PUBS/Inscriptions/vol_5/clifford.html

http://humwww.ucsc.edu/DivWeb/CultStudies/PUBS/Inscriptions/vol_5/v5_top.html

"the temptation to go out and see what was happening"

Fall 1953  Pynchon enters Cornell in the division of
Engineering Physics 

1955  Pynchon enters the Navy 

1957  Pynchon returns to Cornell, transfers to the
College of Arts and Sciences

http://www.millikin.edu/aci/crow/chronology/pynchonbio.html

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