VLVL2(3): An Old Hippie That's Gone Sour

[Dave Monroe]

   "'I don't need that from you, Zoyd, you're just as
fucked as you ever were, and you picked up a mean
streak too.'
   "'Nothin' meaner than a old hippie that's gone
sour, Hector, lot of it around.'" (VL, Ch. 3, p. 31)


p. 31 "Nothin' meaner than an old hippie that's gone
sour."   Pynchon himself?

http://www.mindspring.com/~shadow88/chapter3.htm

He was normal, dusty and neat, a bachelor. He never
had a maid. He was very upset by people cleaning his
windshield. He felt people should clean their own
windshields. It was almost as if they were acting like
servants. What kind of decent person would have a
slave doing their windshields? It would be beneath
your sense of decency and fair play. He didn't
actually say all these words, but it was his body
language, the sense of drama, the injustice of it all.
Something as silly as that would provoke this dramatic
response.

He was very down to earth. It was almost quaint --
trying to be one of the proletariat, saving scraps of
paper, saving everything. He always did the dishes and
helped out, very, very sincere. The neighbors used to
bring their children over for him to baby sit. They
always knew that in a pinch Tom would baby sit. He was
such a good solid citizen, nothing like you'd think a
novelist would be, not very dashing.

The only colors he wore were dark military green and
tan, generic clothes, and they were always baggy and
kind falling off. He had a women friend down the
street, a very intellectual rich woman married to a
doctor, and she used to give him her husband's old
shoes and clothing.

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9610&msg=7406&sort=date

The hippies tried to steer it in the right direction
but they were too irresponsible and they tried to
change the institutions too fast for the middle and
lower classes. There was a big backlash. They were
frightened and jealous. That's what Thomas Pynchon's
books are about --the backlash and the resentment
about food stamps on both sides; food stamps put
labels on  people, they were shame-based-- and the
loss of sentimentality among families and lovers. It's
as if the culture had a surgeon come in and cut out
the part of the heart that was the source of feelings
of sentimentality. People had to give up cherishing
each other in order to protect themselves against a
new virulent strain of killer bee humans, the young
barbarians, the preppies, the white male preppies on
Wall Street and their merger and acquisition jobs....

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

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