VLVL2(3): Weatherpeople

[Dave Monroe]

"'Your ex-old lady, up till they terminated her budget
line, was livin in a underground of the State, not
like th' old Weatherpeople or nothin, OK? but a
certain kind of world that civilians up on the
surface, out in the sun thinkin 'm happy thotz, got no
idea it's even there....'  Hector was usually too cool
to be much of a lapel-grabber, but something in his
voice now, had Zoyd been wearing a jacket, might have
warned of an attempt.  'Nothin like that shit on the
Tube, nothin at all ... and cold ... colder than you
ever want to find out about....'" (VL, Ch. 3, p. 31)


"th' old Weatherpeople"

The Weather Underground Organization (1969-76)

The Weathermen, also known as the Weather Underground
Organization, was a US-based, self-described
"revolutionary organization of communist men and
women" formed by former members of the defunct
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). It was active
from 1969 to 1976. 

The name of the group derives from the Bob Dylan song
"Subterranean Homesick Blues", which featured the
lyrics, "You don't need a weather man to know which
way the wind blows", quoted at the bottom of an
influential essay in the SDS newspaper, New Left
Notes. 

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground

And see as well ...

http://foia.fbi.gov/weather.htm

http://www.theweatherunderground.com/

http://www.claykeck.com/patty/articles/wu.htm


"a certain kind of world"

Cf., e.g., ...

"Yet she knew, head down, stumbling along over the
cinderblock and its old sleepers, that there was still
that other chance.  That it was all true.  That
Inverarity had only died, nothing else.  Suppose, God,
there really was a Tristero then and that she had come
on it by accident.  If San Narciso and the estate were
really no different from any other town, any other
estate, then by that continuity she might have found
The Tristero anywhere in her Republic, through any of
a hundred lightly-concealed entranceways, a hundred
alienations, if only she'd looked.  She stopped a
minute between the steel rails, raising her head as if
to sniff the air.  Becoming conscious of the hard,
strung presence she stood on--knowing as if these maps
had been flashed for her on the sky how these tracks
ran into others, others, knowing they laced, deepened,
authenticated the great night around her.  If only
she'd looked." (Lot 49, Ch. 6, p. 179)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0109&msg=59164&sort=date

>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 (New York: Cambridge
UP, 1991), pp. 127-70 ...

   "As The Crying of Lot 49 nears its end, the
Tristero, which has been looming up all along, comes
dangerously close to losing the teasing
epistemological uncertainty it has retained thus far
in the novel.  As Oedipa stumbles along a railroad
track ... she remembers things she would have seen 'if
only she had looked' (179) ....

[...]
 
   "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.'
   "Looking back on the novel from the perspective of
its finale, it could almost be viewed as a New Deal
novel, concerned with gathering back into the American
fold a 'third world' previouly excluded...." (pp.
149-50)

As well as ...

"'And 'twas so that we enter'd, by its great northern
Portal, upon the inner Surface of the Earth.'" (M&D,
Ch. 75, p. 739)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0209&msg=70519&sort=date

"'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,--"
(M&D, Ch. 75, p. 740)

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

   "'Thy trip to Scotland will be closely watch'd,
Mason, from below....  "Once the solar parallax is
known," they told me, "once the necessary Degrees are
measur'd, and the size and weight and shape of the
Earth are calculated inescapably at last, all this
will vanish.  We will have to see another Space."  No
one explain'd what that meant, however...?'" (M&D, Ch.
75, p. 741)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0209&msg=70528&sort=date

Not to mention ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0208&msg=69706&sort=date


"and cold"

Vheissu
"there's a man in England, president of a Flat Earth
society, who says [that the Earth is flat] and is
ringed by ice barriers, a frozen world which is where
all missing persons go and never return from." 47 ....

http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/v/alpha/v.html

And see as well, e.g., ...

http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/v/extra/eti.html#vheissu

http://www.vheissu.org/varia/eng_intro.htm

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