VLVL 4: War, politics and love

[Dave Monroe]

Thanks, titles friends who've taught courses on the
subject have recommended as well.  If anything is
hardly my forte, it's The Vietnam War, though on the
stateside culture alongside it, see, e.g., ...

Corrigan, Tim.  A Cinema Without Walls: Movies and
    Culture After Vietnam.  NY: Routledge, 1991.

Miller, Stephen Paul.  The Seventies Now: Culture
   as Surveillance.  Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1999.

Wood, Robin.  Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan.
   NY: Columbia UP, 1986.

--- Don Corathers <gumbo at fuse.net> wrote:
> Some good books on the subject:

[...]
 
> Dispatches, Michael Herr

I've suggested before considering Gravity'sn Rainbow
in light of the trajectory (er, no puns where none
intended ...) of the WWII film in the Vietnam Era,
I'll tentatively suggest here (and maybe attempt to
hint at/demonstrate later) that it might prove
productive to read Vineland's Vietnam War references
in light of the Vietnam War film since (I'm thinking
quite a bit of Vineland plays on the cinematic vs. the
historical--the reel vs. the real?--but, again, merely
an intution at this point), but I'm also guessing that
M. Herr's Despatches is no small drop in the pond of
combat prose, and I recall it being mentioned (Otto?)
along the way whilst discussing that "quote" from The
Gospel of Thomas in GR.  Maybe see as well ...

Kittler, Friedrich.  "Media and Drugs in Pynchon's
   Second World War."  Reading Matters: Narratives in
   the New Media Ecology.  Ed. Joseph Tabbi and
   Michael Wutz.  Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1997.

___________. "Media and Drugs in Pynchon's Second
   World War."  Literature, Media, Information
   Systems: Essays. Ed. John Johnston.  Amsterdam:
   G+B Arts, 1997.

And I'll say I'm tentatively with Terrence on
Pynchon's cynicism about the 60s, the leading edge of
this already apparent in Lot 49, and exploding (again
...) in GR.  Recalling here as well the comments of
the former Mrs. Siegel regarding Pynchon vis a vis the
hippies, the failure(s) thereof, Marcuse's mid-sixties
reconsidseration of his earlier pronouncements, and,
again, the WWII film from, say, Stalag 17 through, at
its most cynical, Kelly's Heroes (which'd make good
GR-side viewing, in my estimation).  See also ...

Rorty, Richard.  Achieving Our Country: Leftist
   Thought in Twentieth-Century America.  
   Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998.

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0211&msg=72410&sort=date

This apparently came up before my arrival on these
shores ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9904&msg=37282&sort=date

But despite Rorty's condemnation of Vineland (along
with, among others, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash [?!])
as deploying a nigh unto Foucauldian (in Rorty's
chracaterization thereof) conception of power offering
in the end No Way Out--a-and maybe he's not entirely
incorrect, but ...--but another intution is that
Rorty's fondness for 30s leftism vs. 60s radicalism is
not entirely unlike Pynchon's, either ...

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