Work

[Don Corathers]

If the question is, is there a connection between Zoyd's "working for the
government" and the fact that television news is entertainment with a huge
appetite for content, I'm willing to argue that yes, there is.

Certainly in the 1984 described in this novel, as in the real one and the
real 2003, it suits the government's purposes for reporters to turn their
attention from substantive stories to entertaining but meaningless crap. The
natural order of things is that the bad stories force out the good, because
they're cheaper to produce and they don't piss anybody off. This is a
principle of journalism that anybody who has worked for a small-town
newspaper, or any newspaper or television news program, will be able to
recognize.

The government is obliged to provide bread and circuses. In Zoyd's case,
they are distributing bread and getting a little circus in return.

Not that I think any of this is consciously acknowledged or even understood
by the participants. But in the ecology of power described in Vineland,
Zoyd's annual performance is a little piece of the government's pacification
strategy.

Don Corathers






By requiring Zoyd to do something "publically crazy,"





ecology of power



The news becomes the circus
----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard Fiero" <rfiero at pophost.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Monday, July 21, 2003 8:38 PM
Subject: Re: Work


> I've gotten a little crazy with my delete key but as I recall,
> Terrance's assertion with respect to work was that Vineland is
> about work. I never bought the shtick that GR was about
> religion but I can dig VL being about work. The thread has
> explored various imaginary work ethics without touching on
> whether VL has anything to say about work or whether notions of
> work seem to dominate VL.
> The last I looked, the List had decided that TV news is
> entertainment and that Zoyd was actually working for the
> Government. These reminiscences do add up to our usual foggy
> definitions of work.
> Is there something unexplored here?
>
>