VLVL2 (2) Notes and commentary, p16

[Paul Nightingale]

(16.9) "Isaiah Two Four, a verse in the Bible ..."

He will judge between the nations 
and will settle disputes for many peoples. 
They will beat their swords into plowshares 
and their spears into pruning hooks. 
Nation will not take up sword against nation, 
nor will they train for war anymore. 

Cf the following passage, Hilarius speaking in COL49:

"If I'd been a real Nazi I'd have chosen Jung, nicht wahr? But I chose
Freud instead, the Jew. Freud's vision of the world had no Buchenwalds
in it. Buchenwald, according to Freud, once the light was let in, would
become a soccer field, fat children would learn flower-arranging and
solfeggio in the strangling rooms. At Auschwitz the ovens would be
converted over to petit fours and wedding cakes, and the V2 missiles to
public housing for the elves. I tried to believe it all. I spent
twenty-three hours a night trying not to dream, and spent the other
twenty-one at the forcible acquisition of faith."
"
(16.11-12) "... about converting from war to peace, beating spears into
pruning hooks, other idiot peacenik stuff."

Banter that has been rehearsed many times, perhaps. The performance of a
generation gap.

(16.14) "R2D2": aka Artoo-Detoo, an astromech droid in the Star Wars
films. The previous chapter referred to the third film in the series,
The Return of the Jedi.

(16.17) "Love is strange ..."

See Pynchon's 1988 review of Love in the Time of Cholera:

"Love, as Mickey and Sylvia, in their 1956 hit single, remind us, love
is strange. As we grow older it gets stranger, until at some point
mortality has come well within the frame of our attention, and there we
are, suddenly caught between terminal dates while still talking a game
of eternity. It's about then that we may begin to regard love songs,
romance novels, soap operas and any live teen-age pronouncements at all
on the subject of love with an increasingly impatient, not to mention
intolerant, ear."

Continues at:
http://www.libyrinth.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_cholera.html

(16.22) "'Jason' from Friday the 13th [1980]"

Another successful film series of the time. By the time Vineland was
published, there has been eight Jason/Friday films; the tenth is being
released at about the time you read this. As with the Star Wars
'franchise', the production of sequel after sequel, attempting to
reproduce a 'successful formula' is, perhaps, an example of the way film
production has been transformed by television. More to the point, Jason
did not feature in the 1980 film. 

Prairie: "Everybody was Jason that year. He's a classic now, like a
Frankenstein ..."

On fandom, see papers by Jenson, Fiske and Grossberg in Lisa A Lewis ed,
The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media (1992). The
reference to "a Frankenstein" might invoke Pynchon's 1984 Luddite essay,
where he describes the monster as "a major literary Badass".

Incidentally, the first so-called 'monster film' was a 1910 version of
Frankenstein:

"In making the film the Edison Company has carefully tried to eliminate
all the actually repulsive situations, and to concentrate upon the
mystic and psychological problems that are to be found in this weird
tale. Wherever, therefore, the film differs from the original story, it
is purely with the idea of eliminating what would be repulsive to a
moving picture audience."