VLVL (6) Pynchon's parables

[jbor]

> The Ghost of Picnic Future:

Yes, I like this idea. It matches up with the way that that Apocalyptic
rocket *almost* drops on the world of the complacent reader at the end of
_GR_, the text itself a warning, a wake-up call. "There is time ... " In
_Vineland_ Pynchon looks back at the history of the American "left" in the
20th C. and sees it for the failure, or series thereof, it was.

best



on 1/10/03 8:30 PM, Terrance wrote:

> OK, so VL isn't about work.
> 
> Would you believe me if I said VL is "Work Saturated."
> 
> 
> Independent contractors.
> 
> Ladies on a string.
> 
> In  this novel, Prostitutes get paid off the books or in cash. DL will
> wear a prostitutes blue contact lenses when disguised as Frenesi-Japan.
> 
> The Ghost of Picnic Future:
> 
> Prairie all familied out could end up with BV or she could end up
> working as a prostitute with her friend and shadow, Che (Che's family
> double's Prairie's Wade and Dotty are shadows of Sasha and Hub),  then
> in the joint, where she will find a real family.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> "The war changed everything. The deal was, no strikes for the duration.
> Lot of us thought it was some last desperate capitalist maneuver, a way
> to get the Nation mobilized under a Leader, no different than Hitler or
> Stalin.  But at the same time, so many of us really loved FDR. I got so
> distracted I quit working for a while even though there were all these
> incredible jobs everywhere, just 'cause I had to try to think it
> through.  You can imagine how much help I got."
> 
> VL.77
> 
> In the United States the trade union movement has passed through the
> most stormy history in recent years. The rise of the CIO is
> incontrovertible evidence of the revolutionary
> tendencies within the working masses.
> Indicative and noteworthy in the highest degree,
> however, is the fact that the new
> “leftist” trade union organization was no sooner
> founded than it fell into the steel embrace
> of the imperialist state. The struggle among the tops between the old
> federation and the new is reducible in large measure to the struggle for
> the sympathy and support of Roosevelt and his cabinet.
> 
>> From Leon Trotsky’s Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay
> Written April, 1940, Mexico City
> Published in English, October, 1941
> 
> THE ORIGINS OF THE UNION SHOP
> http://www.anarchosyndicalism.org/theory/origins-union-shop.htm