VLVL (6) Pynchon's parables

[jbor]

on 3/10/03 10:24 PM, Mike Weaver at mikeweaver at gn.apc.org wrote:

> You and Terrance have more than your anti-leftism in common

Wha? Again with the "us" and "them" rhetoric, the attempt to demonise. Give
it a rest. 

>> the one about Frenesi and the lead-up to Watergate (71-2),

> A further comment on the immaturity of the Woodstock generation - freedom
> as lack of responsibility - what was it Don quoted from the SL intro "too
> much concentration on youth, especially the eternal kind..."

Wha? Now there's an overtly political passage in the novel that you really
don't want to deal with!

>> or where Sasha, 
>> with a "right" to be "bitter", describes how "[e]veryone
>> they knew" during the '50s "sold out" everybody else, when they all "made up
>> a different story" (81.7-25)?

> And I'm the one being accused of not reading the book! The text reads
> 
> "Everyone they knew had made up a different story, to make each of them
> come out looking better and others worse. "History in this town," Sasha
> muttered, "is no more worthy of respect than the average movie script, and
> it comes about in the same way..."
> 
> No reference to everyone selling out everyone else,

Except, of course, where it says: "Friends of Hub's had sold out friends of
Sasha's, and vice versa .... Everyone they knew had made up a different
story .... " (81.7-25)

Sasha's "[b]itter" about their "friends" -- "everyone they knew" -- all the
"betrayal, destructiveness, cowardice, and lying" these "friends" indulged
in, and the way they all kept trying to rewrite the script "to make each of
them come out looking better and others worse." Active betrayals. By members
of "the left".

best

> , her bitterness  relates
> to the burying of the actual history and emotions of the time by a typical
> Hollywood rewrite version created by all the participants to make
> themselves look better. The phrase "heartfelt language gets pounded flat
> when it isn't just removed forever" suggests real commitments and an
> honourable resistance to the anti-communist tide which have become hidden
> history.