VLVL: What troubles Zoyd's sleep?

[Michael Joseph]

On Mon, 22 Sep 2003, Terrance wrote:

> And the self-induced orgasm is very bad shit in P's fiction.

While feeling a tremor of disagreement with that statement, it touches
upon something similar I've been brooding about, namely that _Vineland_
seems rather unfriendly toward sex. Among other instances of this, Frenesi
(who seems a kind of Aphrodite figure) allows herself to become a tool of
destruction because she has the hots for Brock (our war god), whereas,
D.L.  and Takeshi abstain and thus not only make a dynamic duo but
actually seem to fall in love. (List alchemists note that through
abstinence Takeshi metamorphoses from Moe into Robert Redford.)



> We don't really want to know who killed Shade. Do we?
>
> "It's true . . . look at the forms of capitalist
>   expression. Pornographies: pornographies of love, erotic
>   love, Christian love, boy-and-his-dog, pornographies of
>   sunsets, pornographies of killing, and pornographies of
>   deduction -- ahh, that sigh when we guess the murderer --
>   all these novels, these films and these songs that they lull
>   us with, they're approaches, more comfortable and less so,
>   to that Absolute Comfort. . . . The self-induced orgasm.
>