Holding up a mirror...

[joeallonby]

I would like to be associated with the remarks......

Nice post. By the way, in the U.S. the term "townies" refers to blue collar
natives. In my world, Zoyd and his occasional coworkers would be considered
townies.

In Bostonese we have another word: Barnies. Those people you see on the T
wearing hiking boots and carrying unnecessary backpacks in an urban
environment are laughingly referred to as barnies. They're straight from the
Harvard Barnyard.

Peace,
Joe


 on 9/27/03 9:50 PM, Mike Weaver at mikeweaver at gn.apc.org wrote:

> 
>> Any text that can be considered "ambiguous" achieves this ambiguity by
>> presenting both sides of a particular situation and giving the reader
>> little
>> or no bearings for how s/he should resolve the ambiguity.
> 
>> ...we've established that he may be viewed either as an ex-hippie...
>> content to "get by" with minimal effort...
>> On the other hand, we've also established that he is also a sell-out to
>> the government and its economics...
> 
> The problem I have with this is that I can find no ambiguity to be
> resolved. There is no ambiguous situation with two sides, there are
> characters who are bundles of contradictions like so many of us. Whitman's
> multitudes.
> 
> It does seem to me that Zoyd is a well realised character, and the way he
> has been judged on this list reflects an awful lot on the particular
> readers and their cultural closeness to, or distance from, his kind and
> their environment.
> I come from a rural area of the UK which might well be compared in its
> cultural/environmental mix to Vineland: forestry, fishing and farming the
> traditional industries, surfers, bikers and hippies the main subcultures,
> small cities, smaller towns and villages with spiderwebs of roads and lanes
> connecting them. I was a teenager in the late 60s and lost contact with the
> area after 1984. When I read Vineland I recognise the characters as  just
> the kind of people I knew through that time, and the ways they get by
> typical of a rural area of seasonal and intermittent employment. The whole
> thread deeming RC and Moonpie to be exploiting child labour is absurd to me
> who grew up helping on the farm from when I was big enough to call the cows
> or heft a bale of straw. It's a way of life where work and play merge at
> many points.
> So I'd guess that the readers who found Zoyd and his friends so wanting in
> so many ways to be townies through and through.
> 
> Vineland may be convoluted in structure but I'm not sure it can be called a
> post-modernist novel. Touches of magic realism yes but that aside if you
> disentangled the flashbacks and allowed for the filtering of perspectives
> through different characters and their biases, what would you have but a
> modern(ist?) family saga and political/philosophical fable. This may be one
> of the reasons why reviewers thought it weak.
> 
> 
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