was Re: VLVL (6) Brock

[jbor]

on 29/9/03 11:39 AM, Don Corathers at gumbo at fuse.net wrote:

> Student radicals, by the way, are not, strictly speaking, hippies. Hippies
> are by definition apolitical.

"[B]y definition", are they? My dictionary (Oxford) defines "hippie" as an
"unconventionally behaving person who is (thought to be) using
hallucinogenic drugs and rebelling against organized society." This seems to
me to fit the student radicals Pynchon depicts in _Vineland_ pretty well,
right down to that ambiguous parenthetic "thought to be".

Suffice to say, during "the Vietnam era", which I don't think you can
legitimately stretch back to Eisenhower or French colonialism or the Ming
Dynasty or whatever (seriously, are you sure you're not just tossing a
bucketload of slurry out the back of the boat?) in this particular context,
a lot of the student radicals were hippies, and vice versa. The "failure of
public will" during "the Vietnam era" which Pynchon alludes to in the
'Sloth' essay maps on to "the failure of college kids and blue-collar
workers to get together politically" in the late '60s which he addresses in
the _SL 'Intro' (p. 7). And it's the same turf he ploughs in the novel.

>>> But are you really claiming that "vile-minded" means "raunchy"
>> 
>> Yes. What else would it mean?

Again, my trusty dictionary defines "vile" as "morally base, depraved,
shameful, abject, disgusting, worthless, and, abominably bad". Not a
"raunchy" in sight.

Point is, it *is* the omniscient narrator making this *judgement* on Zoyd.
I'm not calling him "vile-minded", the text is.

best



>> Hippiedom and "the Vietnam era" are synonymous in the context, and the
>> "hippie resurgence" is overtly critiqued in both the _SL_ Intro and in
>> _Vineland_. (Paul M. makes a valid point about Brock's understanding of
> the
>> student "revolutionaries" reflecting Pynchon's own.) Point is, after all
> the
>> fanfare and flower-weaving were over, the U.S. war in Vietnam went on, the
>> Repression continued. The bottom line in a democracy, according to Pynchon
>> at least it would seem, is that this equates to "a failure of public
> will".
>> 
>> It's pretty straightforward.
> 
> Not for me, really. I don't see Pynchon assigning the responsibility for a
> "failure of the public will" to any particular group in the Sloth essay.
> (And thanks for the link.) The reference to the hippie resurgence in the
> Slow Learner intro is tangential. That leaves us the work at hand, in which
> hippie culture *is* satirized, but then so are surfers, film producers,
> prosecutors, loggers, music impresarios, landscapers, restaurateurs, and
> just about everybody else in California.
> 
> Student radicals, by the way, are not, strictly speaking, hippies. Hippies
> are by definition apolitical.
> 
>> 
>> But are you really claiming that "vile-minded" means "raunchy"
> 
> Yes. What else would it mean?
> 
> and that it
>> is a positive way of characterising someone's sexual fantasies?!
> 
> No, not positive, but since it's a description of a private thought that
> Zoyd would be keeping to himself had the narrator not intervened, it's not
> something I'm going to use to form a judgment about the character, either.
> If it was common practice to judge people by the quality and content of
> their sexual fantasies, in the event some omniscient narrator started
> spreading them around, we'd all be in a lot of trouble.
> 
> My point was that the adjective was specific to the fantasy, and shouldn't
> be generalized to a description of Zoyd's character.
> 
> Or is it
>> just another bait?
> 
> No bait intended.
>