VL page 77 Sasha & Turn.2

[Prsamsa at aol.com]

I'm not up on this part. passage, but would like to urge everyone to read
the book that is quoted from, how TP is from Oyster Bay, is a sociologist,
etc: 
Lineland.  
It's the closest thing to a biography of Pynchon that exists, scanty and
dated as it is.
BUT with the caveat that author Jules Siegel may not understand that TP--
going by my experience with the service, in the 1970's, may have met a
lot of bookish, cultured sailors who MAY have talked in jazz lingo,
street-corner or times-square talk, and that MAY have been his first 
experience
with hipsters/beats.  Hip is an old word;  someone could do a word-search
and come up with it in Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, etc.  And less not
forget that Kerouac was a merchant seaman, and that one way for a person
to see the world and gain some "underground" wisdom was to join the Navy,
etc, and that the only book available to Pynchon of Kerouac's when he went
in the Navy, mid-1950's would have been:  'The Town and the City' by "John"
Kerouac, which has long passages on being a merchant seaman.  
   My experience in the service in the 1970's was that you don't change a 
person''s
character by cutting off their hair and putting them in a uniform;   There 
were always
a few culture-luvin hippie-types who wore earrings off duty, went to 
Amsterdam
on leave, and even:  SHOCK!  did drugs and read Kerouac, Rolling Stone and 
Sartre/
G. Stein.    
    We called ourselves "hippies in green."

Perry.  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20030929/e2aa7363/attachment.html>