VL page 77 Sasha & Turn.2

[Don Corathers]

I'm guessing you haven't read too far into Lineland, Perry, if you're seriously recommending it to this list.

Don


  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Prsamsa at aol.com 
  To: monrovius at yahoo.com ; pynchon-l at waste.org 
  Sent: Monday, September 29, 2003 10:30 PM
  Subject: Re: VL page 77 Sasha & Turn.2




  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.  
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