re Re: VL to SL: Pynchon's Self-Characterization

[pynchonoid]

Otto:
[...] Pynchon was too young for the Beats and too old
for the Hippies. [...] 

I don't think it's his age that's the issue.  As a
young man in the late 50s he's right in the Beat
Generation sweet spot, isn't he? And he seems to have
been part of the beatnik scene -- hanging out in
Greenwich Village, listening to jazz, associating with
folk musicians, & etc. 

Otto:
[...]  This is
pitiable and lucky the same. Makes him kind of a
bridging figure and enables
him to see things more clearly than people actually
involved in any of the
forms of the movement. [...]

He's not one of the "Beat Generation" celebrity artist
insiders, imo that (plus his artist's perspective)is
what makes him "marginal" -- as he says in the SL
Intro, he's responding to the beatnik writers -- even
as he's living a beatnik life, working on his stories
and novels, having traveled some distance from his
relatively affluent suburban childhood, and having
departed radically from the Brooks Brothers future
that might have seemed normal for someone coming up in
that time and place.

He wasn't too old for the hippie scene of the 60s,
either -- plenty of 30-somethings among that decade's
phase of the ongoing counter-culture movement. 


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