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

[Terrance]

pynchonoid wrote:
> 
> 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.

"I enjoyed only a glancing acquaintance with the Beat movement." 

	--Thomas R. Pynchon 


> 
> 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.

No, this isn't all what Pynchon describes in his SL Introduction. 
He never says anything about living a beatnik life. Otto is correct.
What Pynchon says is that he missed the Beat movement, had only a
glancing acquaintance with the Beat movement. P talks about reading The
Wandering Scholars and joining the navy before returning to college to
finish his degree before taking a job at the huge defense company,
Boeing. 

God, Doug, have you been putting LSD in  your fruit loops again? 


> 
> 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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