VL to SL: Pynchon's Self-Characterization

[Terrance]

> 
> I think that in the _SL_ Intro he characterises himself as becoming more
> socially, culturally and politically aware through his exposure to Beat
> culture and ideas, and as maturing from being an "unpolitical '50s student"
> into someone who "saw deeper" into the Beat sensibility of the times and who
> embraced both its trappings (jazz music, drugs) and its "values"
> (anti-Establishment). I can't see how the first wave of the "hippie
> resurgence" could possibly have "vindicated" any brand of conservatism.


No, this is not what he says at all. Pynchon says, 

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

He goes on to describe his generation of writers, the post-Beats and the
post-Beat time when loyalties were divided between what was being taught
in college (modernist tradition) and what was seeping in from the world,
Beats and so on ... when his  generation (not the Beat generation) of
post-Beat writers were onlookers and consumers, getting everything
second hand from the media, adopting Beat postures and props. He says
nothing about the Beat values equaling anti-establishment. He would be
in error if he did say this. And he says that as post-Beats, not Beats,
but post-Beats, his generation of writers came came to see "deeper into
what, after all, was a sane and decent affirmation of of what we all
want to believe about American values. An excellent student of the
Beats, a post-Beat writer, Pynchon is talking about the sanity of those
who tried to convince the American people that the rulers of the nation
were insane Rocketmen launching a  MIC paranoid culture into a theatre
of everlasting war and nuclear destruction. Read Ginsberg. Poem Rocket,
Howl, America, all the poems in Parts II, IV, V, his collected poems
1947-1980.