VLVL PR3 and "the Movement"

[jbor]

on 8/2/04 2:34 AM, Terrance wrote:

> VL focuses on  a specific time period (1967-70) in the movement. It is
> also focused on the Traveling Organizers of SDS (Frenesi's Film Crew)
> and two Universities (Berkeley and Columbia, Berkeley and College of the
> Surf). 

I disagree. The events at College of the Surf occur after Nixon has taken
office and set the DOJ to work on quelling campus activism. Columbia is
mentioned once (208), as an exemplar for Rex of what College of the Surf and
PR3 are *not* like. I agree that the "traveling Movement co-ordinators"
(205.6) are probably SDS honchos, but they are explicitly *not* 24fps:

    The 24fps convoy rolled in the day after the official declaration.
                                                            (209.15)

I agree that the earlier scene where DL and Frenesi meet (116-8) is a
protest march near Berkeley which takes place in early 1967. The text does
not indicate what this demonstration is about. The film footage Prairie
watches at Ditzah's place (198-9) is a montage of other protests and
situations, and includes footage of farm workers protesting, Troopers
disbanding a commune in Texas, cops burning marijuana crops, and police and
military interventions on college and high school campuses.

> The focus of the novel is not intended to imply that one
> organization deserves credit for all of the youthful protest
> activity--violent or non violent--occuring in the years under
> consideration or that Berkeley and Columbia were the beating hearts of
> youthful protest. SDS was most prominent in major campus disorder, but
> lots of disorders occurred when and where SDS-ers were not present.
> 
> VL is about work. As we view the film reel after reel we see Frenesi out
> with her camera filming the repression of farm workers who are trying to
> organize in 1967.

Briefly, yes, Frenesi is filmed speaking to a local news team (195) about
the farm workers' strikes (and her sentiments here are undermined by the
hints of her duplicity), but in terms of what she was filming as 24fps
roamed the countryside "looking for trouble" it's one example of what was
happening of about half a dozen (198-9).

> The brother of the murdered President is in that
> valley meeting with one of America's greatest labor figures, a person
> not as well known as Martin Luther King only because America has a black
> and white memory.

This is not in the text, however.

> Frenesi is the  daughter and granddaughter of labor
> organizers. Her idea of one big revolution that will take everyone in,
> is IWW. 

Page? Passage?

> But her dream is of the people marching into the blade of the
> police must give us pause. What has happened to Frenesi? She has a spark
> of gnostic light in her eyes when she meets her partner, DL.

Frenesi makes explicit Christian analogies all through the text, however.
There is no indication that Frenesi's or 24fps's obsession with "light" is
specifically "gnostic".

> DL is not the daughter of the Left, but the daughter of the military,
> the police, a marriage of domestic and foreign abuse. She wants to kick
> The Man's ass. She might have been a great soldier for Cuba, but she's
> too restless. An angry army brat, she has a personal score to settle
> with the Old Man.
> 
> In College of the Surf  period that Pynchon focuses on in VL, SDS began
> building an alliance of workers and students. Off-camous activism in the
> spring of 1969 was illustrated by the appearance of college students on
> picketlines of striking workers--action not confined to those SDS
> members favoring the Progressive Party line of building aworker-student
> alliance.  The new "Revolutionary Youth Movement" directed SDS's
> attention toward non-student groups. Students from NYC and NJ joined
> workers in a wildcat strike at Ford in Mahwah, NJ, April 1969. Mark
> Rudd, and I'm quite convinced that the College of the Surf is a
> fictionalized Columbia set in Dick Nixon's backyard (and we should not
> neglect the role of the surfers and how their culture was co-opted),
> Rudd, of Columbia, and member of the Black Panther Party were among
> those manning the picket lines (later, Frenesi and Flash will cross a
> picket line at the airport) which succeeded in closing the Ford Plant
> for two nights. SDS was there to help improve the lives of black workers
> in the Plant and in the Union. Same sort of thing was going on in places
> like Michigan, where white workers engaged in a  wildcat strike were
> joined buy students from University of Michigan. On campus too, labor
> was an issue. Student sit-ins at the University of Chicago defending a
> Marxist professor, same thing at Stanford.

One problem with your insistence that College of the Surf is Columbia is
that at Columbia in 1969 there had already been a long history of student
activism. It's explicit in the text that there has been nothing like this at
College of the Surf. It is a fictionalised representation of one of the
"major protest demonstrations" which occurred in early 1969:

All told, there were major protest demonstrations at nearly three hundred
colleges and universities in every part of the country, at a rate of nearly
two a day, involving a third of the nation's students, roughly 20 percent of
them accompanied by bombs, fires or destruction of property, a quarter by
strikes or building takeovers, and a quarter more by disruption of classes
and institutional functions. (Sale, _SDS_, 511-2)

Mike Rudd and Columbia U. are not in the text.

best


> But the violence, the vandalism, the disruption of classes, and so on
> ...  also intensified. The stuff we here on this list all the time,
> "Confrontation" Politics and Militant Anti-Militarization, increase and
> I think Pynchon's focus on these and this period serves to denounce
> these practices and show the damage they caused, but also to expose the
> inherent flaws of floundering polarization policies, how alliances are
> made and broken, not only at the macro level, Russia and the USA of
> pre-post W.W.II in GR, but at the micro or worker level. How, for
> example, the BPP's strain with labor and eventually with SDS,
> contributed to the failure of the workers and the kids to get together.
> 
> Sorry this is more rambled and rough ...ruff ruff ruffer than my usual
> sandpaper and glue job ...    very busy.
> 
> T