Take a load off Fanny, ain't you gonna miss your best friend now

[Paul Mackin]

On Fri, 2004-02-20 at 08:59, Terrance wrote:
>  She thus makes people confess as facts tendencies which, in view of the
> **structure
> > of the culture**, can be predicted, and the confession of which is
> > profitable for anybody's inner peace. 
> 
> The structure of the culture. 
> 
> In the Slow Learner Introduction and,  in his more recent essay, The
> Foreword to Orwell's _1984_, Pynchon hints that his thinking about what
> divides America and keeps the majority of her citizens relatively poor
> and powerless is not racial based discord, but Class. 

I remember the p-list discussion of this fondly. That unparsible
paragraph. Some of us found it made sense if you read it over fast. Or
was that another paragraph.

> 
> We should take a closer look at the Shape of Trasero County and the
> Structure of the culture, at Brock's Marxist mini-state, at the
> underground city where Frenesi works and lives with Flash and her new
> family,  and compare these shapes and structures with Vineland, 
> Thanatoid Village, all the area where Prairie and Zoyd live. Perhaps
> Eliade will be useful. Erikson too. How are these world connected and
> penetrated? 

American adolescence has an early and a late stage. Down in Trasero
Country we see its early stage, which proves no match for the wily Brock
Vond. However, in the later stage, of aging hippie adolescence, up in
Vineland, Brock is undone with aid of local native American mythology,
and life can go on to the next stage of human development. If there IS a
next stage.

I don't think Pynchon is terribly bothered by people not growing up.



> 
> In any event, isn't interesting that Eliot X's argument divides the
> People. 
> What a rock star. And he attacks the children of the surfing class, the
> indigenous people of the area who have been pushed off their sandy dunes
> and cliffs with a view of the great green giants, squeezed out by a
> conservative polytechnic student body funded by real estate developers,
> oil, hollywood cash. What a guy that Eliot X. 
> 
> Money Money Money Money
> 
> MONEY! 
> 
> Money Money Money Money 
> 
> MONEY! 


Yurok influence no doubt.

> 
> "As a matter of fact, Fanny was in an acute state of gloom when we
> arrived. Some days before, on stepping out into her vegetable garden and
> glancing over the scene, a hundred feet below, where the Klamath enters
> the Pacific. she had seen a small whale enter the river, play about a
> little, and disappear again. This shocked her deeply. Had not the
> creator decreed that only salmon, sturgeon, and similar fish should
> cross the fresh-water barrier? This breakdown of the barrier could only
> mean that the world disk was slowly losing its horizontal position, that
> salt water was entering the rive, and that a flood was approaching
> comparable to the one which once before had destroyed mankind." 
> 
> Childhood & Society 
> 
> Chapter 10: The Yurok and Hupa of the Northern Coast
> 
> http://www4.hmc.edu:8001/humanities/indian/ca/ch10.htm

Who is more important to Vineland? Erik Erikson or Leif Erikson?