VLVL TV Parody or a Satire

[Terrance]

jbor wrote:
> 
> on 7/1/04 3:30 PM, Terrance wrote:
> 
> > What the hell is zapping?  McHale call his essay Zapping on Vineland.
> 
> It's a long time since I read it, but I think McHale uses "zapping" to mean
> channel-switching or channel-surfing. I think I agree with you that it
> wasn't one of his most convincing pieces on Pynchon's work. Pynchon uses and
> refers to a variety of sub-genres of tv programs, movies, cartoons, songs
> &c, and in a variety of ways, in the text.

Agreed,  the essay is still very useful. 

My title was inspired b y that of Richard Shusterman's essay, "The Fine 
Art of Rap" (Shusterman 1991). There is much that could be said about
the relations between the practice of channel-switching ("zapping) and
"sampling" in rap music; unfortunately, it will have to be said
elsewhere. 



Dancing About Architecture : Postmodernism  and Irish Popular Music  by 
Stephen Ryan
http://www.icr.dit.ie/volume7/articles/article02.html




> 
> I also had the impression that Vato & Blood were somehow implicated in Ortho
> Bob being "damaged in Vietnam" (174.20, 179.5-6).

In the paragraphs toward the end of his essay, titled Death and
television, McHale talks about Ortho Bob. 

First McHale  discusses Prairie's quest via other media ...  The 
computer monitor at the Sister's Retreat, film at Ditzah's house, 
noting that Prairie's viewing are "mediumistic" ones, that is, it's  as
if Prairie is attempting to contact her mother's spirit or ghost through
the apparatus of the computer screen and film projector. Prairie thinks
about all this in gothic term, exploring the gothic house where her
Mother's ghost leads her into rooms. Her mother, in these imaginings, is
dead only different. Kinda like a Thanatoid. 

At some point Prairie understood that the person behind the camera most
of the time was her Mother, and that if she kept her mind empty she
could absorb, conditionally become, 
Frenesi, share her eyes, feel, when the frame shook with fatigue or fear
or nausea, Frenesi's whole body there, as much as her mind choosing the
frame, her will to go out there, load the role, get the shot. Prairie
floated, ghostly light of head, as if Frenesi were dead but in a special
way, a minimum security arrangement, where limited visits, mediated by
projector and screen, were possible. As if somehow, next reel or the one
after, the girl would find a way, some way, to speak to her....  VL199

Dead but in a special way: mediated death. 

The Thanatoids of VL, McHale explains, occupy the excluded middle ground
between the one and the zero of life and death. 

There seems to be little interest in why and how  VL is as saturated
with Work as it is with TV, and this exaplins why, for example, critical
comments on the  passage above ignore the prison meatphor.