VLVL the "Movement"

[jbor]

on 8/1/04 3:51 AM, Toby G Levy wrote:

>> I think you'll find that they are Student Movement people, i.e.
>> activists within the counterculture who went around from college campus
>> to college campus to escalate things, to stir up dissent against
>> university administrations, a bit like those old trade union organizers
>> we saw earlier.
> 
> You could be right.  Are you talking about SDS?  I have not read
> Pynchon's buddy Kirkpatrick Sale's book on SDS.  Have you?  But whatever
> movement these people represented, Pynchon casts them in a rather moronic
> light.

No, I haven't read that book. Is that one that Pynchon has blurbed? What's
Sale's take on the '60s Youth Movement?

I'm not sure that I agree with you that the "traveling Movement
co-ordinators" are being represented by Pynchon as "moronic", however.

>> But when traveling Movement co-ordinators began to show up,
>> they could only shake their heads and blink, as if trying to surface
>> from a dream. None of these kids had been doing any analysis. Not
>> only was nobody thinking about the real situation, nobody was even
>> brainlessly reacting to it. Instead they were busy surrounding with
>> a classically retrograde cult of personality a certain mathematics
>> professor, neither charismatic nor even personable, named Weed
>> Atman, who had ambled into celebrity. (205.6)
> 
> This is an extremely interesting paragraph, [...]. Though reinforcing
> Pynchon's sarcastic description
> of the College of the Surf kids themselves -- "boys loosening their ties,
> even taking off their jackets, girls ... hitching their skirts up as far as
> their knees, a thousand students ... drinking milk, eating baloney- and-
> white-bread sandwiches, listening to Mike Curb Congregation records on the
> radio, talking about ... the new Nixon monument" -- the glimpse of these
> "traveling Movement co-ordinators" and their superciliousness, their
> commitment to "analysis" and "the real situation", and their disdain for the
> "classically retrograde cult of personality" which they identified as
> prevailing on the campus, is equally mocking, if not more so. The fact that
> these "traveling Movement co-ordinators" went around acting as agents
> provocateurs and, implicitly, stirring up trouble, puts them in much the
> same league as Brock Vond.
> 

best