VLVL What is Pynchon's attitude towards the "traveling Movementco-ordinators"?

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2004 1:27 AM
Subject: VLVL What is Pynchon's attitude towards the "traveling
Movementco-ordinators"?
>
>  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
>

Implicitly? No word of "stirring up trouble" in the text:

    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)

Nice translation of this part in the German text: "(...) who had ambled into
celebrity."

"(...) der zu seiner Berühmtheit gekommen war wie die Jungfrau zum Kind."
(257)

The word-choice "analysis" and "classically retrograde cult of personality"
reveals that this is marxist-slang, that this is what these co-ordinators
theoretically could have reported to other travelling revolutionaries.

The following scene emphasizes the meaning and importance of marijuana for
the 60's revolution. Pynchon is highly ironical here and critisizes the
widespread opinion that when you smoke a joint you don't need to do
political analysis anymore because the weed makes you see what is wrong.

Otto