VLVL College of the Surf and PR3

[jbor]

While it's a shame that there's no-one posting who has any actual first-hand
knowledge of the youth movement and protests at Berkeley and Columbia in the
early '60s, there are many reliable memoirs and well-researched secondary
sources available. From these it's clear that anti-War, Civil Rights,
feminism, free speech and other worthwhile causes were once on the student
protest agenda, whereas at College of the Surf they're not. In Pynchon's
depiction of where "the Movement" ended up by the late '60s it's ADHOC, All
Damned Heat Off Campus (and the police are there because the students called
them), and secession from the USA to keep the College from being turned into
holiday condos (and the PR3 kids don't even realise that their college is
really only a training camp for wage slaves). A farce. Not like Columbia and
Berkeley at all, I'm afraid.

I think the description of the student protests at Cornell in Pynchon's
'Intro' to the Fariña novel, and the description of Oedipa's visit to
Berkeley in the early '60s in _Lot 49_, provide a relevant contrast to the
description of PR3 in this novel.

I agree with Dave's Tom Robbins comparison. _Still Life With Woodpecker_ was
diverting enough in it's way, fine for a wet Sunday afternoon, but
_Vineland_, from Pynchon, was a real let-down. Not a patch on _M&D_,
Pynchon's other novel from the '90s.

best