VLVL College of the Surf and PR3

[jbor]

Terrance:

> However,  I think we agree that the events in Pynchon's novel are set
> sometime in 1967, 68, 69, 70. If, as I contend, Pynchon's College of the
> Surf is a fictionalized Columbia-Berkeley (1968), it makes perfect sense
> that none of the issues above are on the agenda.

I think we'd narrowed it down a little more precisely than that. The episode
at College of the Surf occurs during early to mid-1969, approximately
half-way between the protests at Columbia in spring '68 and the tragic
confrontations at Kent State and Jackson State in May 1970. The mention of
Berkeley in the text refers to 1964.

An excellent first-hand account of the '68 Columbia protests is James
Kunen's _The Strawberry Statement_.

The lead-up to the proclamation of PR3 is really nothing like the events at
Columbia (the issues: building a university gym in a public park located
between the campus and Harlem, and Columbia's affiliation with the
Pentagon's Defense Institute - Civil Rights and anti-War), nor is what
transpires. In fact, Columbia '68 is noted *in the text* as a precursor of,
and therefore a precedent for, the College of the Surf fracas.

Thanks for the Sale quotes. I still don't agree that Pynchon satirises the
Berkeley and Columbia protests in this novel, and I'm not at all convinced
that he has set out to parody Sale's book.

best

> Sale describes the organization at Columbia, Fall 1967
> 
> Throughout the fall of 1967, at a time when resistance was in the air
> everywhere, SDS at Columbia was quite, confused, congealed: it was going
> through the doldrums that practically every chapter encountered  at one
> time or another. Several of the former chapter leaders had graduated or
> dropped out. Drugs proved a more satisfying answer for many, and
> certainly less frustrating. Progressive Labor members were gumming up
> chapter debates, turing the weekly meetings increasingly into battles
> between "correct lines" rather than forums to thrash out ideas. Elitism
> and male chauvinism turned away many potential recruits who could not
> find the in-group congenial, and lack of coherence and lack of action
> turned away still others. And above all a sharp disagreement had grown
> up in the chapter between the moderate leadership, now dubbed,
> half-mockingly, the "praxis-axis"___Kaptchuck, Gold, David Gilbert (a
> 1966 Columbia graduate) and others---and the resistance followers, who
> became known as the "action faction"---among them Jacobs, Papert, and
> Rudd. 
> 
> Sale describes their aborted all-out drive to rid the Campus of
> corporate recruiting and how this issue was effectively coopted by the
> Kirk Administration and the majority of the students who voted for open
> recruiting. 
> 
> Sale continues
> 
> It was in the wake of this defeat in early 1968 that the action faction
> began to assert itself.
> 
> I've already described the pie incident, Slothrop tossing a pie at the
> SSS colonel come to Columbia to tell the students about the virtues of
> military life. (Sale 433)
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> According to Sale (Pynchon's source) the slogan of SDS,  governed by
> the  "action-faction" becomes,  "The Issue is the Issue." This slogan is
> indicative of the "polarization" (the term Sale says SDSers used most
> often to describe their movement) in SDS and the fact that the issues
> mentioned above are no longer viable ones at Berkeley or Columbia.
> 
> 
> 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.
> 
> What happens at Columbia in 1968? What is the issue. It's Land
> Development. Who are the ADHOC at Columbia and what is their role? What
> about the police? Who calls the police? According to Sale, the police
> are called in a few times prior to the final assault is launched. SDS at
> Columbia has fewer than 300 members. What are the other students up to?
> What about the Conservative groups, they  also seize  a building? The
> Black students? What are names of the buildings seized. Hamilton, Low,
> Mathematics  Fayerweather, Architecture. Not Surfer's names. Can't be
> Columbia. Right? Why is their more resistance and violence at
> Mathematics? 
> 
>> 
>> 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.
> 
> No doubt about it.