TPPM Watts: (9) Culture clash?

[Paul Nightingale]

Holdt makes a connection between racism and fear, which is another way
of saying, as I did in my first post, that the culture clash isn't one
of equals. The 'haves' fear the 'have-nots'; and the 'culture clash' is
about power as much as anything. While reading the Watts essay I've been
thinking more and more of Orwell's Wigan Pier, another (more ambitious)
attempt to describe working-class poverty to a middle-class audience. It
was this that I had in mind when I equated documentary realism to
street-dirt: one purpose of the text is to offer the reader/tourist some
kind of vicarious thrill. Avoiding this relationship between reader and
text is key to the Watts text, I think, which is why the Rodia passage
'interrupts' the street-dirt description: the signifiers of poverty are
transformed into something else.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On
> Behalf Of Otto
> Sent: 26 September 2004 12:44
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Subject: Re: TPPM Watts: (9) Culture clash?
> 
> I think this misunderstanding is inevitable. It has to do with the
fact
> that
> the white middle-class isn't exposed to those "terms of strict
reality"
> like
> "disease, (...) failure, violence and death" which the overwhelming
part
> of
> the blacks cannot afford to ignore. But it has been (it is?) American
> reality:
> http://www.american-pictures.com/english/jacob/luck.htm
> 
> Otto
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Paul Nightingale" <isread at btopenworld.com>
> To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Saturday, September 25, 2004 4:54 PM
> Subject: TPPM Watts: (9) Culture clash?
> 
> 
> > "The two cultures do not understand each other, though white values
are
> > displayed without let-up on black people's TV screens ..."
> >