Watts article

[pynchonoid]

--- jbor :
> The really interesting thing about it is the way
> that Pynchon's article,
> even 38 years later, still manages to get up the
> nose of some middle class
> white boys -- quick to latch on to any fault, real
> or imaginary, by which to
> resist the whole essay and so try to defend the
> superiority of their
> "reality" and, correspondingly perhaps, the reality
> of their "superiority".

I don't think we've seen anybody here trying to
"resist the whole essay", although given the vague
nature of the accusation it's difficult to know if
anybody has actually committed such an offense. 

Pynchon makes his preterite sympathies and his views
of black/white relations in the US plain enough in the
Watts piece, building on the picture of genocide that
he presented in V., to lay out a view of race and
class in Southern California that not only reappears
in COL49, but also in GR, again in Vineland, and finds
its roots in M&D. 

I'm just trying to help jbor get your facts straight,
so that when jbor make an interpretation based on the
size of Pynchon's audience -- estimates of the
relative impact of one book or article compared to
another, based on distribution or circulation -- it's
on solid ground.  

At this early stage of Pynchon's career, he seems to
have been opportunistic in his search for an audience.
 He took advantage of the publishing options available
to him at Cornell. He got a break when literary agent
Candida Donadio agreed to represent him (she was
Joseph Heller's agent, and Pynchon got to her via a
recommendation by novelist Herb Gold, mentioned by
Pynchon in the Slow Learner intro,  if I remember
correctly) - now Pynchon's stories are published in
widely circulated magazines:  Cavalier, Esquire,
Saturday Evening Post.  His college friend Kirkpatrick
Sale gives him an assignment for the NY Times
Magazine. Critical reception to V., then COL49, is
flattering. He was a hot young writer with a growing
audience.

Obviously, Pynchon wanted to take part in the
nationwide dialogue that was shaping up about
black/white politics in the US. When he had a shot at
a mass market magazine of iconic status in the
American mediasphere (said to be founded by Benjamin
Franklin, known for the Norman Rockwell paintings it
used as cover illustrations), Saturday Evening Post,
he uses the opportunity to publish "The Secret
Integration", a story about racial integration in the
suburbs, and gets his ideas out to millions of readers
across the US.  This, at a time when much of
small-town America -- the society celebrated in those
Norman Rockwell paintings -- was bitterly divided over
the racial integration issue. A couple of years later,
when he has a shot at publishing an essay in the NY
Times, a publication with relatively little nationwide
distribution (at that time, compared to the weeklies)
but with large inflluence in the US Establishment,
Pynchon addresses similar issues of black/white
politics.  He's managed to inject his ideas across the
board, from small-town America to New York City, where
they have continued to percolate through a long,
successful publishing career.


=====
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"everything connects"


		
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