Opening chapters: the culture of violence in Vineland

[Mark Kohut]

I had drafted this post back before I was offline. I wanted to
improve it, but the time is past. 
 
Forgot to say to check the wiki re anything  you are intersted in and
I may not post about that is in the chapters I am hosting. I will try NOT 
to repeat the wiki posts, but I will surely fail. 
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 Whatever Vineland America has fallen to since the VIkings'
discovered it, is simply entropic compared to what the culture
has become by 1984.
 
Start with those jays. (Birds are predatory or innocent, usually,
so to speak,in Against the Day. See mini-essay on the wiki).
 
TRP could have chosen almost any cereal in the opening pages,
such as Fruit Loops which would have made a nice SSI 'crazy'
joke but he chose Count Chocula, a cereal playing on the Dracula 
story. Cf. that story used in AtD. 
 
Zoyd's chain saw is ten years after The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 
started to move that tool for a tree holocaust--see Vineland cover--, so to speak,
 into an iconic totem for human violence as well. (I just saw Leatherface
in a TV commercial. 2008).
 
And these are just small pervasive symbols around the plot attempt to build 
violence centers by the spawn of 60s hippies which holds center stage.
Hippies spawned a violent strain or was it just another turn on the (cosmic)
Wheel of fortune for America?
 
 "Anyone, anyone, Bueller, anyone?" 
 
>From D. H. Lawrence: Something like "America's soul is violent"...H. Rap Brown,
(Cf. Stokely's dog..."Violence is as American as apple pie".)...
 
But in Vineland, as opposed to Cof L49, his other California novel, violence pervades, I think.