Idle OBA, Creeping Vineland?

[Robin Landseadel]

	Mark Kohut: I think I'm saying that P presents Zoyd as still  
immature....
	too passive within his own life as we meet him, although, yes, as
	loveable as are so many of P's schlemiels (as David says).....
	C'mon, loveable as he is, he has lived an acted-out lie all these  
years.

In a way, Pynchon maintaining his legend via a paranoid "cone of  
silence"
around his own life is acting out a lie as well. Particularly  
considering the
very real probability that there's plenty of heavily redacted  
autobiography
and family history in his novels.

	Mark Kohut: A-and it may generalize to the theme of too many suchlike
	aging "hippies" being part of the problem, as it used to be said, that
	leads to all that happens in Vineland.

I remember, back in 1980, while I was living on the lot of the Northern
Renaissance Faire in Novato CA [the southern edge of "Vineland"] a
"hippie" musician who voted for Reagan. The problem went deeper
than just stoner's sloth. In the process of coming down from the "Cosmic
Consciousness" of acid trips quotidian reality creeps in, bills must be
paid, children must be raised. The acid flash tells us that we are  
immortal,
but Desmond still needs his dog-food, and Count Chocula ain't gonna  
cut it.

	Mark Kohut: I think the jays, the creeping fig are a kind of poetic,
	imagistic rendering of the invasion by fascist-(like) forces--which
	is coming in the book-- because it comes in America without our
	vigilance, with our passivity, so to speak.

Well, as I just told John Carvill, Stellar Jays are a pain in the ass  
all by themselves.
It's easy to imagine that TRP is playing a game in his head with the  
opening scene:
Zoyd's annual act of transfenestration is akin to Pynchon periodically  
exposing himself
to the press via publishing another novel/essay/blurb. But what can a  
poor boy do, 'cept
to sing for a rock 'n roll band? Understand that Vineland is a pretty  
harsh critique of the
left. At the same time, all this self-criticism is funny:

	. . .(after you get a little time in-whatever that means over here- 
one of
	these archetypes gets to look pretty much like any other, oh you hear
	some of these new hires, the seersucker crowd come in the first day,
	"Wow! Hey-that's th-th' Tree O' Creation! Huh? Ain't it! je-eepers!"  
but
	they calm down fast enough, pick up the reflexes for Intent to Gawk,
	you know self-criticism's an amazing technique, it shouldn't work but
	it does ....
	GR [P] , pg 417