Re: VL-IV 1: “Love Your Outfit”, pgs. 10/11 plain text

[Michael Bailey]

I'ma go out on a limb and opine that perhaps Zoyd is an archetype.
That way I don't feel guilty about him not being my protagonist.  I've
promoted him.
A primal archetype, a postulate: I don't liken him to any other archetype.

Although he's perhaps a cousin or nephew to Papa Legba, opener of
gates. (Frenesi Gates, to be specific! ...groan...)

(speaking of cousins, there's this phrase that keeps going thru my
mind, "cousin German to the queen" - I found reference to a personage
of whom the queen was cousin-german on this pg:
http://ehistory.osu.edu/osu/books/Froissart/0116.cfm
and a definition here http://www.answers.com/topic/cousin-german,
apparently it's the same as a first cousin - but no clue why this
phrase fascinates me so)



On 12/7/08, Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
> Hector is waiting to  be re-introduced to Zoyd as he pretends to play a
> Zaxxon machine. [The Zaxxon is a video arcade game made by Ikegami
> Tsushinki, inventor of the hand-held video camera]. Another plot thread is
> dumped into the mix with the introduction of the manager of "The Cuke" Ralph
> Wayvone, Jr.:
>
>  . . . a remittance man from San Francisco, where his father was a figure of
> some substance, having grown successful in business areas where transactions
> are overwhelmingly in the form of cash. . .
>
>  This eventually leads to one of the book's best set-pieces, Billy Barf &
> the Vomitones playing at a Mob wedding. Yet another passage of description
> of class positioning via OTT apparel:
>
>  . . .Today Ralph Jr. was all dolled up in a Cerruti suit, white shirt with
> cuff links, touch-them-you-die double-soled shoes from someplace offshore,
> the works. . .
>
>  . . .reminiscent of the scene at the Log Jam.
>
>  Ralph Jr., after kvetching about his sister's upcoming wedding, shows Zoyd
> to Hector:
>
>         "Uh-huh." He and Hector exchanged the briefest of thumbgrips."
>
>  Go to the "urban dictionary" now and you'll find "thumbgrips" mutated into
> the two little dimples found at the small of a woman's back, but in this
> case it's more like a miniaturized variation on the whole slap & dap routine
> that's somehow associated with Inner City types/Vietnam War vets, at least
> in terms of Blaxploitation and the subgenre of Vietnam War flix, like
> "Who'll Stop the Rain" [1978], "Apocalypse Now" [1979] and "Tropic Thunder"
> [2008]. [see: "The Big Lebowski" [1998].] Just a few pages later:
>
>
>  Isaiah, in their greeting, wanted to slap and dap, having always somehow
> believed that Zoyd had seen combat in Vietnam. Some of this was bush-vet and
> jailyard moves Zoyd recognized, some was private choreography he couldn't
> keep up with, though he tried, Isaiah throughout humming Jimi Hendrix's
> "Purple Haze." "Hey, so, Mr. Wheeler," Isaiah at last, "how you doing?"
>  Vineland, pg. 18
>
>  I guess this makes the Hector/Zoyd thumbgrip the exact opposite of "R-2
> D-2's" species of blatant ass-kissing. Page 22 has some serious explain'
> goin' on about this whole Hector/Zoyd thing:
>
>  IT was a romance over the years at least as persistent as Sylvester and
> Tweety's. Although Hector may from time to time have wished some cartoon
> annihilation for Zoyd, he'd understood from early in their acquaintance that
> Zoyd was the chasee he'd be least likely ever to bag.  . .
>
>
>  Vineland is the land of the Tube, and a Tubal consideration here is the
> animated cartoon, "The Tube" and the impact of TV cartoons on language. The
> genre of "Comix" or "Underground Comics" owes as much to Tex Avery and Chuck
> Jones as it does to George Grosz and Ed Rusha. And Road-Runner cartoons have
> had more impact on Pynchon's writing than Foucault. Vineland has the best
> cartoons of any of Pynchon's books and if everything here seems scaled down
> here, it's because its now scaled down to the size of a cheap, portable TV
> in the back of a double-wide, instead of the Wide Screen Technicolor of the
> Orpheus Theater in Gravity's Rainbow.
>
>  Hector and Zoyd continue their comic sniping. Hector's gonna prove just how
> "bad" he rilly is. Comic complications snake around like a Bach fugue in
> these parts as Zoyd tries to blow off Hector, sets up an appointment in a
> bowling alley with Zuniga, dances around a TV studio's worth of equipment,
> recalls a mantra he paid for with money he really didn't have, musters up
> enough nerve to jump through a plate glass window and the very moment he
> hits, he realizes something's wrong . . .
>


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