aw. RE: Media Edukation

Robin Landseadel robinlandseadel at comcast.net
Fri Apr 17 10:20:57 CDT 2009


On Apr 17, 2009, at 7:44 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen wrote:

> My 12-year old daughter just started to read "Gegen den Tag" (AtD),  
> has
> already made more than a hundred pages and she likes it. Guess her  
> parents'
> media politics cannot be that bad.

I'm sure they're just swell. As far as I'm concerned the media  
politics of Kaia's parents are just swell. And good for you.

I'm sure Kaia will be some kind of a firebrand. I like how she's  
turning out.

Having said all that, and acknowledging that what we are reading is  
very much a satire—we are meant to laugh—there is still a paranoid  
aspect to Vineland's concept of the Tube as a delivery system of  
propaganda that has been altogether too successful. It's in the book's  
design, the way all these tales managed to get their respective happy  
ends, give or take an act of R.I.C.O., or two. Vineland is soaked in  
Television.

What really matters, in this family drama, is that somehow, we find  
our way home. We all know where home is, but we all know that "home"  
is slipping away. At the same time, from Vineland on, Family becomes a  
major theme and many of the characters are a far turn from the  
isolates of the earlier works. Family figures in Slothrop's tale, but  
mainly as shadow. What little sense of family Oedipa Maas has is being  
broken down the further she investigates Tristero. "V." is full of  
isolated yo-yos. But Vineland has a lot to say about family & the  
sorts of "happy endings" we learned from the Tube. As does Against the  
Day.







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