Vineland: The Sit-Com

[Robin Landseadel]

On Apr 20, 2009, at 7:32 AM, Dave Monroe wrote:

> On Sun, Apr 19, 2009 at 11:09 AM, Robin Landseadel
> <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>> The whole article : "Television and Literature: David Foster  
>> Wallace's
>> Concept of Image-Fiction, Don DeLillo's White Noise and Thomas  
>> Pynchon's
>> Vineland"
>>
>> http://home.foni.net/~vhummel/Image-Fiction/TOC.html
>
> Thanks!

Your welcome. Just because Vineland is downright funny doesn't alter  
the seriousness of the subject at hand.

On Apr 19, 2009, at 2:17 PM, Paul Mackin wrote:

> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Robin Landseadel" <robinlandseadel at comcast.net 
> >
> To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Sunday, April 19, 2009 12:09 PM
> Subject: Vineland: The Sit-Com
>
> (quoting vhummell I think)
>
>> Ultimately, the managed version of reality serves Brock Vond
>> and no one else which again indicates that Pynchon's book is
>> concerned with questions of power and politics.
>
> Does it really serve BV and no one else?

Not really, but Brock Vond is the official face of "THEM" in Vineland,  
so plot-wise it's true enough. Vineland puts a more "human" face on  
subjects that Pynchon has been writing about all along.

> In cop shows the cop always wins.

There's a few Law 'n Orders that have bad cops on parade. But, as a  
quick search into history will indicate, Cop Shows Are Propaganda.  
Plain & Simple as that.

	Nixon's drug war delivered large doses of farce. A doped-out
	Elvis Presley was inducted as an honorary member of the
	Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. A heroin "sniffer"
	device - conspicuously concealed in a Volkswagen camper van
	with a snorkel sticking out of the roof - was dispatched to
	Marseilles in the belief that it could locate the labs where
	morphine was turned into heroin. The intricate map of heroin
	labs it produced turned out to be a map of Marseilles
	restaurants: the "sniffer" was unable to distinguish the fumes
	emitted by heroin from those emitted by salad dressing.

	In spite of these and other fiascos, however, the drugs war took
	hold in the public imagination. Instead of being understood as a
	health and social problem, drug addiction was defined as a
	law-and-order problem. Movies and TV serials spread the
	image of the drugs war around the world and shaped the way
	most countries responded to the problem of drug abuse.
	http://www.drugsense.org/tfy/nixon.htm

> And soap heroines are long suffering but are always restored to  
> health for the next segment.

As are all those distaff roles in Vineland.

> TV doesn't seem like a very sinister force in VL (over and beyong  
> what we always knew about its being a wasteland and time waster).

While the sinister Tube is given a comic treatment in Vineland, it's  
still sinister. A lot of Vineland concerns itself with smiley-faced  
fascism. "The Tube" is so ubiquitous in Vineland that it's hard to  
find anyone in the book who has not been adversely affected by its  
comforting rays.

> I like McHales idea that TV is useful for zapping between various  
> realities.

The Firesign Theater is also keen on that—their most popular [early]  
recordings are very much about zapping [and blurring] between various  
realities:

http://tinyurl.com/dyw8x7

http://tinyurl.com/djx5tr

Happy 420!