"straightworld"

[John Bailey]

See also: square (and the great synonym someone employs somewhere in
IV which had me laughing).

Versus: groovy, hip, bent, any number of words denoting curvature or motion.

Where did this opposition come from, anyone? Think I recall reading a
discussion of it regarding the Beats or Burroughs or something.

I'm still harping on about how P twists that common vernacular to
connote something else surrounding geometry (or psychogeometry) and
the reduction of dimensions in IV, mind.

And btw, I agree that Doc is a satirical figure. Straight vs hip
doesn't turn out to describe his world at all. He is depth-impaired,
or rather, looks for depth in the wrong places (utopian beach
paintings) and misses the third dimension when it matters (dismissing
flatlanders and squares as lacking something).

On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 12:48 PM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> See page 38 where the term is used twice by Hope.
>
> GWENDOLYN BROOKS: I wrote it because I was passing by a pool hall in
> my neighborhood in Chicago one afternoon, and I saw... well, as I said
> in the poem, seven boys shooting pool. And I wondered how they felt
> about themselves, and I decided that they felt they were not quite
> valid, that they certainly were insecure, they were not cherished by
> the society, and therefore they would feel that they should, well,
> spit in the face of the establishment. I used the month of June as a
> symbol, an establishment symbol. Whereas the rest of us love and
> respect June, and wait for it to come so we can enjoy it, they would
> jazz June, derange it, scratch in it; do anything that would annoy the
> establishment.
>
> We real cool. We
> Left school. We
>
> Lurk late. We
> Strike straight. We
>
> Sing sin. We
> Thin gin. We
>
> Jazz June. We
> Die soon.
>
>
>
> On Sun, Aug 23, 2009 at 10:28 PM, Rob Jackson<jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> > That'd be "straightworld" as in those who don't smoke pot, i.e.,
> > "straights".
> >
> > "Straight" as opposed to "bent"; definitely not "straight" as opposed to
> > "gay".
> >
> > best regards
> >
> >
> > On 24/08/2009, at 11:41 AM, pynchon-l-digest wrote:
> >
> >> Date: Sun, 23 Aug 2009 10:16:44 -0700 (PDT)
> >> From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
> >> Subject: Pecking into Inherent Vice
> >>
> >> p. 2..."Gentleman of the straightworld persuasion", he [Doc] beamed.
> >
> >