VL-IV Un-Pop culture

[John Bailey]

Currently compiling a list of all tv and film references in VL - I
should have added music etc but only realised that 150 pages in - I'm
willing to mount a committed case against Pynchon "mocking" pop
culture in the novel. I should be able to post a complete list
tomorrow, but so far there's a heavy skew towards cartoons, and surely
P wouldn't have anyone throwing Tubal animation out with the
bathwater.

Plus there's Mucho Maas on p.313 (and I think Mucho's the
COL49/VL/(IV?)) Pig Bodine:

"...soon they're gonna be coming after everything, not just drugs, but
beer, cigarettes, sugar, salt, fat, you name it, anything that could
remotely please any of your senses, because they need to control all
that. And they will."

[Zoyd:] "Fat Police?"

"Perfume police. Tube Police. Music Police. Good Healthy Shit Police..."

I don't think Music or the Tube are being indicted here. Pynchon seems
to be a big fan of both. But the way the real target - systems of
repressive instituationalised power - ends up turning these
pleasurable recreations into escape outlets or cripplingly complicit
acceptances of our own powerlessness might be the problem.

Watching Looney Tunes is fun. Becoming unhealthily obsessed with The
Brady Bunch while carrying out state-sponsored cruelty is a problem.

On Thu, Jan 1, 2009 at 8:07 AM, Joe Allonby <joeallonby at gmail.com> wrote:
> One of the thing that I love about OBA and has brought me back time
> and time again is the playing of low culture vs high culture and the
> erasure of the vague line between.
>
> C'mon! Star Trek and Popeye allusions in M&D?
>
> Today's low culture is next century's high culture.
>
> On Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 2:41 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> bandwraith wrote:
>> Several things occurred to me while re-reading VL so far.
>> First, the lack of high culture. No Botticelli, Beethoven, or
>> any of the other high culture references so prominent in
>> the novels that preceded VL- not even a cartoon or a
>> kazoo version. "Classic" in this book refers to a car, a tv
>> show, a movie or some other pop venue, and nothing
>> more. There is the Marquis de Sade, but I'm not sure how
>> to classify the Marquis- high, low or something else.
>>
>> MK: I say de Sade is low, real lowdown and sadistically violent, as we know---and was newly popular in America from the sixties.
>>
>> Nabokov, read in some degree by our OBA, has this concept, "poshlost", to define a kind of pop culture 'kitsch' (and more):
>>
>> "he defined it as "'self-satisfied inferiority,' moral and spiritual" (Mirsky 1927, p. 158). Vladimir Nabokov made it more widely known in his book on Gogol, where he romanized it as "poshlust" (punningly: "posh + lust"). Poshlust, Nabokov explained, "is not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive" (Nabokov 1944, p. 70).
>>
>> From Count Chocula thru Leatherface through the Marquis de Sade, TRPs pop world of "Vineland" is full of a lust for violence and, arguably, the characters' kitschy culture?
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>