VineLand-IntraVenous: Un-Pop culture

[bandwraith at aol.com]

Interesting, but what can we make of this? Amongst a
stew of pop cult references, a few bits of esoterica-
Several metaphors come to mind:

 They could be acting like hypertext- still a fairly
new idea in 1990, at least for the general public- but
read its history here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext#Early_precursors_to_hypertext

(and note the usual cast of visionaries). Thus helping
to make the text "n" dimensional- think of Zoyd, Super
Slob, jumping out of flatland, through screen, and into
your lap.

 Or, maybe this admixing is analogous to the "doping" of
silicon that made it more useful in supplanting vacuum tubes
as the "gates" of (and to) the future.

 And then, there is the Acedia Squad:

  Perhaps the future of Sloth will lie in sinning against
  what now seems increasingly to define us -- technology.
  Persisting in Luddite sorrow, despite technology's good
  intentions, there we'll sit with our heads in virtual reality,
  glumly refusing to be absorbed in its idle, disposable
  fantasies. even those about superheroes of Sloth back
  in Sloth's good old days, full of leisurely but lethal mis-
  adventures with theruthless villains of the Acedia Squad.

http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/uncollected/sloth.html

An article I found difficult, but making the interesting
point that the definition of Sloth has, with technology,
evolved. So, who is more guilty of Sloth/Acedia- the
reader who tunes into the Pee-wee Herman half of
the reference and glosses the Musil half, or, vice versa?
Maybe it depnds on your subculture, but the spread
between them is getting simultaneously, or paradoxically,
more difficult to span and yet more difficult to keep
separate, with the advent of easy information- "on the
cheap," through technology. Everything is linkable now.

I think the troopers after Takeshi, and his Hypercards,
may be from the Acedia Squad, trying to eliminate any
attempts to re-define Sloth and ADJUST the status quo-
and so, convert (by mark-up Language?) low puns
into High Magic, or make Sloth into a useful activity.


From: Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen@[omitted]>
To: <bandwraith@[omitted]>, <pynchon-l@[omitted]>
Subject: RE: VineLand-IntraVenous: Un-Pop culture
Date: Fri, 2 Jan 2009 12:10:23 +010

Good point, but there's another exception: Robert Musil.
Not unimportant for P, I guess.

Right, it's framed inside TV-movie ontology. Yet still ...

"About the time the show ended, Prairie came by, Zoyd and
Flash went off looking for beer, and she and Justin settled
down, semi-brother and sister, in front of the Eight O'Clock
Movie, Pee-wee Herman in THE ROBERT MUSIL STORY. It was mostly
Pee-wee talking in a foreign accent, or sitting around in front
of some pieces of paper with some weird-looking marker pen, and
the kids' attention kept wandering to each other." (pp. 370-1)

Portrait of the Artist as a magick marker Icon, so to speak:

KFL+