VL--IV, "a gig of death" or Don't Take the Piano Player!

[Michael Bailey]

Mark:
> Thinking of some later stuff in Vineland, you've convinced me.  I think you are somehow righter than I am....
>

but you are both unimpressed with Kahuna Airlines.
However, isn't it kind of cool in a "stoner's idea of in-flight
entertainment" way?
I mean, in this day & age when all the fun has gone out of flying,
wouldn't it be great if some airline actually did that?
It doesn't have to be all portentous, ie could just be typos
differentiating the passenger manifests in & out
Zoyd could be reading them because, like Gopher on Love Boat, he needs
to know so he can facilitate activities, friendships, even romance...

Sure there are overtones, allusions, nuances, but the "main sequence"
story element is an "actual" airline set up that way.  Which resolves
into, or points to, the sort of party/disco atmosphere of the 70s
that a lot of people escaped from monogamy into...or so I hear...

>
> The Rest of yuz, pipe up!

this is plain and simple a wonderful book.  Everything in it is great.
 The hero is a stoner who doesn't get killed, nor is he too much of a
dick, nor does he go crazy or violent or lose his sense of humor.

Robin Landseadel:
>
> The Karma's serious here, even if these stateside folks are too dim to be aware of that fact.  By the time Pynchon got to Aptos, he saw this country move from left to right, and Vineland in many ways is a demonstration of that shift. He also started seeing Karma as counterweight to Entropy, that there was a law of nature that moves towards life.
>

so maybe the dilemma is, how to survive such a calamitous rightward
shift without surrendering every shred of psychedelic insight?

>
> If The Crying of Lot 49 is about  Oedipus, could Vineland be about Anti-Oedipus?
>

might be...

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"All the 3s are brown, and the 5s are gray" - Paint by Numbers song