Pynchon's back catalogue

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Spent the past 4 days with little access to the internet, only to find a zillion + p-list e-mails waiting for me.  So I'm jumping in mid-stream.

I was in Portland, OR, at a memorial/family gathering for my husband's cousin, Bonnie Jean Tinker, a longtime women's/gay rights activist.  Hanging out with the very extended Tinker family (of Tinker vs. the Des Moines School District -- Armband Case fame), in a Left Coast activist setting (lesbian parents, birth parents, sperm-donor dads and grand-dads, single moms, single dads, activists, slackers, black, white, gay, straight, vegans, meat-eaters, dogs, cats, chickens, rabbits, folk-singing, fiddle-playing -- a convivial group mixed with intra-family squabbling) reminded me a lot of the Traverse-Gates family gathering at the end of Vineland.

Returned home and walked in on a huge party my kids had thrown in our absence, complete with our very own Piglet Bodine -- a friend of my daughter on leave from the Navy, who happened to be passing through NY when the party was announced, and was lying naked in a puddle of puke on our bathroom floor (my daughter, by way of defense (of what?  Vomit?  The Navy?) pointed out that her brother's friend, a driven, over-achieving Barnard student, had also puked and passed out).  Shades of the Whole Sick Crew.

ANyway, all this gets me to thinking that yet another division in Pynchon's writing (intra-book,, not inter-book) is writing from research vs. writing from personal experience. The Profane and Whole Sick Crew sections of V and the Zoyd sections of VL are more accessible because he's writing about people and settings he knows (or knew).  These sections are more personal, but curiously weak for those who aren't that familiar with the types or settings.  Pynchon works better when he thumbs his nose at the pedestrian advice:  write what you know.  His best sections (Slothrop wandering the Zone) manage to combine the two.

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: Robert Mahnke <rpmahnke at gmail.com>

>
>I take Vineland as being much more about what America's children did
>to themselves in the 60's, 70's and 80's, than about what was done to
>them by forces of opression.  The reader buys into the idealization of
>Frenesi, and then sees what Frenesi did.  It's much easier to say that
>it was Them, not us, but isn't that the point?
>
>On 7/27/09, Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
>> The CIA's actions against Americans who live, work & breath inside America
>> is the rug that ties CoL49, Vineland and Inherent Vice together:
>>
>>        . . .What is interesting is to have before us, at the end of the
>>        Greed Decade, that rarest of birds: a major political novel about
>>        what America has been doing to itself, to its children, all these
>>        many years. . .
>>
>> http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-vineland.html
>>
>>
>>