CoL49 (5) Sidney [Genghis] Cohen

[Robin Landseadel]

On Jun 30, 2009, at 1:07 PM, Paul Mackin wrote:

> Hey, there is nothing at all wrong with your writing.  I enjoy reading
> you even when my own thoughts are swerving off in an entirely
> different direction.

Gee, thanks. I think Mr. Hollander was pointing me in the direction of  
something that could be published, rather than blogging, and I realize  
he's right about that.

> My feeling is that Pynchon receives much stimulation and inspiration
> from the circumstance of bearing a family name surrounded by a lot of
> interesting history . . .

I think that family history creeps into his writing, particularly from  
Gravity's Rainbow on forward. Against the Day has a lot of material  
that points to the heyday of Pynchon & Co.

> . . . but I think Lot 49 is written straight from the
> spirit of the sixties.  To me, JFK figures in this way,

Yes, and CoL49 happens in the wake of losing JFK. But it doesn't feel  
like subject matter, it feels like background hum. On the other hand,  
LSD is often front and center in the novella.

> A popular and even messianic figure was snatched away from an adoring
> public for no apparent reason. Normal causality could not explain  
> such an
> unnatural happening. Paranoia reigned. A hunt for secret explanations
> generally ensued.

. . . and names are named. It's just that there are more names named  
for the aerospace industry and psychological therapies as practiced in  
California, 1964. Much more.

> I agree that LSD is very important to Lot 49. And in a special way.
> Not particularly as a mind expander. . .

Looked up the LSD sequence from Gravity's Rainbow. Interesting to note  
that it's prefaced by "Loonies on Leave."

> . . .Rather perhaps the reverse, as an
> ego dissolver such as seems to have happened to Mucho.

The working title I was using for Mucho's LSD moment was "Brothers N."

> . . . This can be thought of as being very topical to the sixties  
> and I don't just
> mean the CIA experiments.

But remember that Gravity's Rainbow—his main project at the time—has  
lots of arrows pointing to the CIA. I'm not saying "either/or," as per  
usual I'm saying "&".

> Radical psychiatry (Ronald Liang) was more than
> half seriously talking about psychosis as being a normal adjustment to
> living in certain disfunctional family situations. It was not too
> great a leap to see psychosis as an adjustment to general social
> conditions as well,. as Oedipa finally may come around to accepting in
> the final pages of the novel.

I don't know when "flat affect" was taken out of the DSM, but it sorta  
threw Philip K. Dick out with the bathwater. The acceptance of a  
certain flavor of insanity as the norm is what the sixties were all  
about.

> At first she is not ready to accept
> Mucho's  embracing of paranoid schizophrenia. She holds out hoping for
> the reality of Trystero. But if that hope falls through she is willing
> to accept paranoia as the only way to live under a capitalism that
> will not mend its ways.
>
> A few years latter of course D & G as we fondly refer to them were to
> development Schizoanalysis.
>
> Pynchon was prescient.
>
> P

Yup.