VL-IV - more archival fun

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sat Mar 14 03:54:12 CDT 2009


http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9501&msg=667&sort=date
Paul Di Filippo writes:
"I've only read the book once, but I'd like to know what the airships
were doing in _Vineland_ at all. They don't seem to further the plot"

(what frickin' airships? obviously I don't know this book at all well)

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here's a spacy one, indeed: I'll take a quarter tab of what he's on...
http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9503&msg=856&sort=date

Wanna know who TP is...
First know that the only machine is the time machine,
and when TP got in with his stuffed pig (like Calvin
and Hobbes into a cardboardbox rocket) it was during
post-wartime and his pre-adolescence.  Just as the
pig knew in its heart of hearts that the damn thing
could never work and someday soon things in there'd
start to look notso kosher, Tom knew enough that THIS
TIMT was THE time, so he made absolute sure the door
couldn't be reopened, not even from the inside.  'And
wouldn't ya know it, Miss Wormwood,' he'd be telling
the class after the cops finally managed to get him
out of the contraption, 'the thing DID work.  'Oh,
Miss Wormwood, the places I've been...'

He's been to the movies, to the Navy, and to college,
and he can and does go home again, like Profane to a
follow-your-nose rainbow of fruit, like that Holden
to yittle Pheeb, to innocence, to his childhood, and
Why?  Well, of course, it's to lurk behind a redwood
with a bowlingballbasketball-sized snowball made of
all he's learned and with Suzie's name on it to boot,
TP hoping to make a goldenrectangle SPLAT the size of
a movie screen, one we can all look at and see sooooo
much:  No, it's not a picture of a polar bear in a
blizzard, it's a picture of two polar bears in a film
noir movie whose producers could afford good lighting
and this one here is a cell of when the dummy male
polar bear pulled out and the spiderwoman female bear
got all disgusted and rolled her eyes too far back.
Somewhere out in the tundra, something happened to a
baby bear named Tom, and he's been stranded on that
floe ever since, his mum maybe having up and run off
with a grizzly in a zooed suit.  We can imagine the
cub saying to a hole in the ice, 'My mother is the
blizzard,' and it isn't such a strange thing to say
because this is the verysame hole Pynchon's got his
sights on when he Genesis-es Vineland with a 'Fore!'
rather than a 'To...' in ref to those aspects of his
being that raised him, for the title is not Vineland
but FN-land (film noir), and film noir is what has
gotten him in the mess he's in, for film noir is the
spiderwoman, but not the web.

Film noir is chockfull of abandoned cars, misinterped
phone calls, duped heroes (Zoyd saying he feels like
Bert in Mildred Pierce), shopping places (see the Noir
Center and the Plexes in VINE), and most importantly
homelessness (not the bum kind, but the Dorethyness of
there being no place as godawful as the WW's West),
which brings me to 'CHEZ' (sorry, no accent ague on my
keyboard, but you know I mean the french word for 'in
the home of').  The character Che (again agueless),
Praire's spiderwoman (red and black under garments that
Zoyd would have loved), is last seen by Praire in a
strange light, the kind that fallen heroes in fn see
their pritties for the first time, 'gazing up at Che
framed in the doorway, twilight coming down in great
blurred stain, and hard lemon light in teh room behind
her.'  Che is like 'chez' without an object, homeless,
'at the home of' nothing.  Find me a passage in that
last chapter where the noun Che in a sentence has a
direct object.  You won't.  It has to be the most in-
genius naming of characters in Vineland (unless Hub
Gates is from Herbert J Yates which is a long shot),
that she's 'saved' by Praire in the mallraid and that
she gives Praire her home sobstory further reinforces
a fn motif; the cherry on top is that film noir is a
French term too.

And although Vineland doesn't appear to follow the fn
formula, it can easily be catagorized as an anti-fn.

Suppose, just suppose, Ole Tom felt castrated by film
noir, that it underhandedly did what feminists argue
it meant to do: Following the war, with women in the
workplace, the message had to get out there (by the
powers that be) that the woman's place is in the home
and the message was received.  Thus the 50s.  Same
can besaid of the 70's (with TV shows like Hawaii 50,
white males enforcing paradise; Brady Bunch, at home
mum working dad; Gilligan's I, Don't go in that evil
cave, there's spiders in there, and savages, Stay in
your huts, however shabbily they're built; and we
can't forget Star Trek, a white male taking us where
no man has gone) - weren't Hector and Zoyd negatively
influenced by them.  I see Vineland as a reaction to
these attempts to keep everyonein their 'Right' place
where the woman (as in WWII) are on the Home fronts,
bacause the man is away, in this case 'away' meaning
being made into a figure thanatically limp, gone away
from being the strong male figure.  A perfect time
for women to rise up and, well, be on top.  But not
so high that she can't be found, as in V., Golly,
don't do dat do us, ladies.  Don Quixote is only one
step away from becoming a Republican as it is without
Dulcy planting a snare to catch his big leftfoot toe.
Let's wrap up my ramblings...

(I whisper into Chung's right ear:) Thomas Pynchon
has girl problems.  Now you're saying, "Indeed, that's
unusual.  I never heard anything like that before,'
but when I say girl I mean object of his affections,
whatever political objectives he hopes to achieve -
who knows? Utopian visions? A nicer climate?  What is
he hoping to get out of life? or put into it?  Maybe
by by making the object of desire a book or two about
characters who are not able to get what they desire,
he actuallt creates a relationship with the Creator
and subject, and all that's gone into him to give him
his prophetic nature and scientific knowhow are char-
acters themselves whose end (object) is to express
this relationship, but now I have no idea what I'm
saying.  Feeling a bit like a crash test dummy.  You
can learn alot from a time machine.  Thomas Pynchon
shuffled his feet.

polaRick, bearing West

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this one is interesting because it talks of "laxness" in Vineland -
isn't there a Scandinavian writer named Laxness?
http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9503&msg=975&sort=date

My first venture into the field here, a-and it's prompted by pique!

Browsing, I discovered that one A. Walser offered this comment a few days
ago:

	"VINELAND, I think, reads like the first draft of a masterpiece.
In this sense, it resembles the work of Marge Piercy, whom Pynchon has
praised (or blurbed, to use the word of the week).  This deliberate
laxness of style seems to me a mistake, which will make VINELAND date in
a way that GRAVITY'S RAINBOW does not."


The first sentence, with all due respect, is annoying, snotty and just the
kind of thing that makes critix out to be fools.  How can one evaluate
Walser's kind of "critical" "judgement" except to ask the him to remove the
pipe from his nose and speak English, troop.  It's such a fatuous thing to
say.

I apologize in advance for the testiness, but c'mon man.

Spontaneously, let me offer that the "laxness" Walser feels in VINELAND is
deliberate, and most definitely "opposed" (rather, complementary) to the
"stiffness" of GR.  After all (here's me opinion, anyway)  GR is a dream
made real; Vineland is reality made into a dream.  The act of making a dream
real requires cloaking it in the stuff of reality (and I'm talking about
this quality of "laxness" or its opposite, not about any particular "content
in either book); conversely, making reality a dream MIGHT smell like
"laxity" to some, but to others,it offers just the kind of smoky, drifty,
half-here-half-not, shadowy translucence of, of, a TV image!  (Now don't go
new critical on me and start talking about the "Fallacy of Imitative Form,"
not yet anyway)

Let me also posit,tentatively, that this quality of "laxness" (I agree
there's something slack there, but "lax" is too negative) is connected to
fractals, which are always about to arrive at some integral dimension, but
don't.  I'm working with this idea because I thought of the word "fractals"
as I was trying to keep the plots together (can't get into this here, but
there's something fractal going on about plot lines, having to do with
self-similarity especially).  A-and the VERY NEXT PAGE I turned after I had
this thought contained that word, in the line about "invisible fractals of
smell" during the last chapter's opening family breakfast.  The timing of
this intuition and this word's appearance (it felt like a critic's wet
dream, to have an intuition and have the book on the next page SAY TO YOU
sort of, hey, that's right) has forged an unassailable belief in me poor
head, but danged if I know enough about fractals or self-similarity to prove
it, say, to someone for whom the novel reads like a 17-year long rough draft
(didn't wanna go w/out stoking my little pique one last time, sorry).


I think that VINELAND is every bit as un-lax as GR; it's just diff'rent,
s'all.


-- 
 - "Be groovy or B movie" - the old 24fps signoff



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