Frenesi's Kinks

[Robin Landseadel]

On Mar 13, 2009, at 1:48 PM, Michael Bailey wrote:

> thank goodness Prairie's learned enough history to at least begin
> rejecting Brock by the ending

Perhaps, although she seems to want him back just as soon as he's gone.

In no way do I consider Brock to be on the side of the angels, but he  
seems to have an awareness of the juvenile nature of the revolutionary  
wanna-bee's of 24fps. I think many keys to the puzzle were expressed  
by Márk Kaposvári in "Vineland's America"

	What is interesting in Vineland is looking at how Pynchon
	delivers his description and cultural portrait of America, for this
	is done both in terms of the content and the form of the novel,
	that is, both through the topical and the narratological build-up.
	The description gives a rather negative picture, or rather, a
	severe critique of the United States that appears as an infantile
	and strongly repressed nation in Pynchon’s vision. This
	criticism includes the illustration of how the obsolete Puritan
	values of sobriety and (lucrative) work, exhorted by the
	government, permeate and oppress the American society, of
	how media-manipulated and shallow-minded the Americans
	became. Vineland is a parody of a couch-potato nation in which
	the average citizens are not even aware of their abused
	condition.

http://tinyurl.com/dza9s4

Yes, Brock's the bad guy, but he's also one character in the book with  
some minimal awareness of how all these "freaks" are, underneath it  
all,  consumers to the bone, passive absorbers of the fantasies  
provided by the Tube.