IV God Damn the Repo Man

[alice wellintown]

Oh, Yeah, like what I was planning to write about is Randolph, that is
Saint Philip Randolph. By 1970, that very violent year in our nation's
history, a lot of radicals were making, building, blowing, bombs. The
government was bombing Cambodia and  a lot of student radicals were
becoming more so as more and more students identified with radical
positions after Nixon's Cambodian war was made official, after several
trials, after many murders of students and blacks by the para-military
 . . .but, and black radicals were, as P describes in VL and IV,
pulling away from the Labor struggle that Randloph was Saint of and
forming new, more radical, more violent groups and factions, and not
wanting to be paying much homage to Saint Philip and the Dead
Christian King. The Saint Philip the surfer dude still gives props to
Greg Noll, Noll curled in the fist of God. Noll, no Saint, no God, no
King, no Randolph, is neither worshiped nor dissed by the new wave
rider, Saint Flip.

Perhaps the most important statement P ever made about the New Left is
that the Students, in AMerica, failed to build a coalition with Labor.
Now, as we know, SDS was rooted in Labor, but P is more focused on
Meathead and Archie / Reagan/Nixon.


On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 12:16 PM, alice
wellintown<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> This novel, like all Pynchon novels is set against the historical and
> cultural events of the plot-period and the period of its composition
> and publication. So, as we look at Gidget, who starts off as a book,
> becomes a film, then TV movies, then TV programs, we are also looking
> at that ecofeminism as it progresses (and it progresses in the
> opposite direction) from the real life of the author, another Jewish
> film man who flees Nazi Germany and comes to America (a common enough
> P concern back to V. and TSI and a major concern of GR) and his real
> daughter's surfer girl experiences,  to Robin Morgan's Goodbye To All
> That, to International Women's Day, The Sit In at Ladies Home Journal,
> to Earth Day (all happen in the plotted months of the novel 1970). The
> compare and contrast, as I see it, is not only how books (Walt
> Whitman's famous call for books!) and Free Press (although the violent
> take overs and struggles for Press, Guardian, for example is an
> exception and is actually grouped with the radical film projects and
> the violence it both captures and projects) are contrasted with books
> become films become TV movies become Tube (and the music, as I noted
> when we argued about the working class Liverpool Lads), but also the
> contrast Male and Female resistance to the MAN.
>