AtD/VL: The Traverse Clan

[Michael Bailey]

 Mark Kohut  wrote:

> With the posting on Obama makes me now ask----Is Frenesi the embodiment of the
> America
> that now is-----an America that loves fascists and in which the nice guys are
> rejected for weakness?
>

tragedy of the commons, maybe
those who exercise self-restraint edged out by those who don't,
Idiocracy, so forth


DL, the girlie with a gun, is a compensatory factor?

But, as I'm prone to do, I've rattled on disproportionately about Vineland.

My thesis in response to Laura's question, is that the question of
male-female love, its pitfalls, frustrations, pros and cons of
monogamy and/or promiscuity, looms larger in Pynchon's work -
especially V. - than does unionism, which I see as a background theme
even in AtD.
I was trying to work thru some examples and of course got carried away
thinking about Vineland, still my favorite (till we reread AtD, at any
rate)

If I were writing a paper, I'd go back, cut a whole bunch of stuff,
and bring in more about labor.  One point I'd make is that the IWW is
of great interest because it was (and is) specifically non-racist, and
does in fact reach out to the schlemihls written off as "bums"
(obviously not sincerely)

the long sentence in V. detailing some of these "bums" and their
stories displays the kind of interest that a storyteller sees in them
--

-- the IWW displayed (and displays) interest in *organizing* them -
they tried to get together a union of the unemployed, during the
Depression, I believe.  They today are trying to organize Starbucks
workers, sex workers, and others who fall under the "bum" rubric

I would find a way to work with that thesis, find a way to indicate
that perhaps a focus on love as a priority is something MORE OFTEN
seen among so-called "bums" and that a blinkered blindered focus on
career is (or, sometimes is, or may be) the price of achieving
"success" within capitalism, to the detriment of love, and remedies
for this won't be found in the monoculture fields of study propagated
by the Establishment, but in the jungly rain forest of the preterite?

a-and how the specific workings of this make good stories...