V-2nd: The Whole Sick Crew

[alice wellintown]

Kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
> The issue isn't what we on the list know or don't know of the Beats.  It's what Pynchon knew when he described The Whole Sick Crew.  Between growing up on Long Island and dividing his time between the Cornell campus and the Navy before heading to California, it's unlikely he was part of any NYC literary or music scene, aside from occasional college-kid weekends or Navy liberties, where he was an outsider looking in.  The W.S.C. seems derived from a pop-culture mediated idea about "beatniks" rather than a personal familiarity with either the Beats or even Village coffee-house culture.  Do the various members of the W.S.C. strike you as faithful descriptions of real people?  Any analogs you can name?  Not being argumentative here - as someone who doesn't know much about the period, I'm genuinely curious.
>
> Laura

Members of the WSC remind me of the party guests of Trimalchio, a
character in the Roman novel The Satyricon by Petronius.Of course, I
lived in Roman Novel for a decade so I'm an authority on Roman Novel.
Tony Tanner connects the Roman Novel to Gatsby and to Oedipa Mass.