V-2nd - Chap 8 / All We Are Saying Is Give "V." A Chance . . .

[Mark Kohut]

Mike is riffing like a fine session man and love your jammin'...V. does seem 
like TRP wedged 'tween....

Just want to add, from my deep unhipness, not to forget that TRp set V. in 
55-56....that center of the dead fifties...
and, although pubbed in early 1963...............

Isn't very, imho.




----- Original Message ----
From: Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Thu, September 30, 2010 9:08:37 AM
Subject: V-2nd - Chap 8 / All We Are Saying Is Give "V." A Chance . . .

On Sep 30, 2010, at 3:38 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen wrote:

>> wouldn't two or one Traverse brother have worked just as well?
> 
> Perhaps even better.
> 
> To me the brothers appear like the nephews of Donald Duck:
> 
> I never can tell them apart!
> 
Kai

I can tell Kit apart. I can tell Cyprian apart. I can tell you that there are 
figures whose destinies engage me in Against the Day. Huey, Dewey, and Louie? 
Well -- yeah sure but do you know any cluster-fucks of brothers? How -- 
personality-wise -- they can be a little hard to tell apart? There's a certain 
variety of mirroring and refraction going on here, some aspect of Iceland Spar 
is invested in all parts of the book and for that matter all of creation as 
well, which I guess is sort of the point of "Against the Day" in the first 
place.

I have had a hard time caring about Benny. In my mind, he's been a cipher about 
exhausted post-World War II American ambition. A cardboard stand-in where a 
character should be. And Stencil is more of a process than an actualized human, 
an intellectual entity that spits up various fabulist tales in multiple persona.

But now that I'm on the same page as the rest of you, where Benny is swatting at 
flies with a rolled-up New Yawk Times in front of the Public Library -- his base 
of operations -- it dawns that "V." really is the author, his hopelessly divided 
self. From what I've read, there is Pynchon the relentless peruser of 
intellectual outliers. And then there is "Nearer My Couch to Thee." It 
seems/feels schizoid, this mirroring. Of course by the time we get to "Against 
the Day", the author realizes that there's mirroring upon mirroring upon 
mirroring, endless, inexhaustible, improbably vast and yet and still "everything 
connects . . ."

I find it impossible to get all hung up on Stencil in an emotional way even as I 
apply his M.O. to reading Pynchon. Or maybe possibility I'm in a "Stranger Than 
Fiction" [2006] scenario . . .

    I’m listening to Neil Young, I gotta turn up the sound
    Someone’s always yelling turn it down
    Feel like I’m drifting
    Drifting from scene to scene
    I’m wondering what in the devil could it all possibly mean?

. . . of course things could always change, maybe I never really gave "V." a 
chance, anyway.

If Pynchon is a Child of his Time, then my question is: What sort of time was 
1963?

I look at "V." as more akin to "Narcissus & Goldmund," with its lopsided plot 
and its depiction of the deeply divided self, one of those biggies for fans of 
Freud. And I can see how "On The Road" left its mark on the young author. Of 
course, there been a few other bridge builders between the Beats & the Freaks, 
Allen Ginsberg, the Fugs and their country cousins The Holy Modal Rounders leap 
to mind, a certain Robert Zimmerman as well.

Seems like Benny's enjoying the Bi-Polar lifestyle these days, barely on the 
edge of slipping into the Upper Bay whillst yo-yo-ing from job to job. And it 
seems like Benny's misadventures must have been born of tales from the local 
Village idiots, zensters and scenesters, fabulistly expanded by the local 
enviornment and perhaps a useful substance or two. I'd guess that the young 
author must have been temporarily sucked into the Great Folk Scare, if only long 
enough for  "V." and a short story or two. Lord only knows that Richard Farina 
was the physical embodiment of all of that "Way Back In The 1960s."

When you get right down to it, Pynchon's outliers -- his show  of freaks, 
anarchists, dreamers, dopers, scientists, magicians, musicians, losers, 99.99 
%tilers and other heretics -- constitute the UBI of his oeuvre.

PS:  I'm digging Mike's digging into the temporal geo-political scene of that 
era, daddy-o

"O
tell me all about
Anna Livia! I want to hear all
about Anna Livia. Well, you know Anna Livia? Yes, of course,
we all know Anna Livia. Tell me all. Tell me now. You'll die
when you hear. " -- Ole Whathizname