aw. Re: V-2nd: "Adorned" (p. 414, Picador)

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

> Why Adorno? Pynchon read Adams, Sp[e]ngler, Mumford, McLuhan, Nietzsche,
> Marcuse ...the library of so-called cultural pessimists. Right? He
> read on Film and Photography, commodification of consumer consent and
> blah blah...it was the stuff that Village People feasted on when P
> lived in NYC. We can identify these names in his early works? No?
> Adorno wasn't around in English. Was he? And, Adorno crashes into P's
> Democratic view of the masses or preterit. So, I don't get the P read
> Adorno and Adorno influenced his fictions.
>
>

As I said, "Philosophy of Modern Music/Philosophie der neuen Musik" 
was simultaneously published
in 1949. Also otherwise he published - for example as co-author of "The 
Authoritarian Personality"
or with his influential texts "On popular music" plus "Composing for the 
Films" (with Hanns Eisler)
- in English and was known to psychologists, musicologists, philosophers 
and sociologists in both,
the UK (whereto he first went into exile) and the US. Actually Pynchon's 
novels can be seen as
the most elaborated artistic translation of the 'Dialectic of 
Enlightenment'-thesis by Adorno and
Horkheimer. (Marcuse's theory is pretty much the same, just less 
complex). Adorno also said that
one may be part of the (in his case: cultural) elites, but isn't allowed 
to feel elitist. So it's unfair to accuse him of anti-democratic 
elitism. It's nevertheless true that he did not (and did not want) to 
understand jazz. The reason for this was primarily that he considered 
"repressive desublimation" (Marcuse) as a capitalistic betrayal of the 
preterit. The influence I was suggesting in my mail, me
sees in Adorno's reading of Stravinsky, which - you cannot deny that - 
fits "V"'s chapter 14 quite
well. Might be true that there were similar readings of Stravinsky 
available in the US at the time
"V" was in the making ...