Mendelson's View of P's 2ble Vision

[Bekah]

Pynchon has used contemporary culture many times - CoL49 had Beatle stuff,   Vineland had the Star-Trek stuff,  IV had the drug culture,  BE has the techie stuff.  And every one of these books is considered "lesser" and every one is set in contemporary "hip" US.  And none of us remembers the final days of WWII in Germany,  the US colonial era,  or the world-wide events leading up to WWI.  

Bekah 


On Oct 7, 2013, at 5:06 AM, Carvill John <johncarvill at hotmail.com> wrote:

> << In BE, P's parody of his and our preoccupation with rich media culture is a double in the sense that P saturates the prose, the dialogue, the narrative with rich media culture to sit us down on the Simpson's couch so we can see ourselves watching ourselves transmogrified into toons, into tabloid talk, into real TV personalities, into video game avatars, etc., into a citizenship that has no privacy, no more than the Kardashians, because we don't want it. We wnt our MTV, we want to go viral on Youtube doing something so Twerky we are made into a celebrity. What's wrong with being citizens, protecting ou neighbors, our grandparents, parents and children, our privacy? But this only step one. The creative use of rich media to parody rich media is step two. So P is not out to write abook that simply says rich media is damageing to our liberty, to our greater culture. That's too obvious, too much an old man's lament and screed. Co-opt it! That's what he's done here. And it's so funny we need to laugh at it. And laughter, along with the lament for what is wasted in poor medai land, is a good tonic. >>
> 
> An interesting theory. Not that far removed form saying: "Since we live in a vacant, trash obsessed culture, the author has presented us with a vacant, trash-centric text..." To my mind, he would have served us better by writing us a decent book!
> 
> > Mr P has given us another gift of his genius. Beleive it if you need it, if you don't, pass it on. 
> 
> In as much as this seems to imply that those of us who don't like the new book just don't 'get' it, this does not do much to lend credibility to your interpretation.
> 
> 
> 

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