death of a salesman Worthington

[Robin Landseadel]

Pynchon and the Firesign Theater share so many traits. You mention  
stoney humor, that's really not quite right. They share a time and a  
place—Los Angeles, transition from the sixties to the seventies. They  
are both very paranoid. They are both hyperconscious of the Tube and  
the potential perils of the computer. The scene of "Television  
Communion" in "Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers" really  
belongs is some Pynchon novel, Vineland probably. While, as with  
Pynchon's novels, one is led to the impression that the aesthetic  
results were derived through prolonged application of THC, closer  
examination displays a shrewd knowledge of forms of Propaganda deemed  
acceptable by the state and its citizens and the long term effects of  
that propaganda on those citizens, with both artistic entities somehow  
managing to make a "telegenic" or "phonogenic" impression anyway:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fv041-dAnqs

If you search for the Firesign Theater on youtube, you will find many  
of their albums have been posted by someone with the nom-de-net of 01  
pynchon.

I figured the only reason "Nick Danger, Third Eye wasn't name-checked  
in Inherent Vice is that the reference to that world only slightly  
askew from Doc Sportello's would be regarded as too obvious.


On Oct 12, 2013, at 6:41 PM, Curtis Rawling-Endicott wrote:

> Nice, I kind of thought this too but am never sure chicken/egg on
> SoCal stoney humor, having come to the Firesign in latter days.
>
> On Sat, Oct 12, 2013 at 7:49 AM, Robin Landseadel
> <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
>> I have long assumed that Pynchon's spot-on Parodies of Cal were  
>> inspired by
>> the Firesign Theater's "Jack Poet" ads, guerrilla TV at its finest:
>>
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WA2431JIAQQ
>>
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3QaGV0sY0I
>>
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-CHO5YsIzQ
>>
>> On Oct 12, 2013, at 6:30 AM, Fiona Shnapple wrote:
>>
>> http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/10/09/death-of-a-salesman/
>>
>> On Saturday, October 12, 2013, Fiona Shnapple wrote:
>>>
>>> http://home.foni.net/~vhummel/Image-Fiction/chapter_4.1.1.html
>>
>>

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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l