IMO Gibson ain't Pynchon by a long shot

[Monte Davis]

What you said. Pynchon's songs and movies and comix and advertising snatches
--- say "rich, chocolaty, goodness," everybody! -- are no less central to
what he's doing than his acknowledged Big Themes ---
imperialism/colonialism, routinization of charisma, technology and its
discontents, usw. 

Take Crutchfield and his little pard Whappo, the Norwegian mulatto lad. We
hanker to parse them neatly into "this part is a towering moral critique of
the theft of a continent" and "this part is pop-culture scrapings from a
thousand penny-dreadful Buffalo Bill tales and Howard Hawks Westerns." But
he won't let us.

"Not 'archetypical' westwardman, but _the only_. Understand, there was only
one. There was only one Indian who ever fought him. Only one fight, one
victory, one loss. And only one president, and one assassin, and one
election. True. One of each of everything. You had thought of solipsism, and
imagined the structure to be populated-on your level-by only, terribly, one.
No count on any other levels. But it proves to be not quite that lonely.
Sparse, yes, but a good deal better than solitary."

-----Original Message-----
From: John Bailey [mailto:sundayjb at gmail.com] 
Sent: Thursday, September 26, 2013 7:50 AM
To: Monte Davis
Cc: Joseph Tracy; P-list List
Subject: Re: IMO Gibson ain't Pynchon by a long shot

Terrific post, Monte.

Reminded me of an old thought walk I'd forgotten having taken, sometime
around the BE era. For some reason I was reading Vineland at the same time
as two novels by Bret Easton Ellis and Murakami, no idea which ones and I do
recall they weren't very impressive. What struck me was how all three kept
constantly dropping brand names, and I wondered why. It wasn't for
historical authenticity - they weren't trying to build up a plausible
reality by slipping in historically specific references. And I couldn't
quite buy the opposite; the ol'
pomo argument about the replacement of the Real by the simulation, or
consumerism as the impoverished substitute for whatever religion etc once
promised.

Still not sure where that led me in the end, but I think BE continues a line
of thinking that I first found in VL. The (not really a
spoiler) party late-ish in the novel seems to offer a hint. Nostalgia for
that which isn't yet gone, or the sense that the present is already a past,
and vice versa. I'd say more but will wait until we're done with the read,
perhaps.

On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 8:12 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net> wrote:
> JT> [Gibson is] overly obsessed with fashion to the point of seeing 
> JT> fashion
> sense as a kind of moral force and profound insight.
>
> The same mental and social processes of emulation, alignment, 
> evaluation --
>
> "What are those around me doing?"
> "What confers approval and status, what is deprecated?"
> "What explains the discrepancies between the 'is' I see and the 
> 'ought' I'm taught?"
>
> are at work in the oldest Deep Moral Forces and the most transient
fashion.
> To say "religion, philosophy and psychology are about eternal 
> verities; marketing and advertising are about market-driven trivia" is 
> to blind oneself with idealism -- and in my experience, to make 
> oneself more rather than less easily manipulated by the latter.
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l

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