Weather Underground -exposed.

[Jan Klimkowski]

I read Thomas Pynchon's V and The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow but not Vineland.

Gravity's Rainbow is an incomparable and enduring work of art.

Vineland is more of a trip.

Pynchon wrote most of Gravity's Rainbow in the mid and late 60s, and was friends with the likes of Kirkpatrick Sale, historian of SDS, and Richard Farina, sixties folk artist and counterculture figure who died as a passenger on a motorbike doing 90mph...

Vineland is about COINTELPRO. Betrayal. Things not being what they seem. And whether quality dope helps or hinders the perception of deep political truths....

Here's a flavour. Brock Vond is the repressed but potent authoritarian manipulator. OK - Brond Vond is a fascist:

Brock Vond's genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it. While the Tube was proclaiming youth revolution against parents of all kinds and most viewers were accepting this story, Brock saw the deep -- if he'd allowed himself to feel it, the sometimes touching -- need only to stay children forever, safe inside some extended national Family. The hunch he was betting on was that these kid rebels, being halfway there already, would be easy to turn and cheap to develop. They'd only been listening to the wrong music, breathing the wrong smoke, admiring the wrong personalities. They needed some reconditioning.

Vond spends much of his time, um, manipulating radical filmmaker Frenesi Gates, a leftist born to a leftist mother, Sasha. Vond's trump card is Frenesi's weakness for a man in a uniform:

Sasha believed her daughter had "gotten" this uniform fetish from her. It was a strange idea even coming from Sasha, but since her very first Rose Parade up till the present she'd felt in herself a fatality, a helpless turn toward images of authority, especially uniformed men, whether they were athletes live or on the Tube, actors in movies of war through the ages, or maitre d's in restaurants, not to mention waters and busboys, and she further believed that it could be passed on, as if some Cosmic Fascist had spliced in a DNA sequence requiring this form of seduction and initiation into the dark joys of social control.

:vollkommenauf: