Academic Earth – Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
An awesome new site – AcademicEarth.org – joins the library of MIT’s OpenCourse videos in providing education to all. I can’t help seeking out the fiery literature of the 60’s:
When [Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters] came to Vietnam Day at the Berkeley campus, Kesey addressed assembled people and he said turn your back on the war and say, “F*ck it”. These were a group of people that were intent on doing something to stop the war, and this was Kesey’s response. That moment for me embodies this tension, right at the the center of the 1960’s, the tension between counter cultural self-development and an ethos of play, drop out, tune in… Essentially, leave the institutional life of America, that means school, government, politics, and create disorder, and do that as a way of finding what’s true of yourself, do it in the company of others, it had this communal aspect for sure. [...] Ken Kesey is looking for that internally directed, playful response to the oppressive order of the word, and then there’s this political response. Pynchon lets us see both, and he’s parodying both responses in this novel, and in this sense, this novel is very much of its time.
Amy Hungerford – Yale / English
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
