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Inherent Vice
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Psmith
Oct 15, 2012, 5:23:03 PM10/15/12
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Well, I just read page 1. I look forward to rereading this book. I remember the day it came out I went to Walmart early in the morning, but they didn't have it. At 10 am I went to Barnes and Noble. I couldn't find it, so I asked for help. They had a copy or two on the new arrivals table, I think. I'd hoped to find a stack of copies in the window display. Pynchon has reached cultural icon status but not enough to displace The Hunger Games at Walmart or B & N.
Bhavani
Oct 16, 2012, 5:38:17 PM10/16/12
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I do enjoy reading Pynchon again for many reasons, particularly the multiple levels of meaning in his writing, and his musical sense.
Inherent Vice begins with an apparently beautiful young woman entering the scene via an alley and back steps. She's dressed in "flatland gear" and has changed her appearance in a way quite contrary to how she used to dress which was in a "flower-print bikini bottom" and faded "Country Joe and the Fish T-Shirt."
If I only ever read the first few pages I'd say the Inherent Vice = not living true to yourself.
Interesting reference, Country Joe and the Fish who acquired most of their reputation from the recording of the original Woodstock festival where they led the crowd in an F,U,C,K chant then played their anti-Vietnam war song, "I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die." Fred Frith told me that when he saw Country Joe and the Fish in a London club 5 or 6 years ago that they played that song no less than 7 times in their set. Talk about a one hit wonder. Country Joe McDonald's Uncle, Sydney Plotnik, aka Lester the Jester, distinguished himself in LA's colorful hippiedom scene in the '60s and early '70s.
I like the reference to musicality of traffic at the bottom of p. 4
Inherent Vice begins with an apparently beautiful young woman entering the scene via an alley and back steps. She's dressed in "flatland gear" and has changed her appearance in a way quite contrary to how she used to dress which was in a "flower-print bikini bottom" and faded "Country Joe and the Fish T-Shirt."
If I only ever read the first few pages I'd say the Inherent Vice = not living true to yourself.
Interesting reference, Country Joe and the Fish who acquired most of their reputation from the recording of the original Woodstock festival where they led the crowd in an F,U,C,K chant then played their anti-Vietnam war song, "I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die." Fred Frith told me that when he saw Country Joe and the Fish in a London club 5 or 6 years ago that they played that song no less than 7 times in their set. Talk about a one hit wonder. Country Joe McDonald's Uncle, Sydney Plotnik, aka Lester the Jester, distinguished himself in LA's colorful hippiedom scene in the '60s and early '70s.
I like the reference to musicality of traffic at the bottom of p. 4
Psmith
Oct 17, 2012, 11:18:37 AM10/17/12
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Glad you like the book, Dr. Oz. I liked the synchronicity of the "Can't Buy Me Love" reference and your recent terrific Beatles blog. I grabbed the soundtrack for "A Hard Day's Night" off the shelf this morning, but then I forgot to take it with me, so I'll listen to Pink Floyd's first album some more while reading my two pages today. I hope I remember the Beatles cd tomorrow.
I taught The Wind in the Willows during the spring of 2009. I contemplated buying "Piper at the Gates of Dawn," named after a chapter in that book, at that time. I finally bought it after reading Inherent Vice.
I taught The Wind in the Willows during the spring of 2009. I contemplated buying "Piper at the Gates of Dawn," named after a chapter in that book, at that time. I finally bought it after reading Inherent Vice.
Bhavani
Oct 17, 2012, 2:20:18 PM10/17/12
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Yesterday I sorted through a couple of boxes of books a former tenant had abandoned. Only two books interested me enough to pull out - a book of poetry by e.e.cummings and The Wind in the Willows.
Pink Floyd had their first album produced by Norman Smith who quit his job engineering for the Beatles because he believed so much in Pink Floyd. I look forward to finding the reference in Inherent Vice.
Bhavani
Oct 18, 2012, 4:25:54 PM10/18/12
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We meet Doc's Aunt Reet on p.6, a real estate agent likes to have the television loud and who was married to a guy who had a T-Bird agency. I have never paid much attention to cars but have always admired Thunderbirds. Felt like royalty the few times I've ridden in them.
I get the sense that Pynchon references Finnegans Wake. The first sentence of Inherent Vice reminds me of RAWs analysis of FW's opening sentence from his Tao and Joyce essay mentioned in my blog. Also the mention of "untaxed billions stashed under an Alp someplace" in Aunt Reet's brilliant description of Mickey Wolfmann on p.7.
I get the sense that Pynchon references Finnegans Wake. The first sentence of Inherent Vice reminds me of RAWs analysis of FW's opening sentence from his Tao and Joyce essay mentioned in my blog. Also the mention of "untaxed billions stashed under an Alp someplace" in Aunt Reet's brilliant description of Mickey Wolfmann on p.7.
Psmith
Oct 18, 2012, 10:08:31 PM10/18/12
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Now, I thought of the TV show "Thunderbirds."
Watching "Woodstock" two years ago, it struck me how often people talked about Vietnam, most famously Country Joe. When I first saw the film in the 70's, the F word shocked me in his cheer. I also loved Alvin Lee's performance. When I watched it about eight years ago with a high school class, I found it interesting that the kids most enjoyed Hendrix and Santana.
Watching "Woodstock" two years ago, it struck me how often people talked about Vietnam, most famously Country Joe. When I first saw the film in the 70's, the F word shocked me in his cheer. I also loved Alvin Lee's performance. When I watched it about eight years ago with a high school class, I found it interesting that the kids most enjoyed Hendrix and Santana.
Bhavani
Oct 19, 2012, 2:46:44 PM10/19/12
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When I first heard Country Joe do the F chant on the Woodstock album I found it liberating and exhilarating to hear so many people shouting out the taboo word. Nowadays, in the context of Pynchon, I read itas: Tower you see fortune.
A song or two later on that same side of the Woodstock album had Arlo Guthrie singing, "Flying into Los Angeles. Bringing in a couple of keys. Don't search my bags if you please, Mr. Customs Man" which seems resonant with Inherent Vice.
Forgot to point out that real estate expert Aunt Reet, source of Mickey Wolfmann's info, lives in Tree Section. A lot of trees in my neighborhood too.
A song or two later on that same side of the Woodstock album had Arlo Guthrie singing, "Flying into Los Angeles. Bringing in a couple of keys. Don't search my bags if you please, Mr. Customs Man" which seems resonant with Inherent Vice.
Forgot to point out that real estate expert Aunt Reet, source of Mickey Wolfmann's info, lives in Tree Section. A lot of trees in my neighborhood too.
RMJon23
Oct 21, 2012, 5:32:51 PM10/21/12
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I'm into the first five pages of the late 1969/early 1970 Inherent Vice-world. And feeling like I just sunk into a warm bath after a tough day. I love the feel of this book.
What follows below: a Big Ol' Digression?:
"Inherent vice" is a term used in library science about the ephemeral aspects of library materials, inherent in the materials themselves. Things will break down due to what they're made of. They will also break down due to the whips, scorns and all-out abuse library users heap on the materials. Both the material and the users are part of a general baseline that describes ENTROPY.
Inherent vice is also a term used in insurance, but I'm unclear on the ins and outs. It has something to do with knowledge beforehand of risk that something will go wrong. I'm not sure about fault and how it's determined. Note the LA detective-like story and Pynchon's Inherent Vice (which PT Anderson will film), and one of the canonical films noir, Double Indemnity (1944 Billy Wilder): both insurance terms.
Back to entropy: one of he first stories Pynch published was called Entropy, and can be found in _Slow Learner_. He wrote it around 1959, the year RAW was first published, by Krassner and by the James Joyce Review.
Both Pynch and RAW were fascinated by thermodynamics and how it led to Information Theory. Both sought to make readers note an unduly underrated American scientific genius, Willard Gibbs.
William Gaddis used the term "inherent vice" in The Recognitions, and probably infl. Pynch?
Josiah Willard Gibbs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josiah_Willard_Gibbs
"When Jesus falls for the first time, this can be considered a puncture and Simon operates an air pump on his tires, but the threat to throw LSD in the water supply constitutes a 'foul' and this team thereby is driven back three squares by Mace, clubs, and the machine guns of the Capone mob unleashed from another time track in the same multiverse. Willard Gibbs, far more than Einstein, created the modern cosmos, and his concept of contingent or statistical reality, when cross-fertilized with the Second Law of Thermodynamics by Shannon and Wiener, led to the definition of information as the reciprocal of probability, making the clubbings of Jesus by Chicago cops just another of those things that happens in this kind of quantum jump." - Illuminatus!, pp.219-220
Pynch seems to have been cathected by the 2nd Law as an aid to describing the social world and it's own "heat death": our technology will render us - ironically - more alienated.
http://www.psmag.com/media/bitter-about-your-life-blame-facebook-38970/
RAW, as I see it, took the 2nd Law and emphasized the saving aspect of the creative human mind in creating Negentropy: order amid the inevitable disorder the 2nd Law commands. In this he's influenced by Korzybski, Bateson, Wiener, and Schrodinger.
Some Pynchonites have posited that paranoia is a creative force in his work, and the pattern recognitions at work in paranoia are isomorphic to actual human creativity, which...may lead to a Way Out.
Sorry to get all weird on you guys. My further comments will stick more to the text and my idio-impressions.
What follows below: a Big Ol' Digression?:
"Inherent vice" is a term used in library science about the ephemeral aspects of library materials, inherent in the materials themselves. Things will break down due to what they're made of. They will also break down due to the whips, scorns and all-out abuse library users heap on the materials. Both the material and the users are part of a general baseline that describes ENTROPY.
Inherent vice is also a term used in insurance, but I'm unclear on the ins and outs. It has something to do with knowledge beforehand of risk that something will go wrong. I'm not sure about fault and how it's determined. Note the LA detective-like story and Pynchon's Inherent Vice (which PT Anderson will film), and one of the canonical films noir, Double Indemnity (1944 Billy Wilder): both insurance terms.
Back to entropy: one of he first stories Pynch published was called Entropy, and can be found in _Slow Learner_. He wrote it around 1959, the year RAW was first published, by Krassner and by the James Joyce Review.
Both Pynch and RAW were fascinated by thermodynamics and how it led to Information Theory. Both sought to make readers note an unduly underrated American scientific genius, Willard Gibbs.
William Gaddis used the term "inherent vice" in The Recognitions, and probably infl. Pynch?
Josiah Willard Gibbs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josiah_Willard_Gibbs
"When Jesus falls for the first time, this can be considered a puncture and Simon operates an air pump on his tires, but the threat to throw LSD in the water supply constitutes a 'foul' and this team thereby is driven back three squares by Mace, clubs, and the machine guns of the Capone mob unleashed from another time track in the same multiverse. Willard Gibbs, far more than Einstein, created the modern cosmos, and his concept of contingent or statistical reality, when cross-fertilized with the Second Law of Thermodynamics by Shannon and Wiener, led to the definition of information as the reciprocal of probability, making the clubbings of Jesus by Chicago cops just another of those things that happens in this kind of quantum jump." - Illuminatus!, pp.219-220
Pynch seems to have been cathected by the 2nd Law as an aid to describing the social world and it's own "heat death": our technology will render us - ironically - more alienated.
http://www.psmag.com/media/bitter-about-your-life-blame-facebook-38970/
RAW, as I see it, took the 2nd Law and emphasized the saving aspect of the creative human mind in creating Negentropy: order amid the inevitable disorder the 2nd Law commands. In this he's influenced by Korzybski, Bateson, Wiener, and Schrodinger.
Some Pynchonites have posited that paranoia is a creative force in his work, and the pattern recognitions at work in paranoia are isomorphic to actual human creativity, which...may lead to a Way Out.
Sorry to get all weird on you guys. My further comments will stick more to the text and my idio-impressions.
RMJon23
Oct 21, 2012, 6:37:36 PM10/21/12
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"Whenever Doc needed to know anything touching on the world of property, Aunt Reet, with her phenomenal lot-by-lot grasp of land use from the desert to the sea, as they liked to say on the evening news, was the one he went to." p.6
"From the desert to the sea" was the phrase Jerry Dunphy used. Dunphy was one of the models for "Kent Brockman" (nee Kenny Brockelstein) on The Simpsons, and late in his life Dunphy was proud of that, saying, "I'm Kent Brockman."
"From the desert to the sea" was the phrase Jerry Dunphy used. Dunphy was one of the models for "Kent Brockman" (nee Kenny Brockelstein) on The Simpsons, and late in his life Dunphy was proud of that, saying, "I'm Kent Brockman."
RMJon23
Oct 22, 2012, 6:19:46 AM10/22/12
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On Thursday, October 18, 2012 1:25:55 PM UTC-7, Bhavani wrote:
> We meet Doc's Aunt Reet on p.6, a real estate agent likes to have the television loud and who was married to a guy who had a T-Bird agency. I have never paid much attention to cars but have always admired Thunderbirds. Felt like royalty the few times I've ridden in them.
>
>
>
> I get the sense that Pynchon references Finnegans Wake. The first sentence of Inherent Vice reminds me of RAWs analysis of FW's opening sentence from his Tao and Joyce essay mentioned in my blog. Also the mention of "untaxed billions stashed under an Alp someplace" in Aunt Reet's brilliant description of Mickey Wolfmann on p.7.
The dialogue on p.7, when Doc asks his aunt, "What do you know about Mickey Wolfmann?' The way she responds: the cascaded of nouns, the rhythm - a great imitation of the classic noir patter, both in books (Chandler and Hammett) and the films from 1941-52 or so.
> We meet Doc's Aunt Reet on p.6, a real estate agent likes to have the television loud and who was married to a guy who had a T-Bird agency. I have never paid much attention to cars but have always admired Thunderbirds. Felt like royalty the few times I've ridden in them.
>
>
>
> I get the sense that Pynchon references Finnegans Wake. The first sentence of Inherent Vice reminds me of RAWs analysis of FW's opening sentence from his Tao and Joyce essay mentioned in my blog. Also the mention of "untaxed billions stashed under an Alp someplace" in Aunt Reet's brilliant description of Mickey Wolfmann on p.7.
Bhavani
Oct 23, 2012, 3:24:49 PM10/23/12
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On Sunday, October 21, 2012 2:32:52 PM UTC-7, RMJon23 wrote:
>
>
> Pynch seems to have been cathected by the 2nd Law as an aid to describing the social world and it's own "heat death": our technology will render us - ironically - more alienated.
>
>
>
>
>
> Pynch seems to have been cathected by the 2nd Law as an aid to describing the social world and it's own "heat death": our technology will render us - ironically - more alienated.
>
>
>
> RAW, as I see it, took the 2nd Law and emphasized the saving aspect of the creative human mind in creating Negentropy: order amid the inevitable disorder the 2nd Law commands. In this he's influenced by Korzybski, Bateson, Wiener, and Schrodinger.
>
>
As has happened more than once, I run across a subject in The Exegesis of PKD soon after seeing it on the internet. A very sophisticated analysis of negentropy by Phil appears around p. 592-594. The annotator mentions that Schrodinger first developed the concept then goes on to say:
>
>
"Significantly, Schrodinger turned to the Vedic concept of Brahman or Self to make sense of an important local instance of negentropy -- his own consciousness."
It also seems Pynchon includes negentropic ideas and techniques in his writing.
Psmith
Oct 23, 2012, 7:19:06 PM10/23/12
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I saw Arlo and Pete Seger in concert in 1983, and I briefly considered Pete the head of the Illuminati.
Psmith
Oct 23, 2012, 7:22:52 PM10/23/12
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Cool comments Dr. Johnson and Oz. I love the jazz content of "Entropy," although Inherent Vice seems to me to have more of a rock vibe. I just started my jazz unit with my music history class yesterday, so I feel more connected with jazz, at least today.
I wonder about the specificity of the geography of Inherent Vice. I live in Corona, a little ways from the sites in this novel. I don't have a deep knowledge of the specific sites mentioned or alluded to.
I wonder about the specificity of the geography of Inherent Vice. I live in Corona, a little ways from the sites in this novel. I don't have a deep knowledge of the specific sites mentioned or alluded to.
RMJon23
Oct 24, 2012, 1:41:44 AM10/24/12
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RMJon23
Oct 24, 2012, 2:47:39 AM10/24/12
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On Tuesday, October 23, 2012 4:22:53 PM UTC-7, Psmith wrote:
> Cool comments Dr. Johnson and Oz. I love the jazz content of "Entropy," although Inherent Vice seems to me to have more of a rock vibe. I just started my jazz unit with my music history class yesterday, so I feel more connected with jazz, at least today.
>
>
>
> I wonder about the specificity of the geography of Inherent Vice. I live in Corona, a little ways from the sites in this novel. I don't have a deep knowledge of the specific sites mentioned or alluded to.
I was going to post on this first, before that crap about other meanings of inherent vice: I have family who still live in that very area. And I lived in San Pedro, around the LA peninsula, for 10 years. I spent a lot of time in Manhattan Beach, Redondo, Torrance, I worked in Palos Verdes, etc: I "see" almost all of the landscape in this book, and coupled with Mike Davis's City of Quartz and other histories of LA and how it's changed, social relations in different areas, population changes, etc: it's fascinating and no doubt biases my love for the book.
> Cool comments Dr. Johnson and Oz. I love the jazz content of "Entropy," although Inherent Vice seems to me to have more of a rock vibe. I just started my jazz unit with my music history class yesterday, so I feel more connected with jazz, at least today.
>
>
>
> I wonder about the specificity of the geography of Inherent Vice. I live in Corona, a little ways from the sites in this novel. I don't have a deep knowledge of the specific sites mentioned or alluded to.
Throughout this book I'm very impressed at how Pynch used his memory of Manhattan Beach and environs from late 1969-early 1970, and synced it up with research.
pp.35-42, when Doc visits Hope Harlingen in Walteria? I "know" that neighborhood. Same with the book's trailer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2daNrsfwDgY , with Pynch narrating: those alleyways 1/2 mile from the sand are a deep part of my own childhood psychogeography.
The Channel View Estates bits - esp descriptions pp.19-20 - are not flights of fancy. Reminds me of the soul of Chinatown.
Speaking of films, two keep running through my head when I read this book: Big Lebowski (I can't help but think Pynch was infl. by Jeff in drawing up Doc), and Altman's The Long Goodbye, with Elliot Gould as Marlowe doing a Rip Van Winkle and waking up in early 1970s LA. While Gould is a "straight" detective, as Marlowe "is" he's surrounded by the ambience of a world very similar to Inherent Vice's world.
[Another idiogloss on films and this book: Ed Sanders's book The Family is, to me, THE Manson book. The paranoia those killings engendered throughout hippiedom, but esp, in LA and esp the Hollywood hills/Beverly Hills: and the LAPD and found homemade porn with Mama Cass and Warren Beatty and just all sorts of craziness? Hal Ashby's _Shampoo_ (1975, so five years later, but written by Robert Towne, who also wrote Chinatown and grew up in San Pedro) has this sense of early 1970s Los Angeles paranoia hovering over it, to me...]
The stuff about the cops overreacting when a black person appeared east of the Harbor fwy, near Manhattan Beach: NOT hyperbolic!
Bigfoot Bjornsen, while drawn up to look cartoonish like "Doug Niedermeyer" in Animal House, still approaches a verisimilitude, because these asshole-cops in the hippie-era really saw almost every guy with long hair as a "traitor" to American Goodness. Since then, LA-area cops have become far more worldly, and they have more dangerous (military weapons will make their way to the poorer neighborhoods) people to deal with. They grew up with the counterculture, which is now mainstream. I think a good portion of LA cops are still basically fascists, but it's nowheres near as bad as it once was.
Now: everyone has a camera and particularly egregious cops are caught on video doing what they do...but it still seems almost impossible to fire a rotten cop.
Anyway, I think Pynch needed to caricature Bigfoot in order to remind younger readers how horrid some of these guys were. (And yet: Bigfoot, as corrupt as he is, does seem to serve as comic foil for Doc's stoned "Hey man!" relative innocence.
Gawd, this book is funny. I get a contact high reading it! The bit about how Sauncho and Doc met: stoned in the grocery store, and Sauncho's so paranoid he's buying a flour sifter, just KNOWING everyone will know he's only buying it to separate seeds and stems...so they collude and buy way too many sugary snacks and light bulbs to throw anyone off who might suspect?
Doc calling Saunch to get him away from the police station, but Saunch is stoned and all wrapped up in Donald Duck cartoons, seemingly not listening to a word Doc says, but worried that Daisy is running Donald's life, making him shave, etc: this kind of thing was our stoner humor par excellance, even in the 1980s. Cartoons and the new No.CA. sensimilla.
I can like, ya know? Relate, man!
Eric: did you ever see Cal Worthington commercials on late night TV? (p.9) My brothers and I did. Seems like a million years ago.
"But some of these developers, they make Godzilla look like a conservationist..." <---a stealable line
Laff out loud: when p.38, Hope Harlingen talks way too much about her heroin addiction, for two paragraphs, and then Doc says:
"And so...this thing that happened to your husband..."
I also think the cannabis vs other street drugs thing - Pynch's attitude - is probably true to him and also an honest portrayal of some of the messes he saw when others got into speed, coke, heroin, barbs. It feels consistent with Pynch's oeuvre. And little stories about people who knew him in Manhattan Beach: tall, thin dude who wore the same clothes every day, lived on coffee and pot...
(Bigfoot): "Potheads, you're so exclusive. Would you say you _took offense_ at Glen's preference for barbiturates and amphetamines?"
(Doc): "Yeah, I was planning to report him to the Dope Fiend Standards and Ethics Committee."
Most intellectual stoners I know do seem pretty "exclusive." It's been proven time and again that the "gateway" argument is stupid, but it's still widely believed. The only exceptions most intellectual stoners I've known make is for shrooms and other psychedelics.
Eric: do you think Pynch's Kerouac-infl and the 1950s were more about jazz, while Pynch's coming-of-age-as-novelist had to do with rock and roll and the 1960s?
Psmith
Oct 24, 2012, 12:22:27 PM10/24/12
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I agree with your agreement. Your political summary reminds me of Vineland. I remember when that book came out my friends Steve and Vicky Snow talked with Bob Wilson about Vineland. Bob told them he thought Pynchon made that book easier to understand than Gravity's Rainbow because he considered the message so important.
Psmith
Oct 24, 2012, 12:36:20 PM10/24/12
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Great post, Doc. I loved "Chinatown," and I look forward to rewatching it next month for my MLA class. I also loved "The Big L." and Altman's Chandler film.
I only saw the Cal W. spots in the Monkee's wonderful film "Head."
re: stoned in the grocery store. Have you heard this song - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxuBThOcmZU ?
Vineland also has a Godzilla reference. A rumor went around between Gravity's Rainbow and Vineland that Pynch had gone broke and had to write Godzilla movies to earn some bread.
re: Kerouac - I loved the recent post at rawillumination of the General Semantics article by Bob which discussed K. Reading the book Positively Fourth Street I wondered about the importance of music in Pynchon's life and work. The topic of music came up a few times in our read of Against the Day.
V had a jazz musician character, a cross between Ornette and Pynchon himself. I will mull over your music question.
I only saw the Cal W. spots in the Monkee's wonderful film "Head."
re: stoned in the grocery store. Have you heard this song - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxuBThOcmZU ?
Vineland also has a Godzilla reference. A rumor went around between Gravity's Rainbow and Vineland that Pynch had gone broke and had to write Godzilla movies to earn some bread.
re: Kerouac - I loved the recent post at rawillumination of the General Semantics article by Bob which discussed K. Reading the book Positively Fourth Street I wondered about the importance of music in Pynchon's life and work. The topic of music came up a few times in our read of Against the Day.
V had a jazz musician character, a cross between Ornette and Pynchon himself. I will mull over your music question.
Bhavani
Oct 24, 2012, 2:55:11 PM10/24/12
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>
> [Another idiogloss on films and this book: Ed Sanders's book The Family is, to me, THE Manson book. The paranoia those killings engendered throughout hippiedom, but esp, in LA and esp the Hollywood hills/Beverly Hills: and the LAPD and found homemade porn with Mama Cass and Warren Beatty and just all sorts of craziness?
Bhavani
Oct 24, 2012, 3:07:19 PM10/24/12
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On Tuesday, October 23, 2012 4:19:06 PM UTC-7, Psmith wrote:
> I saw Arlo and Pete Seger in concert in 1983, and I briefly considered Pete the head of the Illuminati.
Pete Seeger could very well have served as one of the music heads of the Illuminatti. A very important figure musically, kind of passing the baton from Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan for lyrical music most intrinsic to the American experience. He taught music nonstop and became one of the first environmental activists, noted for nearly single-handedly cleaning up the Hudson River Valley. All this despite the McCarthy communist paranoia that dogged him.
> I saw Arlo and Pete Seger in concert in 1983, and I briefly considered Pete the head of the Illuminati.
Psmith
Oct 24, 2012, 4:00:12 PM10/24/12
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I enjoyed The Family. I heard it also originally included a chapter on the Process which Sanders had to remove due to legal pressures.
Psmith
Oct 24, 2012, 4:09:42 PM10/24/12
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I see more jazz in Pynchon's coming-of-age-as-a-novelist. I only read V once, over twenty years ago, but I remember it had a jazz musician who seemed to me a character based in part on Pynchon. I've seen critics who saw that character as based on Ornette Coleman.
The ukelele music seems to dominate Vineland, although a punk musician has an interesting role. Inherent Vice seems to me to have more rock than anything else by the Pynch, except perhaps his pieces on the band Lotion:
Lotion
Liner Notes to Nobody's Cool
The name of Lotion's first album is Full Isaac, which besides getting instant screams of recognition from Love Boat rerun watchers everywhere, shows an attentive nostalgia at work -- not to mention some dream of an endless cruise, upon which Nobody's Cool is the next leg of the band's creative itinerary. As beneath the austerities of twelvetone music may lurk some shameless piece of baroque polyphony, so, throughout this album, beneath the formal demands of rock and roll as we have come to know it, between the metal anthems and moments of tonal drama, the darkest of surrealist lyrics, the most feedback-stricken, edge-of-chaos guitar passages, may also be detected the weird jiving sense of humor of a cruise combo, even an allegiance to the parameters thereof, the lounge chords on "Namedropper" and "Rock Chick," the bass line of "Juggernaut," so forth.
But . . . it's supposed to be the Millenium here -- the Apocalypse, right? -- worse it's New York in the middle of a seasonal charm deficiency -- and these guys are smiling? Well, not exactly. If it's a cruise gig, it sure runs through peculiar waters, full of undetonated mines from the cultural disputes that began in the Sixties, unexplained lights now and then from just over the horizon, stowaways who sneak past security and meddle with the amps causing them to emit strange Rays, unannounced calls at ports that seem almost like cities we have been to, though not quite, cityscapes that all converge to New York in some form, which is after all where these guys are from.
The recording studio is half a block from the subway. Times Square is being vacated and jackhammered into somebody's idea of an update. Next door to Peepland, up in a control room out of The Jetsons, the band, between takes, are discussing Bobby "Boris" Pickett, on whose 1962 hit "Monster Mash" it turns out Rob's substitute music teacher in elementary school played saxophone. Everybody here knows the record, not necessarily the Birth of Rap, less an influence than something trying to find a pathway through to us here in our own corrupted and perilous day, when everybody's heard everything and knows more than they wish they did. It's never certain how these things will be carried on, but mysteriously it happens. Every night, somewhere on the outlaw side of some town, below some metaphysical 14th Street, out at the hard edges of some consensus about what's real, the continuity is always being sought, claimed, lost, found again, carried on. If for no other reason, rock and roll remains one of the last honorable callings, and a working band is a miracle of everyday life. Which is basically what these guys do.
And here they are, now. Find the remote, get out the Snapple and Chee-tos, and like the Love Boat staff always sez, welcome aboard.
-- By Thomas Pynchon
He also did an interview with Lotion, but I can't find it online. Did I imagine it?
The ukelele music seems to dominate Vineland, although a punk musician has an interesting role. Inherent Vice seems to me to have more rock than anything else by the Pynch, except perhaps his pieces on the band Lotion:
Lotion
Liner Notes to Nobody's Cool
The name of Lotion's first album is Full Isaac, which besides getting instant screams of recognition from Love Boat rerun watchers everywhere, shows an attentive nostalgia at work -- not to mention some dream of an endless cruise, upon which Nobody's Cool is the next leg of the band's creative itinerary. As beneath the austerities of twelvetone music may lurk some shameless piece of baroque polyphony, so, throughout this album, beneath the formal demands of rock and roll as we have come to know it, between the metal anthems and moments of tonal drama, the darkest of surrealist lyrics, the most feedback-stricken, edge-of-chaos guitar passages, may also be detected the weird jiving sense of humor of a cruise combo, even an allegiance to the parameters thereof, the lounge chords on "Namedropper" and "Rock Chick," the bass line of "Juggernaut," so forth.
But . . . it's supposed to be the Millenium here -- the Apocalypse, right? -- worse it's New York in the middle of a seasonal charm deficiency -- and these guys are smiling? Well, not exactly. If it's a cruise gig, it sure runs through peculiar waters, full of undetonated mines from the cultural disputes that began in the Sixties, unexplained lights now and then from just over the horizon, stowaways who sneak past security and meddle with the amps causing them to emit strange Rays, unannounced calls at ports that seem almost like cities we have been to, though not quite, cityscapes that all converge to New York in some form, which is after all where these guys are from.
The recording studio is half a block from the subway. Times Square is being vacated and jackhammered into somebody's idea of an update. Next door to Peepland, up in a control room out of The Jetsons, the band, between takes, are discussing Bobby "Boris" Pickett, on whose 1962 hit "Monster Mash" it turns out Rob's substitute music teacher in elementary school played saxophone. Everybody here knows the record, not necessarily the Birth of Rap, less an influence than something trying to find a pathway through to us here in our own corrupted and perilous day, when everybody's heard everything and knows more than they wish they did. It's never certain how these things will be carried on, but mysteriously it happens. Every night, somewhere on the outlaw side of some town, below some metaphysical 14th Street, out at the hard edges of some consensus about what's real, the continuity is always being sought, claimed, lost, found again, carried on. If for no other reason, rock and roll remains one of the last honorable callings, and a working band is a miracle of everyday life. Which is basically what these guys do.
And here they are, now. Find the remote, get out the Snapple and Chee-tos, and like the Love Boat staff always sez, welcome aboard.
-- By Thomas Pynchon
He also did an interview with Lotion, but I can't find it online. Did I imagine it?
Psmith
Oct 24, 2012, 4:34:20 PM10/24/12
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I like the list of cars on page 19. Living in Southern California I spend a lot of time in my car contemplating other cars. I wonder how many folks afford such nice vehicles.
I have the Beatles playing. Doc Johnson and Oz's comments about music have made me feel I want to have appropriate music playing while reading this book. It reminds me of when Oz and I read The Bear Comes Home a few years ago. I would put on some of the jazz recommended in the listener's guide during my prep period almost every day. I really enjoyed that process.
I have the Beatles playing. Doc Johnson and Oz's comments about music have made me feel I want to have appropriate music playing while reading this book. It reminds me of when Oz and I read The Bear Comes Home a few years ago. I would put on some of the jazz recommended in the listener's guide during my prep period almost every day. I really enjoyed that process.
RMJon23
Oct 24, 2012, 5:07:06 PM10/24/12
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On Wednesday, October 24, 2012 1:34:21 PM UTC-7, Psmith wrote:
> I like the list of cars on page 19. Living in Southern California I spend a lot of time in my car contemplating other cars. I wonder how many folks afford such nice vehicles.
>
>
>
> I have the Beatles playing. Doc Johnson and Oz's comments about music have made me feel I want to have appropriate music playing while reading this book. It reminds me of when Oz and I read The Bear Comes Home a few years ago. I would put on some of the jazz recommended in the listener's guide during my prep period almost every day. I really enjoyed that process.
Thanks for the liner notes to Lotion. I knew thy existed, and even "read" them one late night, when I ended up at a friend's house, all wasted, and that CD had just come out, and I'd never heard of Lotion, and I asked..."What....who...why do you have this?"
> I like the list of cars on page 19. Living in Southern California I spend a lot of time in my car contemplating other cars. I wonder how many folks afford such nice vehicles.
>
>
>
> I have the Beatles playing. Doc Johnson and Oz's comments about music have made me feel I want to have appropriate music playing while reading this book. It reminds me of when Oz and I read The Bear Comes Home a few years ago. I would put on some of the jazz recommended in the listener's guide during my prep period almost every day. I really enjoyed that process.
"The liner notes were written by Thomas Pynchon."
This immediately hit me as a surreal response.
Have you heard this version of the 1950s tune "At the Hop"?:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QlDuAZFlHo
Supermarkets are sensory-overload places for me even when I'm straight. Usually I have a list and am charged with getting everything, and I just hope they haven't moved things, 'cuz I just wanna get in and out of there as fast as possible. But sometimes I let the supermarket, with its colors and ambient muzak and textures and other shoppers and their wants and needs clued in their carts: trippy. Like Allen Ginsberg, stoned:
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/supermarket.html
Psmith
Oct 24, 2012, 5:47:30 PM10/24/12
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Thanks for the great video. It reminded me of Alvin Lee in feel.
RMJon23
Oct 24, 2012, 8:55:11 PM10/24/12
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On Tuesday, October 23, 2012 12:24:50 PM UTC-7, Bhavani wrote:
Amir Aczel writes about Schrodinger as babe magnet in his explanation of _Entanglement_, pp.55-71. I didn't know the story about Schrodinger having a grandson by another mother who grew up to become a physicist interested in the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics...and then found out who his grandfather was! (see p.235)
RAW hones on negentropy strongly in the revised ed. of Prometheus Rising, near the end, on quantum evolution. Ilya Prigogine extended Bateson, Shannon, Wiener, and Schrodinger with his math of dissipative structures. See pp.257-260: a key to RAW's optimism in the face of radical political/social/environmental instability in the present epoch.
Wilson had riffed on negentropy as far back as 1963, in the Feb. ish of Way Out, which is the first thing under "periodicals" at RAWilsonFans.com, but it's a PDF, the pages are out of order, and the the first page of the article, "Robert Anton Wilson on Sex, Art and Entropy," seems missing.
In the intro to Pynch's Slow Learner, he goes hard on his story "Entropy," and most readers seem to disagree...like this guy: http://loopingworld.com/2011/12/18/entropy-pynchon/
I have not even dipped into the Exegesis, or of the exegetes of the Exegesis, and I've followed your notes on it, and it's always interesting.
Bhavani
Oct 25, 2012, 3:02:01 PM10/25/12
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The first paragraph on p. 20, a description of the Channel View Estates development, could also apply to shamanism or alchemy especially:
" ...and just visible beyond them the skeletons of new construction, expanding into the unincorporated wastes."
Also appreciate the extreme mysterious conjunction of Mickey Wolfmann as a Jewish Nazi. It reminds me of the Taoist union of opposites and of Crowley's 0=2 formula.
Bhavani
Oct 25, 2012, 3:07:09 PM10/25/12
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The video reminded me of Sha Na Na at Woodstock and of the movie Super High Me which has similar production values.
RMJon23
Oct 26, 2012, 2:43:59 AM10/26/12
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On Wednesday, October 24, 2012 11:55:12 AM UTC-7, Bhavani wrote:
> >
>
> > [Another idiogloss on films and this book: Ed Sanders's book The Family is, to me, THE Manson book. The paranoia those killings engendered throughout hippiedom, but esp, in LA and esp the Hollywood hills/Beverly Hills: and the LAPD and found homemade porn with Mama Cass and Warren Beatty and just all sorts of craziness?
>
>
>
> Ed Sanders when writing The Family had an informant infiltrating LA occult groups. After the informant was soon discovered, they fed him the wildest yarns that ended up being printed as fact in the book (source - Poke Runyon podcast). Sanders also got sued for libel and had to completely remove the chapter on the Solar Lodge for being completely fictional.
Oz: thanks for the inside stuff here; you are The Man when it comes to this. A few years ago I gave a very intense, close reading of the 2002 version of The Family. I had skimmed earlier (very different) versions. The first time I tried to read it - 1980s? - got me too creeped out. I was oblivious to the Process Church anyway.
> >
>
> > [Another idiogloss on films and this book: Ed Sanders's book The Family is, to me, THE Manson book. The paranoia those killings engendered throughout hippiedom, but esp, in LA and esp the Hollywood hills/Beverly Hills: and the LAPD and found homemade porn with Mama Cass and Warren Beatty and just all sorts of craziness?
>
>
>
> Ed Sanders when writing The Family had an informant infiltrating LA occult groups. After the informant was soon discovered, they fed him the wildest yarns that ended up being printed as fact in the book (source - Poke Runyon podcast). Sanders also got sued for libel and had to completely remove the chapter on the Solar Lodge for being completely fictional.
Would you know if the 2002 version still contains some "fictional" stuff? There's some stuff on E.J. Gold on pp. 408-409 and 416 ("Morloch The Warlock"). And what about the stuff about "The Inventor"? Creep-a-ZOID! On p.458 Sanders asserts that Morloch (EJ Gold) knew about The Inventor.
To officially tie this all back into Inherent Vice: the Manson arrest had recently been made, and Hippie stock took a dive ("the end of the Sixties," for many); it's reflected throughout this whole novel. Straight Murrkins had seen the Hippies as a threat; the Manson killings were more than they'd hoped for for confirmation that All Hippies and Pot Smokers and Them LSD-Takers are a threat to "our way of life."
[Doc and many others - incl the LAPD - are looking for Shasta Fay and Mickey Wolfmann. Doc visits his old acquaintance, "Fritz" - who smells like CIA - and Fritz asks]:
"Every cop in the LAPD and the Sheriff's is looking for both of them. Who do you think will find them first?"
(Doc):"Judging by the Manson case, I say any random idiot off the street."
(Fritz):"Well come on in and check this out..."
And Fritz shows Doc a massive bank of computers: a node in the early ARPANET, later the Internet. Fritz explains what this thing can do, exchanging massive amounts of data with other computers all over the country, more being hooked into the system all the time. Fritz: "Right now, it's experimental, but hel, it's government money, and those fuckers don't care what they spend, and we've had some useful surprises already."
Doc: "Does it know where I can score?"
-pp. 53-54
Would the Internet have caught the Mansonoids quicker? Who knows? The Net was really just coming into it's own and the FBI were baffled by Kaczynski, for over 10 yrs. Ted K. HATED computers and computer scientists and even blew the hand off of David Gelernter (sp?). But it took a family member who recognized Ted's writing style in snail-mail to finally catch him.
Bhavani
Oct 26, 2012, 2:43:50 PM10/26/12
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On Thursday, October 25, 2012 11:44:00 PM UTC-7, RMJon23 wrote:
> On Wednesday, October 24, 2012 11:55:12 AM UTC-7, Bhavani wrote:
>
> > >
>
> >
>
> > > [Another idiogloss on films and this book: Ed Sanders's book The Family is, to me, THE Manson book. The paranoia those killings engendered throughout hippiedom, but esp, in LA and esp the Hollywood hills/Beverly Hills: and the LAPD and found homemade porn with Mama Cass and Warren Beatty and just all sorts of craziness?
>
> >
>
> >
>
> >
>
> > Ed Sanders when writing The Family had an informant infiltrating LA occult groups. After the informant was soon discovered, they fed him the wildest yarns that ended up being printed as fact in the book (source - Poke Runyon podcast). Sanders also got sued for libel and had to completely remove the chapter on the Solar Lodge for being completely fictional.
>
>
>
> Oz: thanks for the inside stuff here; you are The Man when it comes to this. A few years ago I gave a very intense, close reading of the 2002 version of The Family. I had skimmed earlier (very different) versions. The first time I tried to read it - 1980s? - got me too creeped out. I was oblivious to the Process Church anyway.
>
>
>
> Would you know if the 2002 version still contains some "fictional" stuff? There's some stuff on E.J. Gold on pp. 408-409 and 416 ("Morloch The Warlock"). And what about the stuff about "The Inventor"? Creep-a-ZOID! On p.458 Sanders asserts that Morloch (EJ Gold) knew about The Inventor.
>
>
>
> To officially tie this all back into Inherent Vice: the Manson arrest had recently been made, and Hippie stock took a dive ("the end of the Sixties," for many); it's reflected throughout this whole novel. Straight Murrkins had seen the Hippies as a threat; the Manson killings were more than they'd hoped for for confirmation that All Hippies and Pot Smokers and Them LSD-Takers are a threat to "our way of life."
>
>
>
> [Doc and many others - incl the LAPD - are looking for Shasta Fay and Mickey Wolfmann. Doc visits his old acquaintance, "Fritz" - who smells like CIA - and Fritz asks]:
>
I haven't read The Family but am curious to read it now. The only info I have about it came from a great podcast with Poke Runyon about the Solar Lodge:
> On Wednesday, October 24, 2012 11:55:12 AM UTC-7, Bhavani wrote:
>
> > >
>
> >
>
> > > [Another idiogloss on films and this book: Ed Sanders's book The Family is, to me, THE Manson book. The paranoia those killings engendered throughout hippiedom, but esp, in LA and esp the Hollywood hills/Beverly Hills: and the LAPD and found homemade porn with Mama Cass and Warren Beatty and just all sorts of craziness?
>
> >
>
> >
>
> >
>
> > Ed Sanders when writing The Family had an informant infiltrating LA occult groups. After the informant was soon discovered, they fed him the wildest yarns that ended up being printed as fact in the book (source - Poke Runyon podcast). Sanders also got sued for libel and had to completely remove the chapter on the Solar Lodge for being completely fictional.
>
>
>
> Oz: thanks for the inside stuff here; you are The Man when it comes to this. A few years ago I gave a very intense, close reading of the 2002 version of The Family. I had skimmed earlier (very different) versions. The first time I tried to read it - 1980s? - got me too creeped out. I was oblivious to the Process Church anyway.
>
>
>
> Would you know if the 2002 version still contains some "fictional" stuff? There's some stuff on E.J. Gold on pp. 408-409 and 416 ("Morloch The Warlock"). And what about the stuff about "The Inventor"? Creep-a-ZOID! On p.458 Sanders asserts that Morloch (EJ Gold) knew about The Inventor.
>
>
>
> To officially tie this all back into Inherent Vice: the Manson arrest had recently been made, and Hippie stock took a dive ("the end of the Sixties," for many); it's reflected throughout this whole novel. Straight Murrkins had seen the Hippies as a threat; the Manson killings were more than they'd hoped for for confirmation that All Hippies and Pot Smokers and Them LSD-Takers are a threat to "our way of life."
>
>
>
> [Doc and many others - incl the LAPD - are looking for Shasta Fay and Mickey Wolfmann. Doc visits his old acquaintance, "Fritz" - who smells like CIA - and Fritz asks]:
>
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/the-hermetic-hour/2012/05/18/inside-the-solar-lodge-behind-the-veil
Never have discussed The Family with Gold except when I told him what was said in the Podcast about him regarding that book. Runyon said that Gold told Sander's informant about a "Cult of Circe" that kidnapped house pets from the Hollywood Hills and sacrificed them. It's complete fiction and I would guess didn't get cut out because no one told Sanders he'd been duped. Gold confirmed the story, he had only one thing to clarify. At the start of the story Runyon describes Gold as a prankster. He wanted to make clear though he knew Ken Kesey, he was never one of Kesey's Merry Pranksters.
Sanders did interview Gold. I saw a quote on a forum awhile back that Sanders wrote something like, "evidently Jeff Gold possesses the original manuscript of Crowley's Book of the Law..." Chalk that up to pure fiction. I would have loved to have been at that interview to hear whatever got said to make Sanders reach this conclusion. No one in the occult community took that statement seriously because, at the time, the manuscript of The Book of the Law was lost. It turned up some years later in a basement in Oakland. If the OTO actually thought Gold had the manuscript, they would have asked for it back. Gold did know McMurtry so he may have tipped him off.
I would have to see the other passages about Gold in The Family to see how factual or fictional it reads.
He does talk about his LA days from time to time, and has talked about the Manson case but I've never heard him mention a character called The Inventor. He did know Sharon Tate, that's the only person directly involved he's ever said he knew.
So we have a Fritz in Inherent Vice who smells like the C.I.A.? How interesting... I haven't gotten that far. I had an astonishing number of personal synchs reading Against the Day and it appears I'll see some more here. My name growing up until High School - Mickey Fritz. My Mom gave me the nickname Mickey because Ozzie was being used by my grandpa at the time. Also, just finished watching all the episodes of Nero Wolfe, a high production A & E whodunit from earlier this century. His butler/cook's name is Fritz - another Fritz/Wolfe character combination. I would call those dramas, set in the '50's, not-quite-noir or noir lite but still very enjoyable.
RMJon23
Oct 28, 2012, 7:07:21 AM10/28/12
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Subject: the "free agent" in the information/law arena: the Philip Marlowe Lone Knight, caught in the City-Labyrinth, who gets an "ordinary" assignment, then finds himself alone, dead-set on finding the Truth, even though he's not sure who He Can Trust:
Larry "Doc" Sportello, the Lewbowski-ish character from, say, late-1969: in a 369-page book, in the first 75 pages he's offered by Control (as Burroughs would call them) inducements to become Informer/radically test Doc's integrity/buy off any competition for State Power.
-see p.32: LAPD (always intertwined with the Feds)-ish Bigfoot tells Doc that Nixon has bottomless pockets in the war on crime, get in while you can. Doc is astonished: being asked to do a "Mod Squad" is not his thang.
-p.52, Fritz Drybeam once offered Doc a job (CIA?) driving "truth serum" hypodermics into people to get them to talk. Like it was a selling point.
-p.75, Flatwood and Drybeam, FBI agents, given the shove-off by Doc, remind Doc he could be making $300/mo by taking part in COINTELPRO.
Q: What do you make of Pynchon's ideas about cops and recruitment here?
Larry "Doc" Sportello, the Lewbowski-ish character from, say, late-1969: in a 369-page book, in the first 75 pages he's offered by Control (as Burroughs would call them) inducements to become Informer/radically test Doc's integrity/buy off any competition for State Power.
-see p.32: LAPD (always intertwined with the Feds)-ish Bigfoot tells Doc that Nixon has bottomless pockets in the war on crime, get in while you can. Doc is astonished: being asked to do a "Mod Squad" is not his thang.
-p.52, Fritz Drybeam once offered Doc a job (CIA?) driving "truth serum" hypodermics into people to get them to talk. Like it was a selling point.
-p.75, Flatwood and Drybeam, FBI agents, given the shove-off by Doc, remind Doc he could be making $300/mo by taking part in COINTELPRO.
Q: What do you make of Pynchon's ideas about cops and recruitment here?
Psmith
Oct 30, 2012, 6:21:03 PM10/30/12
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Doc, Pynchon seems very concerned about recruitment in the passages you mention, as well as in Vineland. I wonder whether anyone ever tried to recruit Pynchon. I don't think anyone has really tried to recruit me into turning people in to the cops.
btqu...@gmail.com
Nov 12, 2012, 1:06:29 AM11/12/12
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I'm about 50 pages in and I have to say I'm really digging the book so far.
Actually, I started reading it after coming across a post over the Overweening Generalist. Loving the prose and stoner humor. Also, Pynchon's meandering sentences certainly put one into an altered state of reading.
Anyone notice the reference to Emilio Estevez Sci-Fi flick Repo Man on p. 51-52?
Actually, I started reading it after coming across a post over the Overweening Generalist. Loving the prose and stoner humor. Also, Pynchon's meandering sentences certainly put one into an altered state of reading.
Anyone notice the reference to Emilio Estevez Sci-Fi flick Repo Man on p. 51-52?
RMJon23
Nov 12, 2012, 4:09:47 AM11/12/12
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Psmith
Nov 15, 2012, 1:39:01 PM11/15/12
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The discussion of astrology on pg. 40 reminded me of people asking Mason and Dixon to do their charts in _Mason and Dixon_.
Psmith
Nov 15, 2012, 1:42:30 PM11/15/12
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The reference to Vineland and the Corvairs on pg. 43 links to my beloved _Vineland_.
Psmith
Nov 15, 2012, 1:49:42 PM11/15/12
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The last time I heard Tim Leary talk I asked him what he thought about _Vineland_. He seemed annoyed by the question, "Oh, you want to talk about my personal opinions?" He didn't like the book much except for the bit about tubal detox for those who watch too much TV. The frequent TV references in _Inherent Vice_ reminded me of that.
william...@gmail.com
Nov 15, 2012, 3:18:22 PM11/15/12
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On Monday, October 15, 2012 2:23:03 PM UTC-7, Psmith wrote:
> Well, I just read page 1. I look forward to rereading this book. I remember the day it came out I went to Walmart early in the morning, but they didn't have it. At 10 am I went to Barnes and Noble. I couldn't find it, so I asked for help. They had a copy or two on the new arrivals table, I think. I'd hoped to find a stack of copies in the window display. Pynchon has reached cultural icon status but not enough to displace The Hunger Games at Walmart or B & N.
I have been thinking of significant associations to some of the other characters names ,Shasta Fey reminds me of Mt. Shasta. Being generaly thought of as a mysterious place with links to hollow earth , and some folk lore in a city 'Weed'
Ca. about lizard people that inhabit some of the cavernous psychography. Fey is interesting in that it relates to King Arthur tales as his famous aunt that seduced him and bore his bastard child,Mordred, was named Morgana La Fey as Morgana can be defined as an illusion. Doc Sportello sounds like the kind of name that one would hear in a high school gym class. Maybe a drug connection for roids or good reefer.
> Well, I just read page 1. I look forward to rereading this book. I remember the day it came out I went to Walmart early in the morning, but they didn't have it. At 10 am I went to Barnes and Noble. I couldn't find it, so I asked for help. They had a copy or two on the new arrivals table, I think. I'd hoped to find a stack of copies in the window display. Pynchon has reached cultural icon status but not enough to displace The Hunger Games at Walmart or B & N.
I have been thinking of significant associations to some of the other characters names ,Shasta Fey reminds me of Mt. Shasta. Being generaly thought of as a mysterious place with links to hollow earth , and some folk lore in a city 'Weed'
Ca. about lizard people that inhabit some of the cavernous psychography. Fey is interesting in that it relates to King Arthur tales as his famous aunt that seduced him and bore his bastard child,Mordred, was named Morgana La Fey as Morgana can be defined as an illusion. Doc Sportello sounds like the kind of name that one would hear in a high school gym class. Maybe a drug connection for roids or good reefer.
Psmith
Nov 15, 2012, 4:37:33 PM11/15/12
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And our reading group has a Fritz, and I call the illustrious Michael Johnson "Dr. Johnson," which makes me think of Doc in this novel.
Of course, if we see the novel as a Daedalus constructed labyrinth, we need a Stephen to guide us through it. (Although this sixties novel might need the Dead's "St. Stephen." I don't think the book mentions the Dead, though.)
Of course, if we see the novel as a Daedalus constructed labyrinth, we need a Stephen to guide us through it. (Although this sixties novel might need the Dead's "St. Stephen." I don't think the book mentions the Dead, though.)
RMJon23
Nov 16, 2012, 12:47:50 AM11/16/12
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On Thursday, November 15, 2012 10:49:42 AM UTC-8, Psmith wrote:
> The last time I heard Tim Leary talk I asked him what he thought about _Vineland_. He seemed annoyed by the question, "Oh, you want to talk about my personal opinions?" He didn't like the book much except for the bit about tubal detox for those who watch too much TV. The frequent TV references in _Inherent Vice_ reminded me of that.
Every time I see TV references in Pynchon my mind goes in two ways immediately: I grew up on TV and smile at the references, which are never cast in a distinct, outright morally condemnatory tone; OTOH, any minor exegete of Pynchon will see (I would like to hear dissenters of the view I'm about to articulate) that TV turned into drug, and made those who fought for the 60s ideals of liberation into Lotus Eaters, watching Bonanza, The Dating Game, joking about Gilligan's Island, on and on and on. I don't think Pynchon likes what TV did to kulchur at all, at all.
> The last time I heard Tim Leary talk I asked him what he thought about _Vineland_. He seemed annoyed by the question, "Oh, you want to talk about my personal opinions?" He didn't like the book much except for the bit about tubal detox for those who watch too much TV. The frequent TV references in _Inherent Vice_ reminded me of that.
RMJon23
Nov 16, 2012, 2:45:27 AM11/16/12
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ADDENDA to previous post:
I just recalled the essay TP contributed to _Deadly Sins_ (wasn't that the title?), in which he covered Sloth. IIRC he said that, with the advent of the VCR and the remote (I imagine he thinks the DVR is even better?), TV becomes a different medium, because of the suddenly altered element of time and perception.
As I recall it was a McLuhanesque riff, although MM not mentioned. (TP almost definitely did read Understanding Media and it influenced CoL49, very likely.)
RAW also saw channel surfing as an artform, a way to do random cut-ups. In one interview, I forget where, RAW said he thought he discovered channel surfing, calling it "Bavarian TV." In a 1976 interview with New Libertarian, within the context of cut-ups and WSB, Ezra Pound and magick, he talks of "a TV shot picked up as you turn the dials quickly." This is seriously experimental TV watching, folks! RAW, in 1976, is "turning the dials" (?) to notice the effects? In Prometheus Rising he seems to see TV as a simile/metaphor for the biggest promise and threat we face: knowing ourselves and how our brain/nervous system works.
RIWYCGAW seems highly related to these ideas...
See WSB's _The Job_, pp.31-32, for ideas about experimenting with TV images and sound tracks. This was the late 1960s/early 1970s (the interview is not dated, but The Job appeared in 1974: "For example, you take a television set, shut off the sound track and put on any arbitrary sound track and it will seem to fit." (Is this where Wizard of Oz/Dark Side of the Moon started?)
McLoon:"Concern with _effect_ rather than _meaning_ is a basic change of our electric time, for effect involves the whole situation, and not a single level of information movement." (p.26, Understanding Media)
George Carlin, in 1973, on the subject of TV: "Let's face it, TV is controlled by government and paid for by private industry. Certainly with that combination the result is bound to be mostly junk." - found on p.144 of Sullivan's bio
Later in Inherent Vice we'll see "Godzilligan's Island," and a place for "Toobfrrex," and throughout the novel everyone seems TV damaged in their own ways, even if they're a lawyer. (Although perhaps the meatiest dissent from my idea could be Doc's conversation with Crocker Fenway, pp.346-347; Fenway's class - the owners of the country, basically - the class that the Matt Damon character is both part of and working for in The Good Shepherd, when someone asks him what do HIS people have and he says, "The United States of America. All the rest of you are just visiting." One doubts _they're_ caught up in the anesthesia of TV, and are the Yankees any better than the Cowboys?)
When Doc's visiting Hope Harlingen in Walteria, she's telling him way too much about her heroin addiction, and she says, "My parents saw us locked into a dismal slavery, but Coy and I, all we saw was the freedom - from that endless middle-class cycle of choices that are no choices at all..." (p.38) TV seems like an analog to heroin here for Pynchon. Because the window for true liberation - Pynchon's sixties - had closed, it's hard to tell whether TV/bad drugs were part of the cause or the result of giving up. The Reagan/Nixon counter-rev had won out.
Jeez...I just re-read this post before hitting "send" and it looks like some loser who's not good enough to get into Pynchon Notes. Oh well...I'm from Tai-Ping!
I just recalled the essay TP contributed to _Deadly Sins_ (wasn't that the title?), in which he covered Sloth. IIRC he said that, with the advent of the VCR and the remote (I imagine he thinks the DVR is even better?), TV becomes a different medium, because of the suddenly altered element of time and perception.
As I recall it was a McLuhanesque riff, although MM not mentioned. (TP almost definitely did read Understanding Media and it influenced CoL49, very likely.)
RAW also saw channel surfing as an artform, a way to do random cut-ups. In one interview, I forget where, RAW said he thought he discovered channel surfing, calling it "Bavarian TV." In a 1976 interview with New Libertarian, within the context of cut-ups and WSB, Ezra Pound and magick, he talks of "a TV shot picked up as you turn the dials quickly." This is seriously experimental TV watching, folks! RAW, in 1976, is "turning the dials" (?) to notice the effects? In Prometheus Rising he seems to see TV as a simile/metaphor for the biggest promise and threat we face: knowing ourselves and how our brain/nervous system works.
RIWYCGAW seems highly related to these ideas...
See WSB's _The Job_, pp.31-32, for ideas about experimenting with TV images and sound tracks. This was the late 1960s/early 1970s (the interview is not dated, but The Job appeared in 1974: "For example, you take a television set, shut off the sound track and put on any arbitrary sound track and it will seem to fit." (Is this where Wizard of Oz/Dark Side of the Moon started?)
McLoon:"Concern with _effect_ rather than _meaning_ is a basic change of our electric time, for effect involves the whole situation, and not a single level of information movement." (p.26, Understanding Media)
George Carlin, in 1973, on the subject of TV: "Let's face it, TV is controlled by government and paid for by private industry. Certainly with that combination the result is bound to be mostly junk." - found on p.144 of Sullivan's bio
Later in Inherent Vice we'll see "Godzilligan's Island," and a place for "Toobfrrex," and throughout the novel everyone seems TV damaged in their own ways, even if they're a lawyer. (Although perhaps the meatiest dissent from my idea could be Doc's conversation with Crocker Fenway, pp.346-347; Fenway's class - the owners of the country, basically - the class that the Matt Damon character is both part of and working for in The Good Shepherd, when someone asks him what do HIS people have and he says, "The United States of America. All the rest of you are just visiting." One doubts _they're_ caught up in the anesthesia of TV, and are the Yankees any better than the Cowboys?)
When Doc's visiting Hope Harlingen in Walteria, she's telling him way too much about her heroin addiction, and she says, "My parents saw us locked into a dismal slavery, but Coy and I, all we saw was the freedom - from that endless middle-class cycle of choices that are no choices at all..." (p.38) TV seems like an analog to heroin here for Pynchon. Because the window for true liberation - Pynchon's sixties - had closed, it's hard to tell whether TV/bad drugs were part of the cause or the result of giving up. The Reagan/Nixon counter-rev had won out.
Jeez...I just re-read this post before hitting "send" and it looks like some loser who's not good enough to get into Pynchon Notes. Oh well...I'm from Tai-Ping!
Psmith
Nov 16, 2012, 12:36:31 PM11/16/12
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Great stuff. It made me think of this interview with David Thomson which discusses changing the channels and the surrealists: http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type=&id=1162&fulltext=1&media=#article-text-cutpoint .
A rumor spread in the 70's that Pynchon had gone broke and had to write Godzilla movies to earn some money. In Vineland a character investigates a dinosaur footprint in Japan. Pynchon put rumors about himself into that novel. (Another rumor had the Pynch obsessed with the Brady Bunch, so a Brady Bunch reference made it into Vineland.)
A rumor spread in the 70's that Pynchon had gone broke and had to write Godzilla movies to earn some money. In Vineland a character investigates a dinosaur footprint in Japan. Pynchon put rumors about himself into that novel. (Another rumor had the Pynch obsessed with the Brady Bunch, so a Brady Bunch reference made it into Vineland.)
Bhavani
Nov 17, 2012, 3:51:46 PM11/17/12
to
On Friday, November 16, 2012 9:36:31 AM UTC-8, Psmith wrote:
> Great stuff. It made me think of this interview with David Thomson which discusses changing the channels and the surrealists: http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type=&id=1162&fulltext=1&media=#article-text-cutpoint .
>
>
>
> A rumor spread in the 70's that Pynchon had gone broke and had to write Godzilla movies to earn some money. In Vineland a character investigates a dinosaur footprint in Japan. Pynchon put rumors about himself into that novel. (Another rumor had the Pynch obsessed with the Brady Bunch, so a Brady Bunch reference made it into Vineland.)
The pop culture references provide excellent crossover points or patch points from the book into the reader's personal life and memories. They bring the readers' conscious and subconscious experiences relative to those references into the synergestic, reciprocal feedback experience of reading the book.
> Great stuff. It made me think of this interview with David Thomson which discusses changing the channels and the surrealists: http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type=&id=1162&fulltext=1&media=#article-text-cutpoint .
>
>
>
> A rumor spread in the 70's that Pynchon had gone broke and had to write Godzilla movies to earn some money. In Vineland a character investigates a dinosaur footprint in Japan. Pynchon put rumors about himself into that novel. (Another rumor had the Pynch obsessed with the Brady Bunch, so a Brady Bunch reference made it into Vineland.)
Another way to put it: the pop culture references trigger the reader's bardo if familar.
In his book on using ordinary objects for oracles, Lon Milo Duquette suggested ways to use TV channel surfing for an oracle.
RMJon23
Nov 18, 2012, 12:02:15 AM11/18/12
to
Two things Pynch-lang related:
After "Denis" is introduced, where we find out that everyone pronounces his name to rhyme with "penis," do you read his name a sounding like "DEE-nis" the rest of the book?
Two subtle things Pynch does to catch the cadences of the way people talk in Los Angeles? Like, they are just driving down the street? And they love, like Chinese food? Know what I mean, ese?
After "Denis" is introduced, where we find out that everyone pronounces his name to rhyme with "penis," do you read his name a sounding like "DEE-nis" the rest of the book?
Two subtle things Pynch does to catch the cadences of the way people talk in Los Angeles? Like, they are just driving down the street? And they love, like Chinese food? Know what I mean, ese?
RMJon23
Nov 28, 2012, 4:23:22 AM11/28/12
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What do you make of Doc's ouija trip to a vacant lot, but seemingly the next day he goes back and the Fang building is there? Stoner memory? A page from magical realism? What?
Similarly, Thomas Jefferson on a wall in a restaurant becoming animated and seeming to help Doc tease out the intricacies of the plot? Has Doc smoked so much dope he has psychotic episodes? But T-Jeff does make sense...
The scene where Sauncho talks about the implications of the b&w to color switch in Wizard of Oz is hilarious; Sauncho the lawyer always seems more "out of it" than Doc. It's little vignettes like this that remind me of Pynchon's line, "Every weirdo in the world is on my wavelength." That would be me. I think Pynchon wd be great to hang out with.
FAT CHANCE!
Similarly, Thomas Jefferson on a wall in a restaurant becoming animated and seeming to help Doc tease out the intricacies of the plot? Has Doc smoked so much dope he has psychotic episodes? But T-Jeff does make sense...
The scene where Sauncho talks about the implications of the b&w to color switch in Wizard of Oz is hilarious; Sauncho the lawyer always seems more "out of it" than Doc. It's little vignettes like this that remind me of Pynchon's line, "Every weirdo in the world is on my wavelength." That would be me. I think Pynchon wd be great to hang out with.
FAT CHANCE!
Psmith
Nov 28, 2012, 10:36:47 AM11/28/12
to
Perhaps you have already hung out with Pynchon, at a bus stop somewhere twenty years ago.
Who would have thought I couldn't stay caught up at two pages a day? I found myself so fascinated by playing what seemed to me appropriate music while reading Pynchon that I have gotten behind, refusing to read Inherent Vice except when I could play some music that fit with it. I suspect I will catch up next week. I find myself enjoying the Schroedinger's Cat class.
Also, I now officially consider Louis Zukofsky my favorite poet. (Does anyone care?) For the last five years I've said I considered Pound my favorite, but I read more Zukofsky lately because I'd gotten burned out from teaching The Cantos. I just finished Basil Bunting on Poetry (which Dr. Johnson suggested I buy a few years ago). The last two chapters dealt with Pound and Z. I enjoyed the Pound chapter, contemplated rereading The Cantos and felt sad about Pound's love of Mussolini. Then I read the Zukofsky examples provided by Bunting and I felt such delight I realized a change had taken place inside me.
Who would have thought I couldn't stay caught up at two pages a day? I found myself so fascinated by playing what seemed to me appropriate music while reading Pynchon that I have gotten behind, refusing to read Inherent Vice except when I could play some music that fit with it. I suspect I will catch up next week. I find myself enjoying the Schroedinger's Cat class.
Also, I now officially consider Louis Zukofsky my favorite poet. (Does anyone care?) For the last five years I've said I considered Pound my favorite, but I read more Zukofsky lately because I'd gotten burned out from teaching The Cantos. I just finished Basil Bunting on Poetry (which Dr. Johnson suggested I buy a few years ago). The last two chapters dealt with Pound and Z. I enjoyed the Pound chapter, contemplated rereading The Cantos and felt sad about Pound's love of Mussolini. Then I read the Zukofsky examples provided by Bunting and I felt such delight I realized a change had taken place inside me.
RMJon23
Nov 29, 2012, 5:44:24 PM11/29/12
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I used to let Pound's exceedingly dark ignorance about fascism/Muss/kind remarks about Hitler, and esp the antisemitism really bother me, but I keep remembering RAW's tone and boy language when I was with him: "He'd walk around Rapallo and feed stray cats...he was incredibly naive! He couldn't tell that Mussolini was using suing him...How someone can be so brilliant and innovative and at the same time so naive!" Etc.
Also I have had family who were mentally ill, so I sorta understand.
Finally re Ez: It seems immanently sane to prefer the Adept students of the Innovator. When someone makes a revolution in Art, their energies in breaking through seem to detract from the aesthetics of the work. Paganini came along and just blew all previous violinists away, technically. He innovated in countless ways. But when you listen to his work, esp. his concertos, they're good. They're nice. It's the guys who followed in his footsteps who really do that Heroic Virtuoso Violinist Shredding thing better: check out Bazzini, Henri Vieuxtemps, Sarasate, Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst and a few others.
And I know this is slightly more recondite, but, to me, Webern and Berg made more interesting music than their teacher, Schoenberg.
Papa Bach, meine Gott, is, like Shakespeare, using/stealing/appropriating from the entire history of previous sources, and making The most sublime art. I don't see Billy Shakes or Papa Bach as innovators. I see them as Pinnacles, ne plus ultra.
Painting is more difficult for me to evaluate along these lines. Cezanne's breakthrough in perspective staggers me, but are Picasso/Gris/Braque/Leger extending Cezanne, or were there enough other influences interpolating to say Cezanne is a mere single influence in Cubism, for example?
Back to the Pound thing and the Artist's Bad Politics: Eliot became a Royalist and some sorta right-winger. Same Yeats, Lawrence, Wyndham L, and too many others to mention, really. Heidegger brought ontology back after Marx thought he'd killed it off. And ended up dressing in Nazi regalia while lecturing, making student Marcuse bummed out. A big unsolved problem for me is why did so much brilliant work get done in the 20th c. by people whose politics wd prove brutal to the Other? (The easy answer I see in books put out by university presses: they so hated the bourgeoisie, and didn't trust the varietals of Reds, socialists, etc. I still see it as a Problem To Be Worked On.)
Bhavani
Nov 30, 2012, 8:17:27 PM11/30/12
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Pynchon likes to tell a vision, it seems. Many creative references to various TV shows and the box itself shows up from time to time: p. 7 has a blaring TV on in the background of Doc's Aunt, the real estate expert. I like this example from p. 169, " No worries, it's on the house, as the TV antenna man always sez ..." The psychotic woman humming the theme to Dark Shadows makes for another brilliant reference.
Like RAW's Schrodinger's Cat, part of Pynchon's vision contains shamanic instruction. It enters his writing both implicitly at times and explicitly at other times. The penultimate paragraph on p. 109 to the end of p. 110 presents a shamanic voyage.
Doc keeps running into different manifestations of the Golden Fang. I don't know what it turns out to be in the book yet; somehow connected with finding and rescuing his old girlfriend, his purpose it seems. The name Golden Fang holds magickal significance. "Golden" obviously signifies alchemical success. Fang, as a tooth, conjures up all the associations related to the Hebrew letter Shin one of which describes a particular kind of highly active energy the ancients called fire. Also, if you look at the tarot connections with "Fang" you get F = The Hierophant, A = The Fool, N = Death, G = The High Priestess. The main function of the Hierophant? ... to tell a vision.
Like RAW's Schrodinger's Cat, part of Pynchon's vision contains shamanic instruction. It enters his writing both implicitly at times and explicitly at other times. The penultimate paragraph on p. 109 to the end of p. 110 presents a shamanic voyage.
Doc keeps running into different manifestations of the Golden Fang. I don't know what it turns out to be in the book yet; somehow connected with finding and rescuing his old girlfriend, his purpose it seems. The name Golden Fang holds magickal significance. "Golden" obviously signifies alchemical success. Fang, as a tooth, conjures up all the associations related to the Hebrew letter Shin one of which describes a particular kind of highly active energy the ancients called fire. Also, if you look at the tarot connections with "Fang" you get F = The Hierophant, A = The Fool, N = Death, G = The High Priestess. The main function of the Hierophant? ... to tell a vision.
Bhavani
Dec 2, 2012, 5:25:56 PM12/2/12
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>
> I used to let Pound's exceedingly dark ignorance about fascism/Muss/kind remarks about Hitler, and esp the antisemitism really bother me, but I keep remembering RAW's tone and boy language when I was with him: "He'd walk around Rapallo and feed stray cats...he was incredibly naive! He couldn't tell that Mussolini was using suing him...How someone can be so brilliant and innovative and at the same time so naive!" Etc.
>
It seems to me that those uncompromising artists who plumb the heights of their souls for the expression of their art also plumb the depths as part of the same process. Things can get dredged up that would otherwise stay dormant had they not been looking for a muse. Artists/visionaries like this seem more suggestible, more susceptible to overwhelm from the dark shadows of neuroses, pathologies, or temporary obsessions. I don't know if this describes Pound or not, I don't know him that well. For this reason, and for others, I suggest that pursuing the life of a truly original artist of whatever persuasion contains a serious element of danger. Crowley and RAW employed balanced skepticism and model agnosticism to successfully surf the waves of creative invocation. Although how successful Crowley turned out still gets debated to this day. His dark side has ample documentation.
RMJon23
Dec 3, 2012, 1:49:13 AM12/3/12
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On Sunday, December 2, 2012 2:25:56 PM UTC-8, Bhavani wrote:
>Artists/visionaries like this seem more suggestible, more susceptible to overwhelm from the dark shadows of neuroses, pathologies, or temporary obsessions. I don't know if this describes Pound or not, I don't know him that well. <
You actually nailed the way I prefer to think about this stuff, and not just Pound. It was latent when I wrote the above thing; when I read what you wrote I realized that's actually my primary model of this phenomenon right now. For EX, with EzP: WWI led to the deaths of friends who were artists, and for WHAT? Pound, knowing no limits to his imaginative faculties, tried to figure out why his friends died, and eventually realized there was a sort of virus very deep in the money/economic/valuation system in the West. He actually produced some very brilliant analyses, some interesting ideas, some ideas about economics that seem good but never caught on, and some very very dark, egregious ideas about who was to blame for it all.
>Artists/visionaries like this seem more suggestible, more susceptible to overwhelm from the dark shadows of neuroses, pathologies, or temporary obsessions. I don't know if this describes Pound or not, I don't know him that well. <
RMJon23
Dec 3, 2012, 2:55:39 AM12/3/12
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SPOILER ALERT: I've finished the novel:
As a sort of 180 from Prof Wagner, I finished another reading of the book, and enjoyed it even more this time. How to explain the freakish swells in the San Pedro harbor as Doc and the Feds headed out to check out the Golden Fang? This sort of freak-swell was foreshadowed by a stoner discussion on catching gigantic, freaky, transcendent, immaculate waves way out there, the connection to Lemuria and Los Angeles, but the WTF-oddness of this scene, and the sudden appearance overnight of the Fang building have an odd tonal quality in the book that clashes with the tones of the rest of the book. It doesn't bother me; rather, I think 'tis a certain sort of puzzle Pynch puts in.
In the denouement chapters, learning about ARPANET in late 1969 from a younger proto-hacker colleague of Fritz's, that this system was..."It all moves exponentially, and someday everybody's gonna wake up to find they're under surveillance they can't escape," seems like a basic Pynch trope. But I have a bunch of ways to read the drive home up the 10 to the 405, trying to make it back to Gordita and the fog becomes so thick you can't see anything, and drivers line up to follow each other. I've actually driven in the exact conditions, exact place. What Pynch means by ending the book this way I'm not sure. Maybe he just likes ending the book in a mood similar to Casablanca, even though John Garfield wasn't in that film? A bright English major take?: the fog symbolizes the hopeless cloud of unknowingness that had overtaken the Mind of Unistat by that point. Nixon wd be re-elected, the war wd go on, the Republican's counter-revolution would wipe out whatever there was left of the dreams of 1967-69. Reagan does 8 yrs and the public, increasingly tribal under TV, thinks Reagan is charming and "tough." The Crocker Fenway character, living in wealthy Palos Verdes and a Yankee who'd fit right in with Yale/CIA director/President Geo HW Bush and James Jesus Angleton and the character Matt Damon plays in The Good Shepherd (and hell: Noah Cross in Chinatown): continues to get away with everything, as he knows is his birthrite. See pp.343-348.
Burke Stoddard as Hollywood red scare sell-out feels based on a couple of real-life characters, but Shasta Fay Hepworth, being from roughly the same place as Sharon Tate, seems to be someone who could have been Sharon Tate, but didn't get "lucky." What her exact doings were with the cops I'm still not clear about, but I'm not sure we were supposed to know. Odd relationship between Stoddard and Hepworth. Burke, a real "fink" as WSB would call him, used Coy's heroin addiction to get him involved in some nasty stuff.
The LAPD/para-LAPD and guys like Adrian Prussia/LAPD-sanctioned right wing racist/paramilitary group/the Feds/the DA's office/the odd Golden Fang operation and Heroin and weird dentists, etc, together with the dope and TV and Hollywood dream-permeation of the landscape? This novel, while containing lots of humor and a memorable main character and Pynch's (and my own) lost chance of actual liberation that was promised by the 1960s: this feels like a very dark book to me, and has an attitude about LA similar to Chandler's (although I think Pynch genuinely loves some aspects of LA); it shares notes with Chinatown/The Long Goodbye/LA Confidential/Big Lebowski and classic noir films with John Garfield, who I would bet Pynch genuinely admires. I felt elements of Peter Dale Scott's writings on Deep Politics, and Mike Davis's books on LA: Ecology of Fear and City of Quartz.
For an ironic twist on the detective novel - a postmodern, Pynchonian take - the book, while relatively short and easy to read compared to GR and AtD - still contains a depth that's striking, and I know I can pick it up again in three years and it will continue to reward me.
Those of you who live in cities large enough to have novels to read that take place in actual places you are familiar with will know what I mean when I say that this book - in which every real geographic area, every real street described are familiar to me - activates and resonates with one's own psychogeographic neural clusters, and it's just a fabulous trip. It's an accident: I just happen to have lived in the area the book inhabits, although I was a mere child when the story takes place, that stuff is still there. Or if not, the traces of it are/were. Those of you who _know_ London, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Paris...you have your novels that are not only stories but they take place in a psychogeography that is deeply relatable, adding an extra dimension to your reading. The description of places is filled in mentally in an extraordinary way, compared to most of the novels of our lives, which take place in locations that are largely imagined or non-descript, or in real places that we've never been, or only "know" tangentially.
The first time I felt this was when Charles Bukowski published his novel, Pulp. And the main character is described as driving the exact same route I had myself driven earlier that day. It's an odd feeling, but a magical thing: it's as if some barrier between fiction and you had been pierced. You're sitting there reading a novel and the setting is so vivid you can smell it, you can see the quality of light, even though it's not described. Your nervous system fills in the scene's tableau with the ambient sound that would occur "there." And it's largely unbidden.
At the same time, I've had enough conversations with other humans about topics surrounding this idea to feel relatively certain there have been readers who were 20 years old, living in Redondo/Manhattan Beach in late 1969, the Manson stuff all over the news, who read Inherent Vice and it did not move them like it does me. Why? Because of the wide range of response to novels, I surmise.
Although I think it's far deeper than that.
Anyway, I would hazard a guess that Pynch's CA Trilogy will remain that: a trilogy. And if so, this was a fitting ending. Does he have any hope for us? I think he still has a little, but is not exactly sanguine.
As a sort of 180 from Prof Wagner, I finished another reading of the book, and enjoyed it even more this time. How to explain the freakish swells in the San Pedro harbor as Doc and the Feds headed out to check out the Golden Fang? This sort of freak-swell was foreshadowed by a stoner discussion on catching gigantic, freaky, transcendent, immaculate waves way out there, the connection to Lemuria and Los Angeles, but the WTF-oddness of this scene, and the sudden appearance overnight of the Fang building have an odd tonal quality in the book that clashes with the tones of the rest of the book. It doesn't bother me; rather, I think 'tis a certain sort of puzzle Pynch puts in.
In the denouement chapters, learning about ARPANET in late 1969 from a younger proto-hacker colleague of Fritz's, that this system was..."It all moves exponentially, and someday everybody's gonna wake up to find they're under surveillance they can't escape," seems like a basic Pynch trope. But I have a bunch of ways to read the drive home up the 10 to the 405, trying to make it back to Gordita and the fog becomes so thick you can't see anything, and drivers line up to follow each other. I've actually driven in the exact conditions, exact place. What Pynch means by ending the book this way I'm not sure. Maybe he just likes ending the book in a mood similar to Casablanca, even though John Garfield wasn't in that film? A bright English major take?: the fog symbolizes the hopeless cloud of unknowingness that had overtaken the Mind of Unistat by that point. Nixon wd be re-elected, the war wd go on, the Republican's counter-revolution would wipe out whatever there was left of the dreams of 1967-69. Reagan does 8 yrs and the public, increasingly tribal under TV, thinks Reagan is charming and "tough." The Crocker Fenway character, living in wealthy Palos Verdes and a Yankee who'd fit right in with Yale/CIA director/President Geo HW Bush and James Jesus Angleton and the character Matt Damon plays in The Good Shepherd (and hell: Noah Cross in Chinatown): continues to get away with everything, as he knows is his birthrite. See pp.343-348.
Burke Stoddard as Hollywood red scare sell-out feels based on a couple of real-life characters, but Shasta Fay Hepworth, being from roughly the same place as Sharon Tate, seems to be someone who could have been Sharon Tate, but didn't get "lucky." What her exact doings were with the cops I'm still not clear about, but I'm not sure we were supposed to know. Odd relationship between Stoddard and Hepworth. Burke, a real "fink" as WSB would call him, used Coy's heroin addiction to get him involved in some nasty stuff.
The LAPD/para-LAPD and guys like Adrian Prussia/LAPD-sanctioned right wing racist/paramilitary group/the Feds/the DA's office/the odd Golden Fang operation and Heroin and weird dentists, etc, together with the dope and TV and Hollywood dream-permeation of the landscape? This novel, while containing lots of humor and a memorable main character and Pynch's (and my own) lost chance of actual liberation that was promised by the 1960s: this feels like a very dark book to me, and has an attitude about LA similar to Chandler's (although I think Pynch genuinely loves some aspects of LA); it shares notes with Chinatown/The Long Goodbye/LA Confidential/Big Lebowski and classic noir films with John Garfield, who I would bet Pynch genuinely admires. I felt elements of Peter Dale Scott's writings on Deep Politics, and Mike Davis's books on LA: Ecology of Fear and City of Quartz.
For an ironic twist on the detective novel - a postmodern, Pynchonian take - the book, while relatively short and easy to read compared to GR and AtD - still contains a depth that's striking, and I know I can pick it up again in three years and it will continue to reward me.
Those of you who live in cities large enough to have novels to read that take place in actual places you are familiar with will know what I mean when I say that this book - in which every real geographic area, every real street described are familiar to me - activates and resonates with one's own psychogeographic neural clusters, and it's just a fabulous trip. It's an accident: I just happen to have lived in the area the book inhabits, although I was a mere child when the story takes place, that stuff is still there. Or if not, the traces of it are/were. Those of you who _know_ London, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Paris...you have your novels that are not only stories but they take place in a psychogeography that is deeply relatable, adding an extra dimension to your reading. The description of places is filled in mentally in an extraordinary way, compared to most of the novels of our lives, which take place in locations that are largely imagined or non-descript, or in real places that we've never been, or only "know" tangentially.
The first time I felt this was when Charles Bukowski published his novel, Pulp. And the main character is described as driving the exact same route I had myself driven earlier that day. It's an odd feeling, but a magical thing: it's as if some barrier between fiction and you had been pierced. You're sitting there reading a novel and the setting is so vivid you can smell it, you can see the quality of light, even though it's not described. Your nervous system fills in the scene's tableau with the ambient sound that would occur "there." And it's largely unbidden.
At the same time, I've had enough conversations with other humans about topics surrounding this idea to feel relatively certain there have been readers who were 20 years old, living in Redondo/Manhattan Beach in late 1969, the Manson stuff all over the news, who read Inherent Vice and it did not move them like it does me. Why? Because of the wide range of response to novels, I surmise.
Although I think it's far deeper than that.
Anyway, I would hazard a guess that Pynch's CA Trilogy will remain that: a trilogy. And if so, this was a fitting ending. Does he have any hope for us? I think he still has a little, but is not exactly sanguine.
Bhavani
Dec 4, 2012, 11:00:55 PM12/4/12
to
In my discussion of Pynchon and T.V. I forgot to mention how it shows up in the main character's name, Larry Sportello aka Doc. Using Joycean style analysis to disect his name - Sportello obviously has "tell" and "tello" to suggest television/tell a vision. Larry breaks down as "L" + "arry" or "airy". So his name contains the root words "airy tell." Television people used to, and maybe still do, talk about broadcasting on the air waves.
btqu...@gmail.com
Dec 6, 2012, 1:19:34 AM12/6/12
to
Just about finished. I have to say I fast becoming a Pynchon convert. And I found a copy of Vineland for 3 bucks at a second hand store so that's next for me on my fiction reading list.
And here's a documentary about Pynchon's reclusiveness if anyone's interested.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwXLDvAk5LA
And here's a documentary about Pynchon's reclusiveness if anyone's interested.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwXLDvAk5LA
RMJon23
Dec 7, 2012, 4:17:58 AM12/7/12
to
This was made around when M&D came out, and was copyright 2002. Both the main "webmaster" talking head, Richard Lane, and TP's old buddy Jules Siegel say they think they detect admission of guilt and culpability in being part of Control, and they see this in GR. I've seen this idea proffered by academic Pynchonians, although not so crassly (not the best word, but whatever) as here. I admit it's made me think more about part of what animates TP to write, but there's so very much more to him than guilt.
I don't like the James Bone character near the end: who stalks TP on upper East Side, snaps a pic, and then tries to extend a hand. Leave him the fuck alone.
Here's my take: if someone wants to be left alone, and have done nothing to warrant being stalked, leave them THE FUCK ALONE!
Now, if Pynch wants to come out to media on his own terms, cool. Very exciting, in fact, to me. But why do I get the feeling that his appearance on The Simpsons, with a bag over his head, is as close as we're gonna get?
I hope Pynch lives to 100, which he'd reach on May 8, 2037.
RAW material, since this newsgroup IS devoted to him: Tom Jackson recently dug up and posted a letter RAW wrote in 1990 to Shea's mag No Governor, in which RAW asserts that only Mailer, Pynch, and RAW himself ever captured the "terror of the situation" as well as John Barth (!) did in his novel _Sabbatical_. I had no idea RAW even liked Barth.
Later, not addressing Pynch, RAW writes that he thinks there's no immediate solution for the Luddites, of which Pynch has seemed slowly to embrace: the Luddite character. See his essay from 1984:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html
Bhavani
Dec 8, 2012, 6:15:02 PM12/8/12
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On Wednesday, December 5, 2012 10:19:34 PM UTC-8, btqu...@gmail.com wrote:
Thanks for posting this great doc. I haven't seen it all yet but especially like how it starts talking about his writing as a cryptogram and how the readers become code breakers. That seems one useful way to look at the multiple levels of meaning in his books. What I haven't yet heard them say in the film - unlike other notable multi-level fiction writers, Crowley, Joyce, RAW, E.J. Gold, Pynchon goes out of his way to help the reader begin to crack the code. For example,in Against the Day he speaks openly of gematria, alchemy, the bardo and tarot correspondences. He uses sequences of 3 words with the first letters of l,s and d so often as to blatantly make the point that other levels of meaning can get considered. Pynch doesn't seem to advocate or condemn it, the communications appear more operational than that, but also includes serious warnings.
Another example of Pynchon giving away his "code" appears in Inherent Vice p. 233. Doc asks a driver if he can give him a ride later and gets the answer: "no prob-limo, as we say in the business" Pretty obvious there that he uses phonetic puns to communicate different things.
Bhavani
Dec 11, 2012, 5:11:37 PM12/11/12
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I recently read Foucault's Pendulum and found it interesting relative to Inherent Vice that Eco suggests approaching the mysteries like a detective,like Sam Spade.
Inherent Vice's overall plot arch resembles, in a general way, the classic Nintendo video game, The Legend Of Zelda - saving the Princess in the game; finding and helping Doc's old girlfriend in the book. Both protagonists go on multiple adventures and have to solve various puzzles to reach their goal at the end of the maze. I don't yet know how Doc fares. Zelda became THE bardo training video game of choice in the late 80's/early 90's before the internet allowed interactive playing.
The band, Spotted Dick along with the Denis/penis mnemonic previously mentioned recalls the famous flying phallus of Schrodinger's Cat. Spotted Dick also reminds me of Philip K. Dick.
I love the Godzilligans Island bit, hilarious! Pynchon totally nailed Gilligan's Island dialogue. Godzilligan also references what J.G. Bennett called the heresy of the Sufis in his book "Gurdjieff - Making A New World."
The character Trillium Fortnight recalls for me Trillian from The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I seem to vaguely remember a line with Trillian and "fortnight" from the Hitchiker's Guide.
Inherent Vice's overall plot arch resembles, in a general way, the classic Nintendo video game, The Legend Of Zelda - saving the Princess in the game; finding and helping Doc's old girlfriend in the book. Both protagonists go on multiple adventures and have to solve various puzzles to reach their goal at the end of the maze. I don't yet know how Doc fares. Zelda became THE bardo training video game of choice in the late 80's/early 90's before the internet allowed interactive playing.
The band, Spotted Dick along with the Denis/penis mnemonic previously mentioned recalls the famous flying phallus of Schrodinger's Cat. Spotted Dick also reminds me of Philip K. Dick.
I love the Godzilligans Island bit, hilarious! Pynchon totally nailed Gilligan's Island dialogue. Godzilligan also references what J.G. Bennett called the heresy of the Sufis in his book "Gurdjieff - Making A New World."
The character Trillium Fortnight recalls for me Trillian from The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I seem to vaguely remember a line with Trillian and "fortnight" from the Hitchiker's Guide.
Bhavani
Dec 16, 2012, 2:29:29 PM12/16/12
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While most of Inherent Vice reads like a straight forward, brilliantly written, extrememly funny, stoner detective story set in late '60's LA and Vegas, every once in awhile Pynchon poignantly puns with some valuable esoteric information or references. As for instance:
"For a brief brainpulse, Doc was reminded of the acid trip he'd been put on by Vehi and Sortilege, trying to find his way through a labyrinth that was slowly sinking into the ocean. Here it was all dry desert and beaverboard, but Doc had the same sense of a rising flood, a need at all costs not to panic." p.241
Mulitiple bardo references in the above quote. Two of them: "For a brief brainpulse..." could refer to the theory that the bardo trip comprises an unraveling of the subconscious mind in the last seconds before brain death which the voyager experiences in a completely different and extended time frame.
The end of the quote gives prime, maybe the most important advice for the bardo - DON'T PANIC, advice also prominently found on the front of The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy - the actual Guide itself, not Adam's novels about the Guide. The Hitchiker's Guide = a SF Book of the Dead
"For a brief brainpulse, Doc was reminded of the acid trip he'd been put on by Vehi and Sortilege, trying to find his way through a labyrinth that was slowly sinking into the ocean. Here it was all dry desert and beaverboard, but Doc had the same sense of a rising flood, a need at all costs not to panic." p.241
Mulitiple bardo references in the above quote. Two of them: "For a brief brainpulse..." could refer to the theory that the bardo trip comprises an unraveling of the subconscious mind in the last seconds before brain death which the voyager experiences in a completely different and extended time frame.
The end of the quote gives prime, maybe the most important advice for the bardo - DON'T PANIC, advice also prominently found on the front of The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy - the actual Guide itself, not Adam's novels about the Guide. The Hitchiker's Guide = a SF Book of the Dead
Bhavani
Jan 7, 2013, 4:48:09 PM1/7/13
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Finished Inherent Vice a couple of weeks ago and moved on to Vineland. For me, it ended on an upbeat note. Doc does an unselfish good deed, clears his friends when he could have made a bunch of money instead. Driving through the fog at the very end seems a metaphor for making a way through the Unknown. Some Sufi based groups have a special esoteric meaning for "fog" but from the context, it didn't look like TP referenced that. However, in Vineland when he brings up fog it could have that meaning so maybe he does want to connect to it to conclude Inherent Vice?
Interesting and revealing answer when Doc is asked what he's looking at near the bottom of p. 355
Mickey Wolfmann, the one main character present by his absence, sometimes appears like a saint ( after his "conversion" or whatever), sometimes like a scoundrel. This matches a key line from Crowley: "My Adepts stand upright, their heads above the heavens, their feet below the hells."
Wolfmann's name connects with Horus - wolf a corresponding animal. Mickey = Michael, the archangel Michael corresponds with the element fire. Horus represents a god of force and fire. Wolfmann - mann with the extra "n" ( as explicitly stressed in the book)points to another key idea put out by Crowley. The only real Horus-like attribute I noticed associated with Wolfmann's character happened when the caretaker at MW's unfinished Vegas dream resort says that the hotel can access other dimensions. It reminded me of a floatation tank when I read that.
I had a great time reading this book and am enjoying Vineland immensely. I look forward to the Inherent Vice film, and really hope that the rumors of Pynchon working on the screenplay are true.
Interesting and revealing answer when Doc is asked what he's looking at near the bottom of p. 355
Mickey Wolfmann, the one main character present by his absence, sometimes appears like a saint ( after his "conversion" or whatever), sometimes like a scoundrel. This matches a key line from Crowley: "My Adepts stand upright, their heads above the heavens, their feet below the hells."
Wolfmann's name connects with Horus - wolf a corresponding animal. Mickey = Michael, the archangel Michael corresponds with the element fire. Horus represents a god of force and fire. Wolfmann - mann with the extra "n" ( as explicitly stressed in the book)points to another key idea put out by Crowley. The only real Horus-like attribute I noticed associated with Wolfmann's character happened when the caretaker at MW's unfinished Vegas dream resort says that the hotel can access other dimensions. It reminded me of a floatation tank when I read that.
I had a great time reading this book and am enjoying Vineland immensely. I look forward to the Inherent Vice film, and really hope that the rumors of Pynchon working on the screenplay are true.
Psmith
Jan 8, 2013, 12:35:12 AM1/8/13
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Glad you liked Inherent Vice and I hope you enjoy Vineland. I love that book.
I feel bad I've fallen so far behind in Inherent Vice. I hope to get caught up shortly.
I feel bad I've fallen so far behind in Inherent Vice. I hope to get caught up shortly.
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