VLVL2(3): Gordita Beach

[Dave Monroe]

"Zoyd was living down south then, sharing a house in
Gordita Beach ..." (VL, Ch. 3, p. 22)


The Manhattan Beach of the early 21st Century hardly
seems the kind of place that a reclusive literary icon
would set up shop to write his great novel. And,
truthfully, it isn't. But that wasn't always the case.

[...]

According to several locals from back then, Pynchon
wrote a great deal of "Gravity's Rainbow" while living
in a tiny beach apartment in the north end of the city
around 1969 or 1970.

[...]

Pynchon doesn't refer to Manhattan Beach by name.
Rather, he uses the name Gordita Beach to refer to his
one-time home. This description of a typical Gordita
Beach home is a fine example:

"But having been put up back during an era of
overdesign, it proved to be sturdier than it looked,
with its old stucco eaten at to reveal generations of
paint jobs in different beach-town pastels, corroded
by salt and petrochemical fogs that flowed in the
summers onshore up the sand slopes, on up past
Sepulveda ..."

http://www.theaesthetic.com/NewFiles/pynchon.html

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com