Watts article

[jbor]

The shifting second person pronoun in the Watts essay preempts its literary
usage in GR. Pynchon's article aligns most notably with 'The Secret
Integration', not _Lot 49_, and I'd say it's that story that prompted
Kirkpatrick Sale to ask Pynchon to write the piece.

The article exemplifies the fact that the Civil Rights Movement was the one
cause in the '60s that Pynchon was committed enough to to pull himself away
from his glozing neuterdom and to get and out and do. A lot of readers don't
like to accept this fact, for whatever reasons, but there it is. It is,
after all, a piece of investigative journalism, Pynchon's only foray into
that field. Its purpose is to "journey into the mind[s]" -- positing a sort
of communal "mind" in the article's title -- of the people of Watts and
Pynchon has done this by going there and talking to them and then presenting
their viewpoints and opinions to the reading public, both white and black,
in the New York Times Magazine. Far from positioning himself or his reader
as a tourist, his articulation of grammar, narrative structure and
descriptive language is aimed at getting the reader to empathise with the
Watts residents (and, momentarily, police, social workers etc), and to show
these readers some of the complexities of the situation in Watts and remind
them that the closest they will ever get to this unhappy place is in those
planes that hang in the air overhead every twenty minutes or so (because, of
course, this impoverished minority community is directly on the flight path)
-- and that, perhaps, this is part of the problem. The Simon Rodia and
Festival of the Arts stuff is likewise an ironic counterpoint, and it
provides a useful insight into Pynchon's own literary method, and his
fascination with "waste" and found objects.

It's a powerful and effective piece of writing; my only criticism is that
Pynchon sometimes allows literary fanciness too much rein, to the point
where it almost overwhelms the exposition and critique.

best