TPPM Watts: the Gospel of Progress versus Watts the Real

[Dave Monroe]

Such very real indeed "realities" notwithstanding ...

"While the white culture is concerned with various
forms of systematized folly -- the economy of the area
in fact depending on it -- the black culture is stuck
pretty much with basic realities like disease, like
failure, violence and death, which the whites have
mostly chosen -- and can afford -- to ignore. The two
cultures do not understand each other, though white
values are displayed without let-up on black people's
TV screens, and though the panoramic sense of black
impoverishment is hard to miss from atop the Harbor
Freeway, which so many whites must drive at least
twice every working day. Somehow it occurs to very few
of them to leave at the Imperial Highway exit for a
change, go east instead of west only a few blocks, and
take a look at Watts. A quick look. The simplest kind
of beginning. But Watts is country which lies,
psychologically, uncounted miles further than most
whites seem at present willing to travel."

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_watts.html

... is there perhaps also some trace here of the ol'
white appropriation of presumed black "authenticity"
here?  Pynchon as Mailerian "White Negro"?  Okay ...

--- Paul Mackin <paul.mackin at verizon.net> wrote:

> One notices early on the dichotomy drawn between the
> "real" Watts and "unreal" White L.A.
> 
> "Watts lies impacted in the heart of this white
> fantasy. It is, by contrast, a pocket of bitter
> reality."
> 
> Is the "unreality" of the whites mainly confined to
> the black perception. Is it also Pynchon's
> perception? Sometimes it's hard to distinquish in
> P's writing between the depiction of someone else's
> thought from his own ...
>
> [...]
> 
> Be that as it may, I DO I think the "unreality of
> white L.A." does have application to Pynchon's own
> view, at least for rhetorical purposes....
>
> [...]
>
> "Watts has been able to resist the unreal"
> 
> I do believe that the unreality of the whites is
> for pynchon the unreality of the "idea of progress."
> In this case progress only in a specific area of
> endeaver but wait . . . .

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