TPPM Watts: the Gospel of Progress versus Watts the Real

[Paul Mackin]

On Sun, 2004-09-26 at 17:24, Dave Monroe wrote:
> 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 ...


Very much so.

I should have mentioned the VV piece as perhaps having influenced P.






> 
> --- 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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