TPPM Watts: the Gospel of Progress versus Watts the Real

[Paul Nightingale]

The text twice refers to Watts as "a pocket of [bitter] reality", as I
noted earlier. It could be clumsy writing/sub-editing, and it could be
deliberate.

The first instance juxtaposes the phrase to "this white fantasy"; here,
the text notes that believing the white version of what a black is went
with "the Muslim and civil-rights movements".

The second instance, a couple of paragraphs later, is juxtaposed to the
line about white kids in L.A. using drugs to "escape": "a Watts kid ...
looks perhaps not so much for escape as just for some calm, some
relaxation".

So the phrase is used in connection to discussion of (lost and
maintained) illusions. And because its meaning changes with the context
it isn't simply repetition.

Of course, if you asked whites they would say they too lived reality;
but the text has already established that, whereas blacks know from
experience something of white society (TV, cops, social workers, etc),
whites are largely ignorant of blacks--this is the culture clash based
on an asymmetry of power.

At the outset I referred to Becker's Outsiders (1963) as relevant to
this essay: in particular, in connection to this reality/unreality
thing, see the section dealing with the outlook of jazz musicians.

> 
> 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 (we ran into this problem with the 1984
> introduction). I can only say for sure that as a former white middle
> class resident of L.A. and living not too many blocks north of Watts I
> always thought of myself and my neighborhood as quite real. Despite
what
> might havwe been displayed on TV.
> 

Paul M, I'll come back to the rest of this post when my introduction
covers the second half of the essay.