INHERENT VICE (Exploring the cover)

[Mark Kohut]

FUN, yes.....fun (in song, puns, jokes, to get by) all thru the vision

A-AND fun...lost expressed here in the cover....as we know from OBA, he enables his resonances to shimmer both ways, so to speak...just look at the phrase 'against the day"...or V. 

That beach surf scene is..........Shambala (so to speak)?.......lost?


--- On Mon, 12/1/08, Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: INHERENT VICE (Exploring the cover)
> To: "P-list" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Date: Monday, December 1, 2008, 11:29 AM
> Mark Kohut  wrote:
> >
> >  Since I almost always give TRP the benefit of any
> doubts....(almost...but
> >  "I'm nobody, etc.".....)
> >
> 
> the reason, though, why we discerning nobodies do so is
> because
> he so often has put our doubts at ease...?
> 
> >  I immediately thought that a preexisting picture--an
> emblematic and ironic
> >  historic 'frame"---was purposefully part of
> the meaning of Inherent Vice, as we know TRPs earlier covers
> have been.
> >
> 
> Laura looking at the cruising vessel and seeing planned
> obsolescence...
> now you looking at it and seeing inherent vice...
> is it because I grew up near Detroit that despite
> ecological misgivings
> about cars in general, I have a lot more positive vibes
> from that picture?
> 
> A neighbor of ours (all the really cool kids in the
> neighborhood were
> like 5 or 8
> years older than I was) hung with a guy who'd pull up
> in a Hearse to bring our
> neighbor Skip and his pet monkey out with him cruising the
> strip in
> it.  It was cool as heck.
> 
> Cars painted with psychedelic designs are fun.  Beaches are
> fun.
> 
> Somebody had to say it.  Anterior to all the erudition and
> life
> lessons packed in OBA's wonderful books, the instantly
> recognizable
> and lastingly appreciable main thing about them is they are
> fun.
> 
> Could it signify that Pynchon has taken the noir vehicle
> and tarted it
> up for parties, ridottos, clambakes, transport of
> xanthocroids for
> purposes of wave-riding and beach volleyball?  Too soon to
> know...
> 
> >  That is, one speculation, ala The Recognitions,
> "This eventually develops into making "new"
> originals--paintings so perfectly in the style of known
> masters that they pass for newly discovered works."
> >
> 
> I read that The Recognitions of Gaddis is based upon or
> rooted in The
> Recognitions of Clementine, written in like the year 2 or
> something.
> I aspire to be somebody who knows more about that topic.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> "Certainly this cookbook is for people who are not so
> neurotically
> antiauthoritarian as I am - to whom one can say, "Take
> the juice of
> one lemon," without the furious response: "Is
> that a direct order?" -
> Grace Paley