VL-IV [1/2]: Handoff + Time/Place pg. 22

[Robin Landseadel]

SSi was a small stipend for the un-employable. Social Security Online  
sez:
	SSI makes monthly payments to people who have low income and few  
resources and are:

	• Age 65 or older;
	• Blind; or
	• Disabled.
	http://www.ssa.gov/pubs/11000.html

Being "crazy" was considered a disability. I knew one SSI recipient  
who was certifiable and another who was a good actress. "Being Crazy"  
for a living is rather Orwellian, like the fate of Soviet dissidents.

Of course in Vineland we can consider the possibility that the goings  
on are more autobiographical than usual. It's one of the rules of the  
game that Pynchon himself is inaccessible* and discussion of his life  
is off-limits. On the other hand, those of us who've been following  
this story for a long time know that the author was living in  
California, north-ish during the time of Vineland, southward during  
The Crying of Lot 49. Inherent Vice is [apparently] set between those  
two times and places.

I just know that Richard Farina is going to play into this somehow.

The jump-through-window, get yearly stipend ritual can be equated with  
the insanity of maintaining a life as a novelist---the rounds of  
interviews, the disruption of an otherwise private life,  being tied  
to the system by becoming an Instructor at a College. I guess at the  
time it really boiled down to the Freak/Straight divide—whether you're  
working to maintain the machine, working for "The Man".  I can  
remember dinner table talk, I can remember time and place.

Pynchon's writing on 1984 [the novel] is worth reading on its own  
merits:

http://www.themodernword.com/Pynchon/pynchon_essays_1984.html

The introductions to Slow Learner and TRP's memories of Richard Farina  
in his introduction to "Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me" were  
written around 1984 and are his most autobiographical writings. Of  
TRP's novels Vineland seems to have the most autobiography, although  
there's some beautiful passages in Lot 49 that really capture time and  
place:

	Like many named places in California it was less an
	identifiable city than a grouping of concepts---
	census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts,
	shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to
	its own freeway. But it had been Pierce's domicile,
	and headquarters: the place he'd begun his land
	speculating in ten years ago, and so put down the
	plinth course of capital on which everything
	afterward had been built, however rickety or
	grotesque, toward the sky; and that, she supposed,
	would set the spot apart, give it an aura. But if there
	was any vital difference between it and the rest of
	Southern California, it was invisible on first glance.
	CoL49, 13/14 Perennial Classics Edition.

The opening of Vineland's next chapter is full of time/place specifics:

	. . .generations of paint jobs in different beach-town
	pastels, corroded by salt and petrochemical fogs
	that flowed in the summers onshore up the sand
	slopes, on up past Sepulveda, often across the then
	undeveloped fields, to wrap the San Diego Freeway
	too. Down here, a long screened porch faced out
	over flights of rooftops descending to the beach.
	VL, page 22


On Dec 12, 2008, at 12:58 PM, Michael Bailey wrote:

> c) many people I know subsisted on SSI throughout the '80s.  There was
> no requirement for public acts of craziness, although they did happen.
> Perhaps that was a Brock Vond codicil for Zoyd alone?
> It was hardly a generous stipend, in any case.  None of the people on
> it that I knew were scamming.

*Proverbs for Paranoids:
1. You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his  
creatures.