INHERENT VICE (Exploring the cover)

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

          Mark Kohut:

          ETERNAL SUMMER! 

          The ironies ripple ripplingly....

. . . .and increasingly . . .

 "  . . .But with time change is inevitable. And in the automobile industry 
styling and mechanical advances lead the way.  In the span of a few 
short years our state of art cruiser was no longer the newest and latest.  
Indeed before long it's likely our cruiser found itself in the hands of a 
second or third owner where utility rather than the latest look became 
the priority.  Our cruiser undoubtedly experienced a less pampered 
existence as the harsh realities of life now took center stage.  Fast-
forward a decade or two and for most cruisers life has evolved from 
a world burdened with few concerns to one focused on day-to-day 
survival.  Routine maintenance and regular washing, let alone an 
occasional polishing, are a thing of the past.  Minor dings and 
emerging rust spots are ignored. The ethos becomes "keep running 
and deal with this new, harsher life -- or else".  Or else the junkyard 
or the car crusher may be just one breakdown away. . .  "

http://www.cruiserart.com/1959_cadillac-hearse-beach-cruiser.htm
"Cadillac Hearse Beach Cruiser Story"

Yet at least he had believed in the cars. Maybe to excess: how could 
he not, seeing people poorer than him come in, Negro, Mexican, 
cracker, a parade seven days a week, bringing the most godawful 
of trade-ins: motorized, metal extensions of themselves, of their 
families and what their whole lives must be like, out there so naked for 
anybody, a stranger like himself, to look at, frame cockeyed, rusty 
underneath, fender repainted in a shade just off enough to depress 
the value, if not Mucho himself, inside smelling hopelessly of children, 
supermarket booze, two, sometimes three generations of cigarette 
smokers, or only of dust and when the cars were swept out you had to 
look at the actual residue of these lives, and there was no way of telling 
what things had been truly refused . . .

CoL49, early on---hey, there's at least three different versions
& I've only got one right now—Lately I've been looking up passages 
by smell.

But, in a way, the point that got lost in CoL49 is Inherent Vice, all those
cars, the "Nada, Nada," sign blinking away all night long, entropy as the 
nick of time. And I'd take a serious look at Arrabal's "The Automobile 
Graveyard" If I was you.