IVIV: reception: Inherent Vice review, Fresno Undercurrent

[Doug Millison]

Robin:
>> No-one ever did the Stoned Detective better than Raymond Chandler

Those passages you were posting, a while back, are what drove me to my  
long-neglected Library of America edition. Thx!

Enjoyed reading your IV review, too, thanks for posting it here.

>> did in his original,
>> unexpurgated, Hays-Office-disapproved, three sheets to the wind in
>> Copenhagen, wasted beyond recognition, ripped-to-the tits  
>> originals. It was
>> a target so big, so obvious, so theatrical, so inherently comic it  
>> was never
>> a question of "If" Pynchon would take Raymond Chandler at his word  
>> and
>> simply "Do It," come up with his own tattered casebook full of old
>> time-radio sound effects, his own Pulp Fiction.  It was only a  
>> question of
>> "when?" The Firesigns, the Coens and Altman 'n Gould were all making
>> variations, comments and carom shots off of Chandler's high-gloss  
>> pulp. As
>> does Pynchon.

Speaking of that beach, is IV's the most ironic of Pynchon's epigrams  
or what? Even more than von Braun.
"Nature does not know extinction: all it knows is transformation!  
Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me,  
strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence  
after death."

By '70, it was pretty clear - to me at least, at the time - that peace  
& love were on the way out.  Kent State put a chill on any youthful  
dreams of college campus protest I might have held on a long strange  
trip through high school in the 60s when I was watching the youth  
movement outside of Phoenix, Arizona through the broadcast TV/Time  
magazine lens, bolstered by large daily doses of the music of the era  
and an occasional peek at an underground newspaper from Berkeley or  
San Francisco. Manson gave my father and every other reactionary of  
his generation the club they needed to beat the hippies to a pulp,  
and  the Me Generation helped pave the way for Reagan.