Inherent Vice: The Title

[Robin Landseadel]

A few thoughts, not necessarily organized but doubtless on point.

Back when the title of Pynchon's latest was first announced I did the  
usual googling about for references and cross references. The first I  
noticed concerned printed matter:

	Paper
	Most papers produced from the mid-19th century to the present
	become brittle in about 25 to 50 years. Surveys done in the
	1980s showed that yellowing and brittleness is present in about
	25 to 40 percent of research library collections.

http://www.preservation101.org/session2/expl_iv_cm-paper.asp

I went through a lot of copies of that first QP edition of Gravity's  
Rainbow. Guess I mentioned it all before, but the pages of that fat  
paperback would always start falling out about halfway through. That  
whole "inherent vice" issue of printed materials is really coming to a  
head right now as printed text gets transfered to the digital domain— 
Michael Bailey notes two more digital & unauthorized versions of CoL 49.

Pynchon's dust jacket for Inherent Vice includes a sly joke about the  
inherent vice of the summer "Beach Read," books designed to sell in  
large amounts for a couple of months and then consigned to the  
remaindered tables. That bright pink spray on the inner dust jacket is  
called "remainder spray," a sign that the book is to be assigned to  
the remainder table, where most hardback beach reads find themselves a  
year or two after publication.

Beyond that there is the general dumbing down of characters & dialog  
in Inherent Vice—there are exceptions, like the ever loquacious  
Bigfoot Bjornsen but by and large the characters & set-ups in Inherent  
Vice depend more on non-literary info—TV, Top Forty, Movies—than books  
or magazines or papers.

I've got a temporary job at a college bookstore. Everyone has a smart  
phone. They're all taking photos of books or the isbn number of books,  
they're getting the info on the books they need and then go shopping  
online. They're listening to tunes in low bit-rate MP3's on their  
smart phones. They're buying books that include computer codes that  
lead to homework or additional textual materials. The book, as we have  
known it for all these years, is dying.

Even more than that, Inherent Vice is the product of a man in his  
seventies. There is the biggest inherent vice of them all: the  
materials we are made of & the tendency of our own materials to  
deteriorate due to the essential instability of our own components or  
interaction among our components over time.