IV: potsmoking Doc SPOILER ALERT

[Carvill John]

And, a bit more on the whole 'drugs as a tool of teh detective trade' can be found in one of the closing sections of Against the Day, with Lew BAsnight poking around L.A. (where ATD *almost* ends), visiting teh Royal Jacaranda, where the office boy sits "painstakingly waxing a ten-foot surfboard", an episode which is preceded by a rumination on what will soon happen to Santa Barbara, "a stucco-and-beam philosophy" replacing "overwatered vegetation", thus making it reflect more light. All of this is teeming with IV resonances. Then on page 1044, there's the "Fillipino hop dealer he knew down on lower State who could gaze into the depths of a toilet bowl the way other scryers might a crystal ball or teacup, and learn teh damnedest things, most of them useless, but now and then so illuminative of secrets a subject might think he or she had kept perfectly hidden that there was no way this side of the supernatural to explain it."



----------------------------------------
> From: torerye at hotmail.com
> To: johncarvill at hotmail.com; pynchon-l at waste.org
> Subject: RE: IV: potsmoking Doc SPOILER ALERT
> Date: Wed, 12 Aug 2009 11:41:15 +0200
>
>
> Great post, John!
>
>> Reading the start of your post I was gonna say, ah wait, can
>> *all* the paranoia be put down to drugs? I think the subset of
>> people who are likely to become serious dope smokers, has a
>> significant overlap with the subset who are susceptible to paranoia
>> anyway.
>
> Yeah, I think you're right about that. Smoking some righteous weed
> or dropping some windowpane is described by Pynchon as one root of
> the prevalent paranoia, but so is Nixon, Reagan, Manson, Kent State etc.
> And paranoia is not only a positive force in IV (or GR); it can also
> be seen (and is partly described) as an instance of the solipsism
> and meanness which, as John Bailey pointed out, was creeping in with
> the fog around 1970.
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