Woodstock

[Robin Landseadel]

On Aug 16, 2009, at 2:06 PM, Carvill John wrote:

> Bekah sez:"IV is not particularly nostalgic . . .

I'd say it isn't nostalgic at all. Mournful's more like it.

> . . . if you weren't  there because the names and places are not the
> ones which have continued on in our collective media-induced
> memory (Manson excepted)."

. . . and Charles Manson is absolutely central to the book's notion of  
"Inherent Vice."

> A very interesting point. IV isn't as saturated with canonical  
> Sixties references as we might expect. Is this just because Pynchon  
> wanted to avoid obviousness and cliches? Or is something more  
> complex going on?

One thing that's clearly going on is that this is Los Angeles, spring  
1970. I guess that wouldn't be apparent to someone who wasn't there at  
the time. 1969/1970 was a one-week visit to see my Mom in hippie situ,  
and plenty of other shorter trips, mostly to South Central on either  
side of that great new-year's divide. Otherwise I spent most of my  
time a four-hour car drive away via old highway 99, in Fresno. Spent 4  
extraordinarily weird months in Eagle Rock in 1972, later moved in for  
a longer spell 1974-1979, living in various low-rent spots between  
Eagle Rock and Altadena.

Much of the texture & vibe of Inherent Vice is that of Los Angeles  
just after it found out that Love, is it turned out, was not all you  
need and in fact wasn't even all that durable.

> One of the things that sort of occurred to me as I read through IV  
> first time, was 'how many details would you have to change for this  
> book to have been set in, say, the early 1990s?',

Everything—this thing is trapped in time like a fly in amber.

> I guess this initially triggered by all the Lebowski associations  
> we'd been fed before we got to read the book. I ended up thinking  
> that IV seems both utterly bound up with its temporal setting, and  
> simultaneously somehow not really 'of its time' at all.

Like it's also stuck [Like Eliott Gould in "The Long Goodbye"] in the  
mise-en-scène  and time-zone of Raymond Chandler, only difference is  
that everybody's a wise guy these days so Marlowe's forties lines  
don't have the "zing" they used to now that we're all in this stoned  
and cynical seventies world.

> If it sounds like I'm hedging my bets that's because I'm still  
> puzzling over it. Now and then, I got to thinking that it seemed  
> less 'Sixties' in feel than the 1960s segments of Vineland.

That's because Inherent Vice is set in the Seventies, only all these  
stoners haven't got the memo yet. The Sixties in Vineland were the  
Sixties. What a difference 4 months, a year, a decade makes. eh?

> Part of me recoils from this line of thought, but still it  
> persists.This sense of duality - that the book is (obviously) very  
> Sixties, yet!
> also somehow not very Sixties at all . . .

You mean like how Gravity's Rainbow feels like Los Angeles' long shadow 
—via the movies—falling over the world [something timeless] during the  
forties while folks in the novel also feel a lot like denizens of the  
L.A. of the seventies at the same time?

Geli Tripping? Meet Sortilège.

> . . . ties in, for me anyhow, with the question of just how stoned  
> Doc really is throughout the narrative.

And whether that "stone time" is different from other times, a subject  
that also comes up during Doc's [and everyone else's] acid trips. And  
it ties in, for me anyhow, with the question of "just how stoned was  
Thomas Pynchon when he was writing Gravity's Rainbow?"

> Which both contribute to the sense that IV is nowhere near as simple  
> as it seems on the surface.

Namaste.

> CheersJ