Inherent Vice: The Title

[rich]

I like most of this, Robin particularly the bit about books.

but this confuses me:  '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.'
_________
it almost sounds like yr saying Pynchon is alerting us to that fact
that he's not up to his game sort've "sorry, couldn't help meself"
If this is an experiment, Pynchon's explicit determination to write a
straight forward narrative, etc. IV', the product, if u will, reminds
me of Gaddis' writing experiment to write a short, more commerical
novel, Carpenter's Gothic.  However, Gaddis did not sacrifice anything
in writing that book--it was alot more focused but retained the core
of Gaddis' uniqueness as a writer that showed thru (albiet thru much
verbiage) on a larger scale in TR and JR.
I know this is apples and oranges but what IV, if you go along with what I
said above, is missing is what made his earlier efforts so sui
generis--the je ne sais quoi is that missing hole.

I should point out I'm not talking about themes here but the "quality
of the writing" (I know that sounds vague)

ps.  Gaddis' final experiment Agape Agape imho is actually better than
anything I've read by
Bernhardt (Pynchon improves on the Chandler mode?) --for one thing,
Bernhardt is way more  unforgiving but in his defense, there's the
issue of translation and
the fact of its uber-Austrian-ness, the viscious self-loathing for the
home country. After reading others like Jelenik (who is such a
wonderfully insane woman--one wishes for an english tranlsation of Die
Kinder der Toten) I think I began to understand more about the
Austrian literary mindset (or at least this piece of it)--which, in
turn, made me understand a bit more of what Gaddis was up to.
In summary, Gaddis fit his history of the player piano within the
framework of a uninterrupted first person rant that Bernhardt was
noted for and mirrored it nicely for his own ends.
Superficially I'll say that Pynchon does a good deal of mirroring or
channeling Chandler, MacDonald and the rest but beyond that is he as
successful in molding that framework to make it his own (and/or
improving on his own work)--I think that's an open question.

just thinking out loud

as the talking heads sed:  say something once, why say it again?

rich

On 8/27/09, Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
> 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.
>