IV Chapter 17 Thoughts

[Robin Landseadel]

On Dec 8, 2009, at 4:12 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen wrote:

> Remember that Shasta is connected to Lemuria via Mount Shasta.
>
> Perhaps that's why her motivations in this novel appear 'schizo' and/ 
> or
> 'mysterious.' The following website --- Please note that personally  
> I do
> not believe that there are, these centuries, Lemurians or 'Reptile  
> people'
> or whatnot walking bzw. crawling the planet! --- is also interesting,
> 'cause it mentions a "Bigfoot race of people". So perhaps Shasta is  
> closer
> related to Bigfoot than visible from the novel's text. Since the  
> website
> last got updated in 2007, Pynchon will like have seen it during his
> writing process:
>
> http://www.lemurianconnection.com/en/about-mount-shasta.htm
>
> Regarding Doc ("Forget who --- WHAT was he working for anymore?", p.  
> 314):
> This kind of question --- think Slothrop, think Chums, think M&D (the
> characters) - seems always to pop up in a Pynchon novel sooner or  
> later ...


On Dec 8, 2009, at 11:56 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:

> Rich sez he could not have been so ignorant....
>
> yet, He was never so implicated or connected to these largest forces:
>
> And, thematically, the What question is answered by the presence of  
> Coy and family.....

On Dec 8, 2009, at 9:45 AM, rich wrote:

> For one thing I'm coming to think of Shasta as the most interesting
> character in the book. Secondly, you noted Doc's epiphany about what
> he is working for, but it doesn't seem a guy like Sportello would be
> that ignorant of much of the compromising he's been doing over the
> years unlike say Slothrop, Mason or Dixon, where their eipihanies
> strike me as more believable.

Remember that Sportello is constantly stoned—"Completely Attached to  
Delusion", as John Giornio might say. That would go along with Lemuria  
and Bigfoot and a host of other non-scheduled theologies and mythic  
structures bruited about by the Freaks of the greater Los Angeles  
region, circa 1970. They are all signifiers of the demographic that  
Pynchon tends to focus on. Obviously Dope—and the karma attached to  
Dope—are major themes in "Inherent Vice." Again, this is grounded in  
reality, in the lives lived by millions in California during the  
transition from the sixties to the seventies. There was so much of the  
economy of California that was dependent on such things as the  
Military-Industrial Complex. There was so much of the economy of Los  
Angeles that was dependent on such things as the Underground Economy.  
The two meet up in the Golden Fang, that open palm of desire that  
wants everything. Pynchon must have been thinking about both issues a  
lot as he wrote Gravity's Rainbow, a lot of these considerations made  
their way into Gravity's Rainbow—Doper's Greed, anyone?

Thoughts like Sportello's have dawned on me—who knew that all these  
major, corporate, record companies manufacturing songs of love and  
peace in the sixties turned out to be in the center of the Nuclear  
power, Nuclear weapons industries and other Military-Industrial  
interests? How could I know, as I was selling Bernard Haitink LPs—me  
being just another freak in a record shop flogging vinyl—that I was  
promoting Nuclear power at the same time? Simultaneously there are  
many parallels with current times, with so much of our collective hope  
for change torn apart by the reality of how money really is made.

Doc has been working to get away from the karma of his line of work  
but there's no escape—it's one of the inherent vices of his occupation.