IV Chapter 17 Thoughts

[rich]

thx, Robin. that goes a way in explaining Doc's dilemma but why does
Doc think Coy can quit the game so to speak but he can't--is it
because he doesn't have a wife and kid to support/protect/serve, etc?
is it because he's a PI, that's his job, the job makes the man to
quote the Wizard in Taxi Driver?

rich


> 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.