meta [part the second]

[Robin Landseadel]

I remember meeting Doug some ten years ago while I was in the midst of  
a particularly turbulent phase of my life. It was nice to be able to  
talk with one of these "Pynchon Experts" that otherwise were pixels on  
my monitor. I suspect that actually meeting one of the people one  
encounters online changes the nature of the interaction—it's harder to  
diss flesh and blood than a "virtual mouthpiece."

Speaking of virtual mouthpieces, when I first encountered "Alice" as  
the group entered discussion of Inherent Vice, Terrance managed to get  
me in a tizzy with his intense and instant dismissal of Pynchon's  
latest. Since then things have cooled off [as regards Robert Jackson,  
I am neither here nor there and successfully managed to avoid either  
confrontation or revelation from reading his posts.] But I'm detecting  
essential differences in the way I approach Pynchon's writing and the  
way most people on the list approach Pynchon's writing—I'm an outlier.  
Terrance is also an outlier. Though there are times that Terrance  
offers up ideas with insufficient background details for many [in  
particular, ME] on the list to ascertain his meaning,  it's clear that  
he is approaching the texts with a deep background in the critical  
texts attached to the author's work. T 'n A approaches the texts more  
as literature, I approach them more as revisionist history.

The first time I encountered Pynchon's writing was around 1970. My  
stepbrother had the Mass Market paperback of V. and I [all of 15 at  
the time] gave it a shot, giving up before the second chapter was  
through. I didn't seriously attempt to read anything by Pynchon again  
until 1979. Working at "Campus Textbook Exchange" [now defunct] in  
Berkeley Ca., I found a "stripped" copy of The Crying of Lot 49 in the  
store's dumpster and started to read.

Whatever you, out there in P-list land, may have derived from CoL49,  
the very first thing that stuck me was "I have been here before." The  
places Pynchon was describing in his novella were places I have been.  
My orientation to these places is much clearer now, thanks in  
particular to our most recent group reading of the book. But thirty  
years ago there was a confluence of my reading of CoL49 and of my  
entering into the haunted landscapes of the greater San Francisco Bay  
area. After my job at the Campus Textbook Exchange ended I got a job  
across the bay. I'd take a bus to the Transbay terminal to a Union 76  
building just a few blocks away. Having lived in Southern and Central  
and Northern California I speculated where Kinneret Among The Pines  
might be and recalled other places mentioned in the book where I  
walked or drove or worked or played.

Naturally when Vineland and then Inherent Vice came out I had a  
similar degree of attachment to those texts as I do to CoL49 for the  
very same reasons—these are places where I lived and these books  
address the history of the rise and fall of the Empire of California.

Whatever intellectual abilities I might or might not have, when I was  
young I had the ability to absorb text that should have been way over  
my head. In 1969 my eighth grade teacher loaned me her copy of  
Catch-22. I ate that book up like candy—coming from an intensely left- 
wing family I always assumed the worst about our government and  
Catch-22 was one of my favorite proofs of that bad faith.

This bit of Pynchon biography was recently re-posted on the P-list. I  
found this particularly relevant:

	As to whose books he liked, that was interesting. He loved
	Heller’s Catch-22, thought it the very best novel of its time. . .

	. . . He thought the world was mad with its weaponry and
	paranoias, and that hasn’t changed much . . .

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n24/bill-pearlman/short-cuts

There are many striking things about Gravity's Rainbow. For me the  
sense of the innate corruption at the center of the Second World War  
was particularly intense. That theme is also at the core of Catch-22.  
While my parents were enmeshed in their Civil Rights activities, I  
couldn't help but notice all the military industry around me. For a  
brief time in 1964 the Jet Propulsion Laboratory was my backyard, from  
time to time I'd hear the roar of a rocket being tested. I was going  
to be an astronaut when I grew up, I just knew it.

Since then things have changed. Because CoL49, VL & IV all speak of  
places I have been my relation to those books will be different that  
of people who were not in L.A. in the seventies or been up to far  
Northern California in the mid-eighties or near Southern California's  
military-industrial complexes in the mid-sixties. I've been in the car  
with the family as we drove by the Hughes complex in Culver City,  
recall the TRW building, walked through Sproul Plaza many times, kept  
myself plugged into KHJ and KRLA and KPFK, my mother would point out  
the Bradbury Building as we drove by. Others—with every good reason— 
look on Pynchon's novels as literature, I tend to look at them more as  
history.