VL-IV: Two or Three Things About Her

[Robin Landseadel]

In a way, all of Pynchon's books are concerned with cataloging [with  
the obsessive-compulsive list-making of Herman Melville describing a  
below-decks cabinet full of tools designed for the extraction of whale  
blubber] the specifics of spycraft. Gravity’s Rainbow  and Against the  
Day seem to act the most like spy novels, Vineland & The Crying of Lot  
49 work closer to the ground, with more resonances of Raymond Chandler  
than of John Buchan. These genre fictions unfold two or three years  
before the plot is supposed to deliver its big package, and seem to  
document an event that will occur sometime well after the book's final  
page.  In the case of The Crying of Lot 49, there's a lot of pages  
devoted to LSD. I'll bet that TRP was aware [via his connections to  
certain grapevines that gave him data concerning “What’s Happening in  
Spycraft!!!” back in that golden age of secret agents, 1964] of such  
shenanigans as the MK ULTRA project "Operation Midnight Climax" that  
the CIA had fooling around with back in 1964* in San Francisco,  
already infecting the City By the Bay with the Trystero meme. By the  
time 1966 rolled along LSD was a far larger concern and as far as  
1967-1973 is concerned . . .

I really don't think I have any need to explain OBA's love of the  
subject of Spys and Spycraft, seeing as as the author himself has  
already given us plenty of good intel:

	. . . I was also able to steal, or let us say "derive” in more subtle
	ways. I had grown up reading a lot of spy fiction, novels of
	intrigue, notably those of John Buchan. The only book of his
	that anyone remembers now is The Thirty-nine Steps, but he
	wrote half a dozen more just as good or better. They were all in
	my hometown library. So were E. Phillips Oppenheim, Helen
	MacInnes, Geoffrey Household, and many others as well. The
	net effect was eventually to build up in my uncritical brain a
	peculiar shadowy vision of the history preceding the two world
	wars. Political decision-making and official documents did not
	figure in this nearly as much as lurking, spying, false identities,
	psychological games. Much later I got around to two other
	mighty influences, Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station and
	Machiavelli's The Prince, which helped me to develop the
	interesting question underlying the story - is history personal or
	statistical?

	Slow Learner, page 18

In Pynchon's work there is always an anachronistic overlay of the  
author's "present tense”—the delta-t's of the time and place of the  
novel's writing—on top of the historical time frame[s] where the novel  
nominally dwells.  Vineland, set in 1984 [with enough flashbacks to  
fill up a year's worth of "Movies of the Week"] and published in  
1990,  has one of its biggest anachronistic overlays right on the  
novel's cover.  If someone was involved with the various offspring of  
SDS or 24fps that were active in 1990, such groups as  Earth First,  
Abalone Alliance or Reclaiming, then the cover photograph by Darius  
Kinsey of "Crescent Camp Number One" could signify one thing and one  
thing only . . . the clear-cutting of timber, an issue that fired up  
thousands of leftist activists to get involved back in 1990:

http://www.moma.org/imagåes/collection/FullSizes/50093031.jpg

http://www.shadowcatchers.net/TheShadowCatchers/Jeffers/Jeffers_Studio_I.htm


1990 was Annus mirabilis for Earth First and fellow travelers who  
continued the traditions of the SDS, Yippies & Bernadine Dohrn. Judi  
Bari is a better point of reference for the unfortunate events at  
College of the Surf than the Weather Underground or SLA. Vineland’s  
[and ATD’s] demonstration of the big connection between rank & file  
Labor activists and charismatic leaders like Judi Bari is underscored  
by this IWW tribute by Nicholas Wilson, taken from the Albion Monitor  
of March 1997:

	. . . While a student at the University of Maryland, she "majored
	in anti-Vietnam War rioting," as she put it. After dropping out of
	college in her fifth year, she got a job as a blue-collar worker
	and quickly got involved in union organizing. As a clerk for a
	large grocery chain she became the union shop steward in the
	early '70s. Only about five feet tall, she took karate classes for
	self-defense, and reached the black belt level. Later she broke
	a gender barrier by passing a qualifying test requiring her to lift
	and shoulder a 70 lb. mail sack, and got a job at the U.S.
	Washington Bulk Mail Center near the nation's capital. There
	she continued her union organizing, publishing a workers'
	newsletter and organizing a successful wildcat strike for better
	working conditions. . .

	. . . Betty Ball credited Bari with the feminization of Earth First!.  
"It
	had been incredibly male-dominated prior to Judi's entrance.
	There were women involved but none were as successful as
	Judi in putting the feminine spin into it, and getting rid of some
	of the macho chest-beating that had been prevalent in Earth
	First! prior to that. Judi's influence then allowed many more
	women to get involved, in more influential ways than had been
	possible previously. Judi also innately understood the
	importance of community-based organizing, as opposed to the
	nomadic style that Earth First! had before that. . . "

	. . .In the spring of 1990, Bari and Cherney had the idea to try to

	bring thousands of college students from around the country to

	the redwoods in an effort inspired by the Mississippi Summer

	civil rights campaign of the early '60s. They first called the

	campaign "Mississippi Summer in the Redwoods," but it was

	soon better known as "Redwood Summer." The purpose was,

	as Bari put it later, to try to make sure there were still some

	forests left to preserve if and when the Forests Forever initiative

	passed. Timber companies joined forces to defeat the initiative.

	They hired public relations firms (including the infamous Hill &

	Knowlton) to whip up opposition to Forests Forever. The

	consultants coined the term "eco-terrorists" to smear Earth First!

	with, and labeled Prop. 130 "the Earth First! initiative." They

	manufactured phony Earth First! press releases advocating

	tree-spiking, logging equipment sabotage and violence in order

	to create a public perception of Earth First! as violent extremists.

	The fake press releases were circulated to workers and the

	press by Pacific Lumber and Louisiana-Pacific, among others in

	the timber industry. A Pacific Lumber memo about one release

	pointed out that Darryl Cherney's name was misspelled,

	showing the company knew the release was fake even before

	they spread it around . . .


http://www.iww.org/en/culture/biography/BariObit1.shtml

Let us say that there is a bonified paranoid aspect to OBA, that maybe  
he has damn good reasons for not wanting to be photographed.  Perhaps,  
on top of having plenty of knowledge of spycraft, he has maybe two or  
three far-left friends who are more or less portrayed with all their  
quirks intact in such epics as Gravity’s Rainbow. As Professor John  
Krafft pointed out earlier this week:

	Subject: FW: FYI: The Stephen M. Tomaske collection at the
	Huntington Library :

	. . . Taped interviews with many of Pynchon's shipmates from his time
	in the US Navy.  My brother believed that many of the characters
	in Pynchon's novel V. may have been based on real people,
	specifically his shipmates in the US Navy.  Steve succeeded in
	making contacts with a number of people who served with
	Pynchon and remembered him.  In turn, many of the individuals
	interviewed seemed to be models for characters in V. (I believe
	they were known as "the Whole Sick Crew).  Steve was certain
	these men were the basis for characters in the novel.  Note that all
	of these interviews were taped with full knowledge and permission
	of the participants. . .

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0902&msg=132348&sort=date


Perhaps the man has sustained relationships with folks [like “Murdered  
By Capitalism” author John Ross] with underground connections and  
experiences, folks who might remind him of high times with Richard  
Farina or otherwise fire up his fascination with espionage and  
counterforces. Whatever the source of his inspirations, it is reported  
that in 1990 the author was living in Aptos California; right next to  
surfing haunt Capitola and close to Santa Cruz, whose UC is as good a  
stand-in for College of the Surf as any.° If OBA lived in Aptos CA.  
and had the spare time and wherewithal to check out around the local  
political territory he must have at the very least heard of Judi Bari.

I suspect that Judi Bari was a probable inspiration for Vineland.


*And I'll also bet that'll be a big thread in "Inherent Vice."

°Other than the fact that College of the Surf was way down south, deep  
in Nixon country.