VL-IV a few more things, around page 200 or so, give or take

[Michael Bailey]

1)  this Karmic Adjustment business...still perplexing to me.  another
thing in "Your Mama Eats" that puzzles me, or I miss the significance
somewhere -- what is the waitress doing with a newspaper called The
Meteor with a picture of T and DL in Australia?  The only thing that
pops to mind - and it's not even a tenuous connection with the story -
is in the movie JFK where they talk about how a newspaper in Australia
had printed the news of the Kennedy assassination the day before
somehow...
but that has nothing to do with the plot.  However, maybe it does have
something to do with Takeshi being willy-nilly a public figure...a
notorious insurance adjustor already (?) which may help him set up
shop...

2) 172 "developers described in images of thick fluids in flexible
containers" - I'm pretty sure it didn't take anybody else nearly as
long as it did me to translate that to "scumbag" (it took me a day and
a half, and I'm still wondering if there's another entendre)

3) his "interesting work with airplanes" - ok, let's say he was 18 in
1945, then by 1984 he'd be turning 57.  Heck, I'm almost that old and
I'm still pretty spry.  I place the DA convention in maybe the late
70s? so a vigorous 40 something...somebody a few years older than OBA
but one that he could probably imagine himself as (speculation) -- a
direct tie to GR, then...

4) "Most of the time he couldn't believe she'd really Done It to him,
because even this long way down the line he still had trouble
believing in his own death.  If she'd killed him, why stick around?
If she hadn't, why put him, a complete stranger, through all this?  It
was driving him toward what, in fairly close to it now, he could
detect as some state of literally mindless joy. There was no way he
knew of to experience such joy and at the same time keep his mind." --
he's got it bad for her...must be love...

5) Long Binh -- apparently quite a major base...also a military prison
-- notable occurrences being
a) sabotage of their munitions in 1967 (a good night to be off the base....)
b) and a prison riot in 1968

6) 186 "Other woge who found it impossible to leave withdrew instead
into the features of the landscape, remaining conscious, remembering
better times, capable of sorrow and as seasons went on other emotions
as well, as the generations of Yuroks sat on them, fished from them,
rested in their shade, as they learned to love and grow deeper into
the nuances of wind and liight as well as the earthquakes and eclipses
and the massive winter storms that roared in, one after another, from
the Gulf of Mexico."
-- not a marathon sentence, but long enough...a suggestion of gentle
subsidence of ghosts into the landscape - pertinent to what might be
called the "Thanatoid Question"

7) "Oh, kick out, the jambs, motherfuck-er,
'Cause here comes, that Stove once again -
You thought I was somethin' in Olathe,
Wait till, you see me in Fort Wayne..."
--- completely lost on me?  well except for the Kick out the Jambs
part - the rock group the MC5 (which was associated with the White
Panther Party, who were wannabe Black Panthers, prominently John
Sinclair who famously was sentenced to 10 years for 2 joints and Abbie
Hoffmann organized a benefit for him with John Lennon performing, and
- mirabile dictu - mere days  after the benefit, some judge or other
decided to release Sinclair...coincidence?  Yeah, probably...) had a
song called "Kick out the Jams" which got radio play with the line
"Kick out the jams, brothers and sisters," but the authentic version
started off with "kick out the jams, motherfuckers" - I had that
LP...back in the day (codger-like, producing a lucent string of drool
when thinking of the teenage beauties one knew...)
(and of course Shea and Wilson in the Illuminatus trilogy did
something very great  and funny with kick out the JAMS "justified
ancients of mummu") --- but DL is singing "kick out the jambs" as in
doorjambs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doorjamb
--- which kicking of the doorjambs is something that Brock's people
are doing back at the Kunoichi Retreat...and something that dissidents
of many stripes do experience from time to time...
---- but also, then, "here comes that Stove once again" - other than
"stove in the door", or I guess "Stove" as a reference to "the heat" -
ie, cops.... I'm pretty clueless
-- Olathe is a suburb, in eastern Kansas, of Kansas City
-- Ft Wayne is in Indiana, which is another Midwestern white-bread state
---- anybody got any elucidation?  any orange sunshine?  white diamonds?

8) Krishna was a girl! page 198 - "...it was Krishna who led everybody
to the bathroom and served as counselor for as long as it took.
Without her, Ditzah thought, no telling how much sooner it would all
have come apart, exchanging with DL now a look that Prairie didnt
miss."    a) how many times have I missed that pronoun...thinkin'
Lobelia was a girl and Krishna a guy...
              b)  he writes, "Ditzah thought" but for Prairie to not
miss the look passing betw DL and Ditzah, she'd have to have been
thinking aloud...

9)  was there really a traveling film commune reporting the news like
that back in the day.  One wonders.  However, in _Vineland_ a plot
element is that Frenesi actually achieved some crossover fame, enough
to appear bankable to hector and his producer friends.  So if she was
that famous, Vond's juice to disappear her beyond the reach of radical
priests and John Lennon benefits and William Kunstler must have been
as potent as that liqueur served up by the Swedish minister who
married Lake and Deuce in AtD...

10) 201 "Sledge Poteet" -- seems to me there used to be a comic strip
called Steve Canyon, and there was a character called Poteet
Canyon...never knew what to make of that comic...

11) 203 "By the time of the last offer by bullhorn of  safe passage,
every road, watercourse, storm drain, and bike path was interdicted" -
compare Gravity's Rainbow, page umpty-ump, "even the kid's paths are
interdicted"

12)  Rex Snuvvle - ah, I'm losin' my steam, household chores a-callin...

13) have to touch upon this, page 238: "It wasn't till years later, on
a lunch hour, somewhere inside the rusticated grandiosity of an
Indiana courthouse - not too far from Brock Vond's old hometown, as a
matter of fact [and what is Frenesi doing there, maybe seducing that
judge mentioned much earlier who tended to think with his dick?] -
trying to find out,  as usual, about a stipend check [ well maybe
payment for the seduction?], that she heard, in human frequencies, the
same phrases she'd heard that night, and followed the voices to a
judge's chambers, sunny, wood, undusted, where nobody looked up when
she put her head in.  The game turned out to be pinochle, and she
understood then that years ago, in Anaheim, she had seen the famous
worms of song, already playing a few preliminary hands on Weed Atman's
snout."
-- non-US readers might not be whisked back in memory to riding in the
back of somebody's parents station wagon on a rainy day, singing "The
worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play pinochle in your
snout" - but I sure was...
that was one of those kid grossout tunes, like "great big gobs of
greasy grimy gopher guts, mutilated monkey meat, granulated birdy
feet, great big gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts, and me without a
spoon..."
--
--
"Ｈｅ　ｗａｓ　ｓｔｉｌｌ　ｐｒｅａｃｈｉｎｇ　ｈｕｍａｎｅ　ｒｅｖｏｌｕｔｉｏｎ，　ｂｕｔ　ｓｅｅｍｅｄ　ｄａｒｋｌｙ
ｅｘｈａｕｓｔｅｄ，　ｕｎｈｏｐｅｆｕｌ，　ｓｎａｐｐｉｎｇ　ａｔ　ｅｖｅｒｙｂｏｄｙ，　ｔｈｅｎ　ａｐｏｌｏｇｉｚｉｎｇ．"　（Ｗｅｅｄ，
ｐ２２９）