VL-IV: Two or Three Things About Her

kelber at mindspring.com kelber at mindspring.com
Sun Feb 8 09:57:42 CST 2009


All good stuff, Robin.  Thanks.  Question:  How long had Pynchon lived in Aptos before Vineland came out?

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
>Sent: Feb 7, 2009 7:27 PM
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: VL-IV: Two or Three Things About Her
>
>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.





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