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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