VL-IV: Two or Three Things About Her

Sun Feb 8 12:54:22 CST 2009

On Feb 8, 2009, at 7:57 AM, kelber at mindspring.com wrote:

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

My scrying ball is murky, but these links:

http://college.cengage.com/english/lauter/heath/4e/students/author_pages/contemporary/pynchon_th.html

http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/10.01.98/cover/lit-pynchon-9839.html

. . .point to something like a decade spent in Aptos, like pretty much  
all of the eighties. Note that previously Pynchon was living in  
Manhattan Beach, down south by Hermosa Beach and just three miles from  
the Beach Boys' home town of Hawthorne, a nom-de-burg that must have  
had some resonance for our beloved bookworm, library patron, genie/ 
genealogist and Brian Wilson fan. Both both the southern and northern  
California habitats are notable as surfing locales. Capitola [just  
north of Aptos and next door to Santa Cruz] is a surfing community of  
note, a mecca for devotees of the wetsuit [let's scan CoL49, GR & AtD  
for wetsuit citations, shall we?] whose inventor happens to famously  
live right on the beach, with his outdoor claw-foot bathtub facing the  
Pacific Blue. As I was looking out of the panoramic window of a bed &  
breakfast in Capitola earlier this year, several dozen wet-suited  
surfers were running down to the beach like baby turtles returning to  
the water.  Neptune, trident erect in a claw-foot bathtub, holds court.

The Wikipedia notes:

	In the late 1980s, author Robert Clark Young prevailed upon
	his father, an employee of the California Department of Motor
	Vehicles, to look up Pynchon's driving record, using Pynchon's
	full name and known birth date. The results showed that
	Pynchon was living at the time in Aptos, California, and was
	driving a 1974 Datsun (Young 1992). The improperly-obtained
	cancelled license subsequently found its way into the hands of
	at least two academics publishing scholarly work on Pynchon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Pynchon

All of this pretty much blows Wanda Tinasky out of the water, yet  
another delusion that I'm more than willing to relinquish.*

However, from the single first-person citation I've personally  
witnessed, it is clear that OBA was not at all adverse to traveling  
around California, and bopped into Berkeley pretty regularly while his  
fixed address was Manhattan Beach. Once our beloved author moved north  
to Aptos, excursions into the Mendocino/Fort Bragg area would be  
pretty likely considering the native agriculture of the territory and  
OBA's wandering nature. What did the man say about "that useful  
substance?"

Judi Bari was particularly active in Fort Bragg. Mendocino [just south  
of Fort Bragg] was/is full of New Agers and self-described Witches who  
participated at those rallies.° I was present at a few and noted that  
many folks involved in the Earth First/Reclaiming activities up and  
around Fort Bragg brought video cameras to record their activities and  
the activities of the Cops sent to break up their demonstrations. Fort  
Bragg was the site of Pacific Lumber's sawmill, bought up by Corporate  
Raider Charles Hurwitz via Maxxam, and then closed down in 2002. PALCO  
eventually [last year] was driven into bankruptcy, a fate that Judi  
Bari foretold well before it became the obvious outcome of their  
policy of non-stop clear-cutting and then shipping the unprocessed  
lumber overseas.

http://www.times-standard.com/opinion/ci_9560701
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Lumber_Company

	Everybody knew it was high times for the stiffs in the woods—
	though not for those in the mills, with the Japanese buying up
	unprocessed logs as fast as the forests could be clearcut—but
	even so, the scene in here was peculiar. Dangerous men with
	coarsened attitudes, especially toward death, were perched
	around lightly on designer barstools, sipping kiwi mimosas.
	Vineland, page 5

The dude knows the locale. It's a "Bear Bar", a place where Zoyd's  
M.O. crashes into a fancy new designer collection of fetishes, a brand  
new gender for those guys tired of the same old gender roles, a scene  
kinda like when Oedipa Maas wandered into a San Francisco Gay bar and  
got turned onto I.A. Gender issues were hot back in 1990, and the  
Feminist revisionism of Spiritual Dogma that Sister Rochelle so  
eloquently expressed was very much in the air that year, leastaways in  
Northern California. I was busy recording interviews with figures  
involved in Woman's Spirituality those years for KPFA, the audience  
was small and pretty much overlapped with the folks that showed up at  
rallies at the Pacific Lumber sawmill.

	As the two were driving in Oakland, California, on May 24,
	1990, a powerful bomb exploded under Bari's driver's seat,
	nearly killing her. Oakland Police and FBI terrorist squad 	
	members were quickly on the scene and within three hours
	placed Bari and Cherney under arrest. Police told the press that
	the two were the only suspects, and that they were eco-
	terrorists injured by the accidental explosion of a bomb they
	were knowingly transporting. Their bail was set at $100,000
	each, even though Bari was in intensive care. . .

	. . . In May, 1991, a year after the bomb blast, Bari and Cherney

	filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the FBI and individual

	agents, and against the Oakland Police and individual officers.

	The suit, titled "Judi Bari vs. the United States of America" and

	filed in the 9th Circuit, charges that Bari and Cherney were

	falsely arrested by the Oakland Police, at the "illegal,

	politically-motivated instigation of the FBI."

	Their lead attorney, Dennis Cunningham of San Francisco,

	wrote in a new document in the suit,"Actually the bombing was

	a clear, carefully designed, criminal attempt to stop and silence

	Judi Bari, a leader of activist protest by Earth First! against

	destruction of the forest environment and local human

	communities by corporate logging powers in northern

	California; and to intimidate and weaken the movement she

	and Darryl Cherney were part of. The reality of this criminal --

	terrorist -- attack was ignored and debunked by the defendant

	state and federal police authorities, and they have continued to

	do so up to the present."

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

Here's an interesting point:

	(David Streitfeld said in the Washington Post on August 9, 1992
	 that he had seen a copy of the Vineland manuscript three
	months before publication and that "It was basically a rough
	draft, meaning he did a lot of work at the last minute. This
	certainly didn't take 17 years.")

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.books/msg/ddc442f03369d0cc

. . . which raises the possibility that Vineland was as much of a  
"Quick One" while he was away [or just trying to make a buck] as The  
Crying of Lot 49.  I'd speculate that Inherent Vice will be yet  
another [comparatively] short-term project. I also suspect that the  
"On the Beach" cover for "I.V."—a painting of one of those  
"Ghostbuster " Cadillac hearses parked in the sand in front of some  
tiki hut—and the little excerpt that Penguin released indicates a high  
probability that "I.V." will be Mucho autobiographical, at least as  
regards the author's living circumstances during his beach years.

*Turns out ol' Wanda was probably Tom Hawkins:
http://cornchipsandpie.blogspot.com/2005/08/wanda-tinasky.html

°Sharon Devlin, who lives in one of the more rural of Mendocino's  
nearby towns,  would be one of the more Pynchonian Witches I've  
managed to talk to. I encountered her at a 1990 anti-Maxxam rally  
where there were about 30 video cameras in use, and she was hollering  
her head off about something. Her shed/meditation/spellwork room had  
the south wall covered in images taken from fiery Tibetan tankas, full  
of blood-red flames.

http://tinyurl.com/bv6yt6

http://tinyurl.com/bvgwvr

http://www.reclaiming.org/resources/death/ghostbusting.html