CoL 49: Loose, Disconnected Thoughts

[Robin Landseadel]

		"In sum, to really try to be informed and literate today
		is to feel stupid nearly all the time."
		David Foster Wallace

After thirty years of reading and re-reading The Crying of Lot 49 I'm  
still wandering off on my own tangent, still convinced  that I'll  
eventually find out "what it all means" even though I already know one  
of the morals of the story is "you'll never know what it all means."

After Oedipa's midnight ride—her moment of gnosis---she is overwhelmed  
by altogether too much information, the kind that requires sorting.  
And we all know just how much work all that sorting really is.

On Jul 9, 2009, at 10:00 AM, Paul Mackin wrote:

> On Wed, 8 Jul 2009, Bekah wrote:
>
>> Omg,  I mean the houses were on the LEFT side (west)  of the road  
>> as I traveled north from SJ.   Gads.
>>
>> Bekah
>>
>
> Hey, I thought of a possible explanation.
>
> The highway running North along the Bay is pretty straight most of  
> the way.
>
> However at a certain point a hillside appears pretty much straight  
> ahead with the words "South San Francisco" on it.
>
> The highway of course must swerve right to get around the hill and  
> to stay at bayside but it seems entirely possible that at certain  
> point in the approach one actually does see houses in the distance  
> on the right side of the road.
>
> I'm working from memory. Back in the early 50s I travelled the piece  
> regularly. It was called Bloody Bayshore Highway them. Lots of  
> accidents. The  Giants were still playing at the Polo Grounds so  
> there was no Candlestick Park sign or anything.
>
> Anyway.
>
> P

I mean,where the hell are we, anyway?

This got me thinking. I know for reasonably certain that OBA floated  
in and out of the Bay area during the time he was writing The Crying  
of Lot 49. 1964/1965 seems to be the years the novella was written.  
And it turns out those were the years of Ken Kesey's famous acid  
soaked exploration of our nation's interior with his Merry Pranksters.  
Like the Dude points out "those that know, know" and those that know  
anything about early LSD research know that Palo Alto/Stanford was one  
of the national centers for government funded [aka MKULTRA] research.

On Jun 15, 2009, at 7:10 AM, Paul Mackin wrote:

	Chapter 1 leads us to think it's a town along El Camino.

	Robin:
	Could you point to the reference?
	
	Paul:
	 P. 19 in Harper and Row paperback (Perennial Library) during
	O's meeting  with Roseman (near end of chapter 1).

	"They often went to the same group therapy sessions, in a 	
	carpool with a photographer from Palo Alto . . . ."

	I pick Menlo Park as the model because the two cities abutt and
	living in  one is practically like living in the other. P.A. is of
	course better known.  Also I like the association of Menlo Park
	with the famous VA Hospital LSD, etc, experients of a few years
	earlier.  Ken Kesey et al.

Remembering my postings concerning Vineland—guessing [from all sorts  
of low-level details] that at the very least, OBA's traveled through  
the greater "green triangle" region—it's clear that he's been in the  
general locations described in the Crying of Lot 49, but he covers his  
traces by creating fictional town names. While Kinneret-Among-The- 
Pines evokes both Carmel by the Sea [where Richard Farina was living]  
and Cambria in the Pines [considerably south, towards Pismo Beach,  
Morro Bay and San Simeon], San Narcisco was evoked by suburban  
developments in South San Francisco/Daly City/Westlake region.

	San Narciso lay further south, near L.A. Like many named
	places in California it was less an identifiable city than a
	grouping of concepts—census tracts, special purpose bond-
	issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to
	its own freeway.

An excerpt titled "The World (This One), the Flesh (Mrs. Oedipa Maas),  
and the Testament of Pierce Inverarity"  was published in Esquire,  
December 1965. As for how long the author was working on the book, we  
know that:

	. . . in a 1965 letter to Donadio, Pynchon had written that he was
	in the middle of writing a book that he called a "potboiler." When
	the book grew to 155 pages, he called it, "a short story, but with
	gland trouble," and hoped that Donadio "can unload it on some
	poor sucker."

http://cl49.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Thomas_Pynchon

The Crying of Lot 49 was conceived and executed in the interregnum  
twixt the beats and the  hippies, when LSD was still legal and under  
serious consideration as a psychotherapeutic &/or "mind control" drug.  
Curious, considering our current realm of Serotonin Reuptake  
Inhibitors and Alex Grey, Paxil & Burning Man. People who have taken  
the novella to their breast and committed themselves to some sort of  
deeper explanation of the meaning of the tale look at structure and  
symbol and so on without looking too hard at the surface contents of  
the story. The book is very much concerned with psychotherapy and the  
[then] psychotherapeutic drug LSD. The protagonists name was chosen  
due to it's obvious resonance with everybody's favorite psychoanalytic  
term, the Oedipus Complex. But this fictional name is also like Webb  
Traverse, containing numerous possible alternative meanings, allusions  
and internal metaphors. Like Oedipus as a mystery story, with the  
protagonist finding out that he's the perp he was seeking all along.

	"Now I'll never know the secrets of the Tristero. Did it really
	exist? Was it Pierce's last elaborate hoax? Am I mad? Or am
	I just stuck in a dated timewarp of empty counter-cultural
	allusions to which 60s stoners and reviewers too scared of
	being thought stupid will attach great depth and revelation?"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2008/sep/13/digested.classics

. . . I mean, as far as I'm concerned it sure don't look like he  
sweated too hard on the finishing touches on this one, eh?

And yet, And yet, And yet . . .

Part of what's going on here feels like the writer's initial reaction  
to LSD, before the responses to the drug were popularized, routinized  
into MSM expressions of psychedelia. And however many misplaced cars  
were left on Telegraph avenue [or was it Treat Street?], however many  
awkward, juvenile or "literary" passages were tossed into the book,  
it's still a case of "first words, best words." Like William Mann said  
of "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", the Crying of Lot 49  
"is an encapsulation of time." What with so much LSD floating in the  
mix, is it not so very strange that so much of what goes on in this  
book tilts towards revelation, perhaps gnosis?

Catching up with Mucho many years later, the Experience seems to have  
left its mark. Something Happened, as Joseph Heller would say:

	"Well I still wish it was back then, when you were the Count.
	Remember how the acid was? Remember that windowpane,
	down in Laguna that time? God, I knew then, I knew. . . ."

	They had a look. "Uh-huh, me too. That you were never going to
	die. Ha! No wonder the State panicked. How are they supposed
	to control a population that knows it'll never die? When that was
	always their last big chip, when they thought they had the
	power of life and death. But acid gave us the X-ray vision to see
	through that one, so of course they had to take it away from us."

	"Yeah, but they can't take what happened, what we found out."

	"Easy. They just let us forget. Give us too much to process, fill
	up every minute, keep us distracted, it's what the Tube is for,
	and though it kills me to say it, it's what rock and roll is
	becoming—just another way to claim our attention, so that
	beautiful certainty we had starts to fade, and after a while they
	have us convinced all over again that we really are going to die.
	And they've got us again." It was the way people used to talk.

I've got good reason to expect that we're gonna be reading a lot more  
of that kind of talk in the very near future.