Thomas Pynchon's Unofficial Guide to Los Angeles

[Robin Landseadel]

I might have said Raymond Chandler.

Joan Didion's "White Album" is right on target, like one of those V2's  
in the wake of Slothrop's fucking:

		We put "Lay Lady Lay" on the record player, and
	"Suzanne." We went down to Melrose Avenue to see the
	Flying Burritos. There was a jasmine vine grown over the
	verandah of the big house on Franklin Avenue, and in the
	evenings the smell of jasmine came in through all the open
	doors and windows. I made bouillabaisse for people who did
	not eat meat. I imagined that my own life was simple and sweet,
	and sometimes it was, but there were odd things going around
	town. There were rumors. There were stories. Everything was
	unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable. This mystical
	flirtation with the idea of "sin"—this sense that it was possible to
	go "too far," and that many people were doing it—was very
	much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969. A demented
	and seductive vortical tension was building in the community.
	The jitters were setting in. I recall a time when the dogs barked
	every night and the moon was always full. On August 9, 1969, I
	was sitting in the shallow end of my sister-in-Iaw's swimming
	pool in Beverly Hills when she received a telephone call from a
	friend who had just heard about the murders at Sharon Tate
	Polanski's house on Cielo Drive. The phone rang many times
	during the next hour. These.early reports were garbled and
	contradictory. One caller would say hoods, the next would say
	chains. There were twenty dead, no, twelve, ten, eighteen.
	Black masses were imagined, and bad trips blamed. I
	remember all of the day's misinformation very clearly, and I also
	remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was
	surprised.

Absolutely Essential reading for our upcoming journey.

On Jul 28, 2009, at 7:37 AM, rich wrote:

> I might've said Nathaniel West or Mike Davis or Joan Didion
>
> On 7/28/09, Henry Musikar <scuffling at gmail.com> wrote:
>> "Little known fact: Thomas Pynchon, the paranoid poet of the  
>> information
>> age, is LA's greatest writer. To be sure, Los Angeles—whose aerial  
>> view he
>> likened to a printed circuit board—has always been central to the  
>> elusive
>> writer's weird weltanschauung, his hallucinogenic stir-fry of Cold  
>> War
>> hysteria, high tech anxiety, and low-brow pop-culture references.  
>> But did
>> you know he actually lived there in the '60s and early '70s, while  
>> writing
>> Gravity's Rainbow, the Moby-Dick of rocket-science novels? His latest
>> effort, Inherent Vice, is an homage to those bygone days, plus  
>> something no
>> one expected from the notoriously private author: a  
>> semiautobiographical
>> romp. Set in the twilight of the psychedelic '60s, Inherent Vice is  
>> stoner
>> noir, a comic murder mystery starring a detective who—like stories of
>> Pynchon himself—smokes bales of weed, obsesses over unseen  
>> conspiracies, and
>> relishes bad TV. (The Big Lebowski meets The Big Sleep.) And if you  
>> map the
>> novel against Pynchon'!
>> s life in LA, it really does tie the whole room together."
>>
>> http://www.wired.com/special_multimedia/2009/pl_print_1708