Thomas Pynchon's Unofficial Guide to Los Angeles

[rich]

LA uptight
city in the smog
don't cha wish u could be there, too?

On 7/28/09, Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
> 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
>
>