Pynchon's "White Negro" view of Watts & Scooby-Doo too

[Robin Landseadel]

On Jul 29, 2009, at 7:11 AM, Campbel Morgan wrote:

> That Scooby-Doo, the modern day Lion of the Wizard stories, is
> connected not only with L. Frank Baum and other texts, comics and
> "childrens" literature, to plastic man, and then to the
> Japanese-Americans who created the characters in the Fang and
> Scooby-Doo and Platic Man TV shows, in an American Internment Camp,
> after their communities were destroyed and bankers and real estate
> developers developed and banked, much as Watts, where a series of Real
> Esates landlords supressed and repressed Blacks in Watts.. and we
> should do well to recall that Pynchon's best short story, "The Secret
> Integration," a Mark Twain & Henry James period work that fails on
> surrealism but succeeds at the ghost and character level, deals with
> Real Estate  development, a major political issue on Long Island when
> P was growing up there   . bussing and block busting ...and of course,
> his father was right in the middle of it all ...the labor surveyor
> stuff.
> .
> see Edward T. Chang " America's First Multiethnic 'Riot' " Nopper,  
> and Tamara K.
> The 1992 Los Angeles Riots and the Asian American Abandonment
> Narrative as Political Fiction
> CR: The New Centennial Review - Volume 6, Number 2, Fall 2006, pp.  
> 73-110

Cool. Manhattan Beach is pretty close to Watts, and I could think of  
some pretty jazzy, "White Negro" reasons for Pynchon to park his ride  
on 103d & Central. In 1966, Watts was Owsley's other base of  
operations and Kesey threw an Acid Test there that year. On the other  
hand, traffic in L.A. is set up so as to make it easier to drive past  
South Central & Watts, something TP points out in the article.