Prepping the IV

[Mark Kohut]

I read your whole posts especially one's like this which, presuming no scanning device, you type for us as a labor of ...community....

Chandler, I say. 

--- On Fri, 7/31/09, Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:

> From: Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
> Subject: Prepping the IV
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Friday, July 31, 2009, 11:02 AM
> The mid-sixties satirical creation of
> the Stoned Detective/Hippie as embodied by Nick Danger is
> actually an alternate [call it Po-Mo if it makes you feel
> better] reading of Raymond Chandler, one that focuses more
> on the actual words on the page, as opposed to somebody
> elses words on the page or dialog from the movie versions or
> something somebody picked up in a college course. No-one
> ever did the Stoned Detective better than Raymond Chandler
> did in his original, unexpurgated, Hays-Office three sheets
> to the wind in Copenhagen, wasted beyond recognition,
> ripped-to-the tits originals. It was a target so big, so
> obvious, so theatrical, so inherently comic it was never a
> question of "If",Pynchon would take Raymond Chandler at his
> word and simply "Do It," come up with his own tattered
> casebook full of old time-radio sound effects.  It was
> only a question of "when?"
> 
> Here is an extended swath of "Farewell, My Lovely" [1940],
> a fine example of "This Private Dick wakes up in this
> Private [nudge, nudge, wink, wink] clinic, see—stoned out
> of his mind . . .:
> 
>     "Seems like a nice place," I said. "Nice
> people, nice
>     atmosphere. I guess I'll have me a short
> nap again."
> 
>     "Better be just that," he snarled.
> 
>     He went out. The door shut. The lock
> clicked. The steps growled
>     into nothing.
> 
>     He hadn't done the smoke any good. It
> still hung there in the
>     middle of the room, all across the room.
> Like a curtain. It didn't
>     dissolve, didn't float off, didn't move.
> There was air in the room,
>     and I could feel it on my face. But the
> smoke couldn't feel it. It
>     was a gray web woven by a thousand
> spiders. I wondered how
>     they had got them to work together.
> 
>     Cotton flannel pajamas. The kind they
> have in the County
>     Hospital. No front, not a stitch more
> than is essential. Coarse,
>     rough material. The neck chafed my
> throat. My throat was still
>     sore. I began to remember things. I
> reached up and felt the
>     throat muscles. They were still sore.
> Just one Indian, pop. Okey,
>     Hemingway. So you want to be a
> detective? Earn good money.
>     Nine easy lessons. We provide badge. For
> fifty cents extra we
>     send you a truss.
> 
>     The throat felt sore but the fingers
> feeling it didn't feel anything.
>     They might just as well have been a
> bunch of bananas. I looked
>     at them. They looked like fingers. No
> good. Mail order fingers.
>     They must have come with the badge and
> the truss. And the
>     diploma.
> 
>     It was night. The world outside the
> windows was a black world.
>     A glass porcelain bowl hung from the
> middle of the ceiling on
>     three brass chains. There was light in
> it. It had little colored
>     lumps around the edge, orange and blue
> alternately. I stared at
>     them. I was tired of the smoke. As I
> stared they began to open
>     up like little portholes and heads
> popped out. Tiny heads, but
>     alive, heads like the heads of small
> dolls, but alive. There was a
>     man in a yachting cap with a Johnnie
> Walker nose and a fluffy
>     blonde in a picture hat and a thin man
> with a crooked bow tie.
>     He looked like a waiter in a
> beachtownflytrap. He opened his
>     lips and sneered: "Would you like your
> steak rare or medium,
>     sir?"
> 
>     I closed my eyes tight and winked them
> hard and when I
>     opened them again it was just a sham
> porcelain bowl on three
>     brass chains.
> 
>     But the smoke still hung motionless in
> the moving air. I took
>     hold of the comer of a rough sheet and
> wiped the sweat off my
>     face with the numb fingers the
> correspondence school had sent
>     me after the nine easy lessons, one half
> in advance, Box Two
>     Million Four Hundred and Sixty Eight
> Thousand Nine Hundred
>     and Twenty Four, Cedar City, Iowa. Nuts.
> Completely nuts.
> 
>     I sat up on the bed and after a while I
> could reach the floor with
>     my feet. They were bare and they had
> pins and needles in
>     them. Notions counter on the left,
> madam. Extra large safety
>     pins on the right. The feet began to
> feel the floor. I stood up. Too
>     far up. I crouched over, breathing hard
> and held the side of the
>     bed and a voice that seemed to come from
> under the bed said
>     over and over again:
> 
>     "You've got the dt's . . . you've got
> the dt's . • • you've got the dt's."
> 
>     I started to walk, wobbling like a
> drunk. There was a bottle of
>     whiskey on a small white enamel table
> between the two barred
>     windows. It looked like a good shape. It
> looked about half full. I
>     walked towards it. There are a lot of
> nice people in the world, in
>     spite. You can crab over the morning
> paper and kick the shins
>     of the guy in the next seat at the
> movies and feel mean and
>     discouraged and sneer at the
> politicians, but there are a lot of
>     nice people in the world just the same.
> Take the guy that left
>     Mae West's hips.
> 
>     I reached it and put both my half-numb
> hands down on it and
>     hauled it up to my mouth, sweating as if
> I was lifting one end of
>     the Golden Gate bridge.
> 
>     I took a long untidy drink. I put the
> bottle down again, with
>     infinite care. I tried to lick
> underneath my chin.
> 
>     The whiskey had a funny taste. 
> .  .
> 
> I want to ask the P-List—or at least the part of the
> P-List that got down this far—does Thomas Pynchon read
> more like a passage out of "The Ambassadors" or "Farewell,
> My Lovely?" Think about analogous passages in Pynchon, in
> Gravity's Rainbow, Vineland and Against the Day. I mean,
> like— beachtownflytrap, fer chirsakes..
>