CoL49 (5) Two or Three Things About Her

[Robin Landseadel]

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

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

Could you point to the reference?

> If she and Roseman attend group therapy with a photographer from  
> Palo Alto.
>
> Sounds like Menlo Park to me.

I'm thinking of Carmel by the Sea in part because Richard & Mimi  
Farina lived there:

	In Europe, Fariña met Mimi Baez, the teenage sister of Joan
	Baez in the spring of 1962. Hester divorced Fariña shortly
	thereafter, and Fariña married 17-year-old Mimi in April 1963.
	They moved to a tiny cabin in Carmel, California, where they
	composed songs on a guitar and appalachian dulcimer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Fariña

I'm also thinking, as this is a work of fiction, that OBA takes  
multiple references and scrambles them together as so many fiction  
writers do when they're far away at sea. Thus "San Narcisco", clearly  
a part of southern California, was inspired by a hunk of South San  
Francisco that 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." I was told  
by one of the author's acquaintances that she was in a car with the  
author when he came up with the name "San Narcisco" while they were  
driving towards South San Francisco. Daly City—a hunk of South San  
Francisco— was the inspiration for Malvina Reynold's "Little Boxes."  
I'm reasonably certain that Pynchon would have been aware of  
Rocketdyne, Canoga Park & the surrounding environs down in the San  
Fernando Valley.