CoL49 (5) Two or Three Things About Her

[Robin Landseadel]

On Jun 16, 2009, at 7:38 AM, rich wrote:

> years ago driving the main drag on my way to the Packard Fdn offices
> near Stanford was confusing for this east coaster--looking for a
> certain building address was made more complicated by the fact that
> once u enter a town whether its Menlo Park or Palo Alto e.g. the
> numbers revert back to the beginning--you don't know really when the
> new numbers start so u end up not only missing the building but the
> building numbers start up again
> took me at least 30 minutes to figure this out w/ lots of u-turning
> its all so seamless

When I first read CoL49, the town of San Narciso reminded me  
[instantly] of Ventura County in the mid-sixties, mainly on account of  
these passages:

	She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight,
	onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together,
	like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she
	thought of the time she'd opened a transistor radio to replace a
	battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of
	houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with
	the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card
	had. . .

Ventura County was farmland mutating into suburbs in the mid-sixties,  
with tract homes sprouting up as the new crop. The other feature of  
San Narciso that stands out is the numbering of the street addresses,  
much like one finds in the extreme edges of L.A.:

	. . . a neighborhood that was little more than the road's skinny
	right-of-way, lined by auto lots, escrow services, drive-ins, small
	office buildings and factories whose address numbers were in
	the 70 and then 80,000's.

The confusion of location in Pynchon's fictional California towns  
appears to be by design. Interestingly enough, there is a confusion of  
location in this chapter that is unreconcilable. Oedipa parks her  
Impala in North Beach. The next time she's in the car she driving away  
from the hotel in Berkeley. If she took the bus back to North Beach,  
it's not mentioned in the text. This confusion of location may or may  
not be deliberate. After all, this is a minor hole in a novella full  
of little holes.

One of the features or flaws of California is the development of huge  
tracts of suburban sprawl. North or south, these cookie-cutter  
developments were a new and worrying feature of life as we know it in  
California, & a central source of wealth for Pierce Invervarity's  
estate. This wasting of California may well be Pierce's true legacy.