CoL49 (5) Two or Three Things About Her

[Paul Mackin]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ian Livingston" <igrlivingston at gmail.com>
To: "Robin Landseadel" <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
Cc: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Tuesday, June 16, 2009 1:47 PM
Subject: Re: CoL49 (5) Two or Three Things About Her


> This is really an interesting departure from the meticulous placement of 
> V.
>
> I agree that TRP's locations in CoL49 and Vineland are likely
> composites, partly because I think Pynchon is really talking about an
> interior geography here and whether you're in Berzerkely, Big Sur or
> Bakersfield hardly matters so much as whether or not you inhabit your
> own ego.  The sexties and 7ts were an era wherein the cultural
> identity of Americans was rattled to the quick.

It was like a return to the 20s

The twin traumas of the Great Depression and World War II had finally been 
recovered from.

Buying homes ("little boxes") and raising children had required a certain 
caution in dress, behavior and politics.

Now it was time for some fun.


  >We seem still to be
> at sea as to what it means to be an "American," whereas after WWII,
> Americans enjoyed a brief period of cultural certainty, however
> deluded.

Not being unemployed (carried over from the war years) does have a 
remarkable effect on one's outlook.


 Only the Beats spoke of the alienation brewing beneath the
> appearance of confidence.  The Beats and a few persecuted artists and
> film makers & c....  The red mote in the American eye -- or I -- or
> aye, aye, yi, yiiii....

The Beats reminded us there was more to life than paying mortgages and 
raising kids but were all too soon featured in Life Magazine.

None of which tells us what it means to be an American.

That depends on the American.

Like barbers, surgeons, and musicians, they are not a homogeneous group.

Although they all sort of sound alike, dress alike, and are immediately 
recognizable any place on earth.

Reflectingly,

P
>
>
>
> On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 10:14 AM, Robin
> Landseadel<robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
>> 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.
>>
>>
>