CoL49 (5) Two or Three Things About Her

[Paul Mackin]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Robin Landseadel" <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Monday, June 15, 2009 11:45 AM
Subject: Re: CoL49 (5) Two or Three Things About Her


> 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?

P. 19 in Harper and Row paperback (Perennial Library) during O's meeting 
with Roseman (near end of chapter 1).

"They often went to the same group therapy sessions, in a carpool with a 
photographer from Palo Alto . . . ."

I pick Menlo Park as a model because the two cities abutt and living in one 
is practically like living in the other. P.A. is of course better known.

Also I like the association of Menlo Park with the famous VA Hospital LSD, 
etc, experients of a few years earlier.

Ken Kesey et al.





>
>> 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.

Interesting.  Was that the song that was the theme of the earlier seasons of 
Showtime's Weed?

They're all made of ticky-tacky and they all look the same.

But speaking of Lot 49 geography one can't help notice Pynchon isn't really 
at home yet in California.

For example, the second paragraph of chapter 2.

"San Narcisco lay further south. near L.A."

People living on the pennisula don't speak of L.A. as FURTHER or farther 
south, but just plain south, or more likely IN the south. (I know that 
doesn't make sense but it's the way people consider things there)



Nitpicking.

P..




For example