Ch 14 summary continued
Joseph Tracy
brook7 at sover.net
Fri Mar 27 11:15:18 CDT 2009
Continuing Summary of Ch 14 pages 306-315 with notes questions
Zoyd and Prairies take off on their trip to Vineland, picked up by VW
bus and taken to commune of mostly people trying to stay off screen
from police. It’s located in Sacramento Delta military are ans
clearly corresponds to Mclellan Air force Base an Air materials
complex. It is a nasty place, noisy with nasty chemical smells. ( It
has since closed and along with Rancho Seco is one more ugly toxic
mess left behind by military industrial complex.) ( There is
something weird, in California especially, where some people seem to
have adapted to extreme noise from air and road traffic; you see
multi-million dollar houses right next to 6 lane freeways: and there
is something extra jarring about hippie types finding refuge in this
hellish place.)
Couple days is all Z&P can take and they head to SF to mansion of
Wendell Mucho Maas( COL 49), are taken in by young long haired babe
named Trillium( a common wild lily with 3 petals.) who takes Prairie
in her arms to baby’s delight, guides them through mansion, rooms
with high end analog stereos, Pinball machines, black lights,
psychedelia, TVs. Trillium leaves for paranoids concert and Zoyd
feeds Prairie & sings to her “Lawrence of Arabia” with his wig, wag,
woggledy doo!, then settles in to watch Woody Allen’s imaginary
“Young Kissinger”.
We get a brief history of Mucho Maas from DJ to divorce to Record
Producer/Count Drugula ( Nice reference back to Count Chocula Cereal
on first page of VL) who then goes on Coke binge, ends in office of
Dr. Hugo Splanchnik, rhinologist who takes him through dreaded and
funny Room of Bottled Specimens (of cocaine users’ brains and noses)
and compels Maas to sign in blood an agreement to forgo Coke or be
subject to extreme penalties before repairing Mucho’s nose. Mucho
then became a prophet of the Natch. Somewhere in here Maas returns in
real time.
We visit a comic memory of the encounter between Maas and Hector Z
( “Hey my man with the reverse chic shoes”) and then move to a
consideration of the social impact of LSD revealing to takers the
unreality of death and the danger of that notion to the State. They
part after a listen to the “sermon” of the Best Sam Cooke V. 1&2.
Zoyd and Prairie wait at bus station Prairie sitting on Pinball
machine, then head north across the Golden Gate which OBA describes
as “a transition in the metaphysics of the area”
On to the land of Fog and “fiss”
Notes:
Count Drugula gets his cape n paraphernalia from Z&Z. Connection to
Zoyd Zuniga ? role of letter Z as zed? end, terminus of loss?
Prairie and Frenesi both have thing with Pinball machines. What’s up
there?
Is there a pattern to the journey? From beach house to Sasha’s
Hollywood suburb, from Cops to military hell, to ex druggie on the
natch to VL?
transition from weed to LSD to Coke to natch
more notes /questions later
More information about the Pynchon-l
mailing list