Vegas, list trouble etc.

[grladams at teleport.com]

the question is, is anyone going to Vegas mid March?


Jill

Original Message:
-----------------
From: Joseph Tracy brook7 at sover.net
Date: Sat, 14 Nov 2009 17:18:11 -0500
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: Vegas, list trouble etc.


Not getting all the emails again. My last weird post on Rigs again  
again didn't show up in the box and neither diid Clement Levy's  
interesting post on Las Vegas. I found his in the  p-list website  
archive.


The question is why take the action in IV to Vegas? and what happens  
in Vegas and how is it being Las Vegas important?

What happens in Vegas in IV?
Puck Beaverton is in Vegas. Why?  To gamble where he is not welcome  
with the magic fingered Einer, OK. zatit? Hide from police/Doc ? Is  
he on an errand for A Prussia? Is that why Riggs has a gun?
FBI types are there.
Riggs is there in zome town being built in desert. Why build it    
there? If deserts invite utopian dreams , is that what Vegas is?
MW has investments there with  idea of drive-in gambling, kinda like  
fast food cash flow reversal.
Kismet  is taking bets on MW's reappearance.
Mickey is being held in Kismet, or at any rate appears in FBI custody  
there.
hints of mormon mob, HH.

What is Vegas about?
The novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas accounts for two trips to  
Las Vegas, Nevada, that Hunter S. Thompson and attorney Oscar Zeta  
Acosta took in March and April 1971. The first trip spawned from an  
exposé Thompson was writing for Rolling Stone magazine about the  
Mexican-American television journalist Ruben Salazar, whom officers  
of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department had shot and killed  
with a tear gas grenade fired at close range during the National  
Chicano Moratorium March against the Vietnam War in 1970. Thompson  
was using Acosta — a prominent Mexican-American political activist  
and attorney — as a central source for the story, and the two found  
it difficult for a brown-skinned Mexican to talk openly with a white  
reporter in the racially tense atmosphere of Los Angeles, California.  
The two needed a more comfortable place to discuss the story and  
decided to take advantage of a Sports Illustrated magazine offer to  
write photograph captions for the annual Mint 400 desert race being  
held in Las Vegas. ( the novel has little to do with these reasons  
for going to Las Vegas, but is more about the descent of the 60's  
revolution into drugs, self absorbtion  and irrelevance)

The Mob, Gambling, Prostitution( another consistent theme in IV),  
instant marriage, entertainment, Howard Hughes, money, weird showy  
architecture, neon, water issues (Glen Canyon), proximity to LA,  
musical demise of Elvis.

To my thinking Vegas relates to 2 or 3 linked ideas that are  
important to the novel. The first is the glitzy sordid appeal of an  
entire city that sells vice as glamour, this relates to the theme of  
inherent vice.  The 2nd is the idea of an outpost of lawlessness  
where criminality, government and capitalism are living in open co- 
dependence. It seems like that is a fairly good summary  definition  
of "them" that emerges throughout TRP's fiction. Also throughout  P's  
fiction one finds that to investigate any system  or system related  
event, deed or misdeed is to run into this powerful nexus( system  
meaning any organized network from Golden Dawn to Pinkertons to   
various players in Europes great game, to working as a surveyor).











































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