Strange Names

[Robin Landseadel]

If John Krafft see this, I apologize for the long reply chain, but  
this post works better in context.

My sister, who has seen the insides of a left-wing movement or two, is  
flat-out crazy for "Bleak House"—her master's thesis concerns that  
novel. So I suppose I need to take my sister's interest in that novel  
as one of those deep nudges from forces unseen and go pursuing that  
path. Yes, there certainly is the element of socialist tract in "A  
Christmas Carol," isn't there? And Miki has gone on at some length  
concerning the labyrinthine pathways of the legal system in "Bleak  
House", so reminiscent of the labyrinths of "Gravity's Rainbow."  I  
seriously need to delve into Dickens' Novel.

I apologize for the fall-off of posts, I'll give a quick summation and  
toss it over to Joseph. I think he's on to something, which leads me  
to gathering you folks all together for a little chat.

Terry isn't a troll, he's an imp, he likes to stir thinks up. He's a  
provocateur. One might also point out that he's constantly  
misdirecting. Why? I don't know,  but there's always one in every  
blog, every discussion group, every political organization. Whatever  
I'm going to say, he's going to write off. I already know that.

So here goes.

I'm seeing the movie machinery of Howard Hughes—picking up a thread  
from the end of Against the Day— feeding into the creation of L.A. as  
a money magnet. There's the rise of Hughes Aircraft—on some level the  
Hughes Corporation is the mob that turns into the Mormon Mob simply on  
the basis of financial attractors in military operations. And if you  
follow the freeways in both Inherent Vice and Raymond Chandler's L.A.,  
the "they" of Inherent Vice turnes out to be the continuation of  
Philip Marlowe's "Bay City." Chandler's mob followed the rest of the  
mob to Vegas in the seventies—Mickey Wolfmann being carried out,  
subrosa by subcontractors, is supposed to echo with "Elvis the King"  
and his Memphis Mafia—Doc, as usual, is merely pointing out the  
obvious here when he tells the FBI agents he saw Elvis. The Rise of  
the Hughes empire—the richest man in the world at the time and far  
more powerful and paranoid than Richard Nixon, who obviously was only  
a puppet for the Golden Fang—coinciding with the rise of the CIA,  
coinciding with the rise of the "Doctor" class: and there you got late  
twentieth century capitalism in a nutshell game, with Three-card Monte  
on the side and hot slots for those that know.

As I pointed out before, the Hughes empire was based on family  
ownership of the patent to the oil drill bit that made that whole  
petroleum thing rilly—like surplus value city—rilly super profitable.  
Hughes money, at the bottom of it all, was oil money. That drill-bit  
is the Golden Fang. That's my take-away for that signifier and on to  
round two.

There's the development  of sub rosa, subcontracted field operatives  
in all of Pynchons books, the lot of 'em. Pop-cult makes that kind of  
figure—James Bond, anyone?—the new badass archetype. Boom: CIA. Yeah,  
yeah, I already know, you already know, we've all already heard it.  
But still, this is the subject matter in GR, it's all over AtD, we all  
know this theme, I'm merely humming along with the bass-line here.

As regards Shit 'n Shinola, Pynchon has always been all over this  
subject, the way all money is dirty in all his books—we're slapped  
with that at Shasta's entrance with the namecheck of "Can't Buy Me  
Love." Who knows, maybe the boy's some sort of convoluted puritan, but  
specific reference points keep popping up in all of Pynchon's books.  
By deliberately pointing to the Hughes empire's involvement with the  
end of the era—in some ways the roach end of the sixties really meant  
that the routes of distribution of all the "good shit" was detouring  
around L.A., finding a higher quality atmosphere up the coast,  
northward, or finding hotter action in Vegas—in any case, following  
Doc to Vegas we find the Vegas of Howard Hughes and Hunter S.  
Thompson. I'd give you all more reference points to this revisionist  
history, but to do that would mean that I'd have to read more and blog  
less. It's not that I'm giving up on pointing to the joint in Dean  
Martin's mouth—of course, that means re-reading "Dino—Living High in  
the Dirty Business of Dreams" by Nick Tosches at his high-water mark;  
not exactly an onerous task but a time consuming one. And I'm only a  
third of the way into "Lady in the Lake" with "Playback" and "The Big  
Sleep" still ahead of me. You can look to New England ancestors all  
you like when talking about Pynchon, but this time he's talking about  
L.A. and he has something to say and you're not going to find it in  
"Moby Dick."

So I've got my work cut out for me. And then there's job hunting. I'll  
continue to dribble in posts, hopefully with more content of this  
nature. Glad to hand over the ship to Joseph, my shoulder's getting  
kinda sore.

Seriously, with a name like "Webb Traverse", don't you think the  
author might be inviting us all on this wild goose chase, make us look  
up stuff in the record books, find some history of the United States  
of America that can explain how exactly we got here, right on the  
verge of L.A. going underwater, just like New Orleans did???

On Nov 15, 2009, at 7:20 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:

> And i just want to add to Monte's untoppable obs this, recently  
> relearned,
> (which Monte adumbrates):
>
> Dickens' popularity led him to be viewed as too popular to be  
> 'great", kept him from being 'canon'ized by those who mostly defined  
> great literature until well into the 20th Century.
>
> Dr. Leavis, perhaps the James Wood of his time (but probably even  
> more influential within Academe), so to speak, pronounced him
> not for mature readers when he wrote The Great Tradition. (Let's  
> see: juvenile satire, sound Wooden to you?)
>
> One can imagine the James Wood-like reviewers of Dickens time  
> writing of his 'hyperbolic realism" or 'sentimental' failures----Oh,  
> the death of Little Nell, so... 'sob','sob'......
>
> I do know many of the most influential hardly took him seriously,  
> compared to such as George Eliot or others who have deservedly faded. 
> (Eliot has not faded, rightly)
>
> To Leavis's credit he did reread and reconsider Dickens for 'the  
> tradition' in a 1970 book. When I wrote Wood about AtD, I suggested  
> he would come to the same conclusion about Pynchon if he would  
> reread him in full intelligent openness, but all, all is vanity,  
> mine, I'm sure as much as Wood's.
> --- On Sat, 11/14/09, Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net> wrote:
>
>> From: Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net>
>> Subject: RE: Strange Names
>> To: "'Henry Musikar'" <scuffling at gmail.com>, "'Pynchon Liste'" <pynchon-l at waste.org 
>> >
>> Date: Saturday, November 14, 2009, 9:51 AM
>> Henry Musikar asks:
>>
>>> Has there been much consideration of Dickensian
>> influence evidenced in
>> P-works?
>>
>> Not as much as there ought to be in the [small slice of]
>> critical literature
>> [known to me]. I've been ruminating this one since
>> reading/re-reading most
>> of Dickens a few years ago. Dickens is, of course, "a very
>> traditional
>> novelist" only as seen through 150+ years of *a tradition
>> he reshaped*.
>>
>> That's the hardest lesson to re-learn over and over from
>> any sort of
>> history: what we instantly label (and stop thinking about)
>> as "Victorian"
>> arrived on the scene as mad, bad, and dangerous to know as
>> any Romantic or
>> Modernist cutting edge. There's abundant evidence that
>> contemporaries' view
>> changed as Dickens evolved during the 1840s from the
>> gemutlich olde-Englande
>> comfort of the Pickwick Papers to a "problem[atic]
>> novelist," all the more
>> disturbing because he was so wildly popular with newly
>> literate blue-collar
>> readers.
>>
>> Check out some of Dickens' most hallucinatory crowd scenes,
>> especially those
>> of revolutionary Paris in A Tale of Two Cities and of the
>> 1780 Gordon Riots
>> in Barnaby Rudge.  See if you can't plot a Visto,
>> perhaps by way of _The Day
>> of The Locust_, that leads to many of the busiest Streets
>> in Pynchon.
>>
>> -Monte
>>
>>
>