Vegas, list trouble etc.

[Mark Kohut]

What a moire, as GR is always sayin"...Wonderful connections, Robin.

And Joseph writes:
> > Seems like the Vegas version of the dream is what is
> left of the Economy. US taxpayers propping up the"financial
> sector" which looks more and more like the high interest
> gaming tables of deathbed capitalism.

and Alcie alludes to Walter Benjamin on slot machines, which I wish he could link to or synopsize......dunno it, but..........

Prosaic, perhaps boring obs: Gambling as pastime has only grown and grown in these United States since the time of Inherent Vice....with state lotteries, it is now State-sanctioned gambiling across Woody's Land that is our land. Talk about the degradation of the democratic idea. 

Gambling, described as a punitive tax on the poor. Gambling as a mug's game
enabling poor saps to believe in getting rich easily. Gambling as a(nother) unreal dream world...(see Against the Day most for this).  

And I think some famous economist, like Veblen, or another has presented gambling as a major metaphor for capitalism and its risks. 

--- On Mon, 11/16/09, Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:

> From: Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
> Subject: Re: Vegas, list trouble etc.
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Monday, November 16, 2009, 10:49 AM
> On Nov 16, 2009, at 7:05 AM, Joseph
> Tracy wrote:
> 
> > On Nov 16, 2009, at 5:05 AM, John Carvill wrote:
> > 
> >>> What happens in Vegas in IV?
> >> 
> >> A question which deserves a thorough analysis. At
> the very least, the
> >> symbolism of that machine spitting out a wave of
> Kennedy coins is
> >> pretty dense. And suggests comparison with the
> Nixon bank notes, eh?
> >> 
> >> << 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 ... The two needed a more comfortable place
> to discuss the story... >>
> >> 
> >> Yes, that's what HST said afterwards. Fear &
> Loathing, though, was
> >> definitely *not* a 'novel'.
> 
> > novel was wikipedia's word. Memoir?
> 
> Tom Wolfe called it "A scorching epochal sensation," H.S.T.
> called it "Gonzo Journalism," the MSM judged it to be "The
> New Journalism." Like so much else that winds up between the
> covers, there's an admixture of fiction and journalism in
> Hunter S. Thompson's archetypically Badass missive,
> difference here being that H.S.T. threw all pretense of
> "Objectivity" out the window of the Great White
> Shark—"Fuck it!'—the literary madman would
> decry—"we're devolving into ancient Rome, Bread &
> Circuses, bring on the bearded ladies, the self-castrators,
> orgies of overindulgence, throw it on the bill, stiff
> management, what did they every do for us anyway?". What
> separated H.S.T.'s book from the pack was that "Raoul Duke"
> got stomped by Hell's Angels long before Altamont alerted
> the rest of a burgeoning subsector  of young 'n stoned
> Hip wannabees that maybe all that "Peace 'n Love" shit was
> overrated.
> 
> As regards the extraordinary sociological impact of "Fear
> & Loathing"—once that loose canon was rolling around,
> the hippie dream became intensely uncool, regularly
> appearing as a Gilligan's Island" level of joke all over the
> Tube, in "National Lampoon", movies, usw. Some folks who
> hopped on the hippie train while Owsley was still
> circulating kept the faith but most folks withdrew from the
> scene—another high water mark/bathtub ring was John
> Lennon's "God"—"The Dream is Over."
> 
> >> . . . The question is why take the action in IV to
> Vegas? and what happens
> >> in Vegas and how is it being Las Vegas important?
> 
> Remember Doc's little drive to visit Fritz Drybeam? We
> start with a drive into Santa Monica—Raymond Chandler's
> "Bay City." In the process we float on by the "Hughes
> Company Property." When Fritz shows off his high-tech link
> to Arpanet to Doc TRW and the subcomponent parts of that
> corporation get name-checked—
> 
>     The origin of the company was in the
> Cleveland Cap Screw
>     Company, founded in 1901 by Charles E.
> Thompson, which
>     eventually became Thompson Products. The
> 1958 merger of
>     Thompson with the Ramo-Wooldridge
> Corporation (named
>     after Simon Ramo andDean Wooldridge) was
> named
>     Thompson Ramo Wooldridge Inc.,
> 
>     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRW
> 
> —everything here is circulating back to the CIA and
> projecting into a future of GPS and I-Phones via the
> interwebs. What Pynchon is doing here is revisionist
> history, showing that the "Nixon Era" really belonged to
> Howard Hughes. That's why Philip Marlowe's pothead offspring
> follows leads to Vegas, not just or only as an homage to
> Hunter S. Thompson, but also showing us what happened to the
> "Bay City Mob."
> 
> >> Certainly an interesting question. String flavours
> of Fear & Loathing
> >> in Las Vegas throughout Inherent Vice. In a sense,
> both books address
> >> the same central question: "How did the Dream
> die?" Whether you view
> >> that Dream as referring to the Hippie Dream, or
> the American Dream, or
> >> both, depends on your political outlook. My guess
> is that Pynchon,
> >> like HST, sees the former as an incarnation of the
> latter.
> > 
> > Seems like the Vegas version of the dream is what is
> left of the Economy. US taxpayers propping up the"financial
> sector" which looks more and more like the high interest
> gaming tables of deathbed capitalism. Thinking of the
> loansharks in IV . That was when loansharking was a crime
> and over 13 percent interest was loansharking. Citibank,
> bailed out with government money at 0% interest, just raised
> their card rates to 21% on most cards.
> 
> "This economy will self-destruct in 10, 9, 8, 7 . . ."
> 
>