Flagging/schedule change?

[Michael Bailey]

 John Carvill wrote:

>  some sort of bullet point summary, listing, I dunno,
> the Top Ten Things We've Learned About Inherent VIce Thus Far, not

>
> Obvious starting points might be: the connection between
> Lemuria/Bigfoor/Wolf Man, etc; or that the book ends on Pynchon's
> birthday; or the meaning of 'sportello' as in door, window, etc.
> A-and/or, a list of 'kute korrespondences', my fovurites being the
> (possible) link between the ARPANET and GR, and teh fact that Ida
> Lupino directed the Pilot episode of Gilligan's Island.
>

nice start!  and, good idea!
mine aren't so arcane, I don't imagine:

10. lots of pot gets smoked, but also lots of cigarettes.  Cigarettes -
and this is a known fact - taste ever so much better after smoking weed

9. a sharp demarcation between the protagonist and the
author is that Doc stresses not being much of a reader.
None of his big characters are, really, except maybe Pugnax.
Frank reads a Chums adventure.  Oh, Weissmann probably reads a lot...

8. a childhood he never much wanted to escape from.
The importance of giving kids happy childhoods shines thru
in a few places in every p book except maybe V.  Are there any
kids at all in V.?

7. Shasta, Clancy, Trillium: the first, his high-school sweetheart
who has dreams of her own that are stronger than her desire to settle
down with Doc...Clancy and Trillium cause love to flare up in him briefly,
but they, too, although friendly enough, look right past Doc to pursue
their own adventures.  Penny the attorney carries on with him, but is
a career woman with - probably wisely - little respect for Doc.
 And Luz has so much else going on that although
she's "non-USAn" and thus knows more about life, she doesn't do much
more than touch Doc's circumference and veer off...
Doc's folks are still there to represent love and marriage, but where
is a woman interested in being the distaff part of such a partnership
for Doc?

6.  Questions about the morality of being a repo man or detective
and co-operating with the police are not confronted directly very often.
I'd argue that such relations are inevitable in an imperfect world,
dissatisfaction
is a given, and they are shown as being resolved - to the extent
that they can be - in action: "solvitur ambulando"

5. If Mickey Wolfmann represents a larger societal tendency
that is rolled back towards business-as-usual, you might
even expand that to be reminded of all of Johnson's Great Society
and Kennedy's New Frontier
initiatives.  Zome City combines innovative architecture
with this stray and repressed charitable impulse.  The notion
that there is some kind of connection between the desire to
do a big giveaway and the introduction of new forms of lifestyle
is one that I hope Pynchon is not done playing with.

4. Doc is learning to work with/around/through Bigfoot,
to deal with being used by Bigfoot.  Is it unreasonable to
project a future when Doc, or individuals with a similar generous
spirit, might learn to deal with the other grey eminences who
seem even more powerful than Bigfoot - the FBI, the lawyers, so forth?

3. Denis is sure that it's the Boards who ransacked his place.
I'm not convinced.  Somebody, though, has his photographs.
(Fat lot of good it will probably do them...)

2. The Golden Fang: like the Trystero, it's a conspiracy too large
to be fully comprehended.  Maybe even by its members...

1. The fortuitous coincidences that lead Doc forward do
occur in life too.  The worldwide meetings of the dramatis
personae in AtD are partly explained by there usually being a small
finite number of places that foreign travelers congregate -
witness both John Barth (IIRC) and Anthony Burgess telling of meeting up
with William Burroughs in Tangiers.
Likewise, in LA in 1969-70 there are probably (vanishingly) few
hippie detectives to whom such varied personages as Clancy,
Tariq and Hope could turn.  His logo would draw them in...



-- 
- "The whole point of life is to have a story" - Jeremy Cioara