IVIV (15) 273—7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38

[Robin Landseadel]

As I said before, Doc and Bigfoot are heading in the general  
direction	 of 7000 Romaine in this scene. "Waste a Perp" is on South  
La Brea—that's between Beverly & Wilshire. You go past Melrose to get  
to Santa Monica Blvd. Sweetzer is about a mile west. At the corner of  
Sweetzer and Santa Monica, Bigfoot says that his car is in the same  
direction as Doc's—near Fairfax. Recall that "Waste-a-Perp" is on  
South La Brea. 7000 Romaine is just off of La Brea.

Close by 7000 Romaine Street is the L.A branch of "Wasteland," a used  
clothing outlet based in the S.F. Bay area.

I sensed a while back that Joan Didion's writing must have entered  
Pynchon's mind, what with all the Mansonoid paranoia that runs through  
"The White Album." But I never read "Slouching Towards Bethlehem."  
There's a piece in  "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" entitled "7000  
Romaine, Los Angeles 38," originally entitled "The Howard Hughes  
Underground" and published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1967. The  
essay has a phrase that seems to me to a key for understanding the  
selection of title for Pynchon's Latest:

	Our favorite people and our favorite stories become so not by
	any inherent virtue, but because they illustrate something deep
	in the grain, something unadmitted.

If not by "Inherent Virtue", then that "something unadmitted" must be  
"Inherent Vice." Here's a longer excerpt:

	The stories are endless, infinitely familiar, traded by the faithful
	like baseball cards, fondled until they fray around the edges
	and blur into the apocraphyl. There is the one about the barber,
	Eddie Alexander, who was paid handsomely to remain on "day
	and night standby" in case Hughes wanted a haircut. "Just
	checking, Eddie," Hughes once said when he called Alexander
	at two in the morning...

	Why do we like these stories so? Why do we tell them over and
	over? Why have we made a folk hero of a man who is the
	antithesis of all our official heroes, a haunted millionaire out of
	the West, trailing a legend of desperation and power and white
	sneakers? But then we have always done that. Our favorite
	people and our favorite stories become so not by any inherent
	virtue, but because they illustrate something deep in the grain,
	something unadmitted. Shoeless Joe Jackson, Warren
	Gamaliel Harding, the Titanic: how the mighty are fallen.
	Charles Lindbergh, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Marilyn Monroe:
	the beautiful and damned. And Howard Hughes. That we have
	made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting
	about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tell us that
	the secret point of money and power in America is neither the
	things that money can buy nor power for power's sake
	(Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about
	power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive
	because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed
	the the uses of power), but absolute personal freedom, mobility,
	privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all
	through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a
	restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free
	agent, live by one's own rules.

	Of course we do not admit that. The instinct is socially suicidal,
	and because we recognize that this is so we have developed
	workable ways of saying one thing and believing quite
	another...There has always been that divergence between our
	official and our unofficial heroes. It is impossible to think of
	Howard Hughes without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf
	between what we say we want and what we do want, between
	what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the
	largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love. In
	a nation which increasingly appears to prize social virtues,
	Howard Hughes remains not merely antisocial but grandly,
	brilliantly, surpassingly, asocial. He is the last private man, the
	dream we no longer admit.

At the start of the essay, Ms. Didion connects this section of West  
Hollywood with Raymond Chandler;

	Seven Thousand Romaine Street is in that part of Los Angeles
	familiar to admirers of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell
	Hammett: the underside of Hollywood, south of Sunset
	Boulevard, a middle-class slum of "model studios" and
	warehouses and two-family bungalows. . . .

Here's the entire piece:

http://jonobr1.com/argentina/summer_school/reading_ted.pdf