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

[Mark Kohut]

one has to believe that the phrase "inherent virtue" in Didion entered TRPs
creativity and emerged sea-changed.

Amazing connections, Robin. Keep it up for the rest of us who aren't finding them!

--- On Sat, 11/21/09, Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:

> From: Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
> Subject: IVIV (15) 273—7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Saturday, November 21, 2009, 10:41 AM
> 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
>