CH 15 the hard on

[Joseph Tracy]

On Nov 22, 2009, at 11:10 AM, alice wellintown wrote:


> Mark Kohut sez, I counter by saying that IV, like all his works, is a
> subtler moral argument than we have yet fully articulated.
>
>> That it may not work--no moral center--is worth continued argument  
>> BUT  The man has a MORAL perspective on EVERYTHING, on history, on  
>> the Human and its loss........it is in Inherent Vice or IV fails  
>> to embody it..... but it is intended, I say over and over.
>>
>
> But his obvious attack on Zombie Banks and Zombie REO, the corrupt
> American Elect and the MIC War & Consumer economy is compromised by
> the harsh attack on the preterite, and specifically the
> counter-culture.
>


> We are left with nothing but fragments shored against
> the ruins of an entrenched soul on Eliot's side of no man's land with
> only Voltaire's clever provactions to keep us romantically peeping
> into the best of all possible worlds going wrong.
>
Yes, but if you haven't noticed, that is a fairly apt description of  
where we are in fact at.

  But I think you are wrong about the attacks on the counterculture  
and also the preterite. Anything that can be called the  
counterculture is only glimpsed in IV. We have the mystics Flip, Vehi  
and Sortilege, we have the eco activists, We have the Zomer aka  
enviro-capitalist, tantric Yoga expert Riggs. and we have Tariq  
Khalil the revolutionary whose name implies a direct connection to  
Tariq Ali the brilliant Pakistani leftist intellectual who first  
became famous in the 70s in a debate about the war in Vietnam with  
Henry Kissinger, and we have Doc who is a mix of investigative  
journalist and throwback 50s private eye, who uses pot and acid  
instead of scotch or gin. I don't see a harsh attack, but a condensed  
version of the counterculture spectrum.  I have trouble with the  
absence of anti-war activists and it is a weird hole in the 70s since  
it was personally the main vector of my identification with the idea  
of a counterculture.

The preterite are taken pretty seriously in their suffering:  
Japonica, Glenn Charlock, Hope, Coy,  and in their kindness to one  
another Fritz, Tito, Denis, Jade, Petunia, Doc's folks, Pepe, and in  
the addictions and economic arrangements that constrain their growth  
and empowerment.

I think you have been too swayed by the style and tone to take the  
text seriously.