JFK

[Robin Landseadel]

On Nov 23, 2009, at 7:56 AM, Carvill, John wrote:

> I'm not sure I agree with this. Just because I don't come up with  
> 'an alternative reading' to yours, doesn't forbid me from  
> disagreeing with your reading, does it?

Of course not, but I would hope that swinging to the stands would  
result in others attempting to overtop my efforts, you know—keep up  
with the discussion, throw out new ideas, see if anybody else salutes.  
In the particular case of Terrance I was witnessing "anti" poses more  
than anything else and found the connections to Bartlby & co. loose at  
best. "Inherent Vice" as a noir concept eats up all of L.A. and using  
stuff coming out of L.A., 1970 seems like a more appropriate vantage  
point. So if  I stupidly stumble over the rotting corpse-in-life  
Howard Hughes and his empire of smack and death, then what am I  
supposed to do, ignore the corpse?

> Are you saying you'd never given MKULTRA a second thought before?

I never gave MKULTRA a first thought before. I was more interested in  
the Heretical, Gnostic, Black Magick and Theater-of Cruelty aspects of  
the book, not the CIA/LSD stuff. This previous reading, with a  
discussion of probable locations, Pynchon's history at Boeing and what  
was going on at those places in the summer of '64 and they spelled  
"MKULTRA." This is very much as I've just done with 7000 Romaine. We  
all know what Bigfoot is pointing to.

> Hmmm. I dunno if I'd really call IV a 'darker' book than COL49. IV  
> doesn't seem that dark to me. Sure, it points to all sorts of  
> historical, political, and societal matters which can be viewed as  
> pretty bleak, as is the nature of these things. But the book itself  
> is quite light-hearted, I reckon. Shot through with dark humour,  
> yes, but not overall what you could call a negative or 'dark' piece  
> of work.

The Crying of Lot 49 ain't exactly no Swiss Picnic but we end on a  
moment of expectation of revelation. At the end of Inherent Vice Doc  
hopes he'll see "something else this time, somehow, to be there  
instead." And for me that comes with the necessary "knowing full well  
that things aren't about to change"—something Doc, more or less, is  
telling us from the outset. Doc is cynical, "wised up", like Philip  
Marlowe or Michael Corleone—he's knows the system's rigged, he's just  
been witness to the pulleys and ropes and knocked off two of the  
operators. Yeah, I know there's the Firesign Theater flavor of the  
vocal impersonations and general mise en scène of Inherent Vice, and I  
dig that like an old soul record but the longer I read the book—and  
I've probably been reading it too long—the sadder it all seems.