IVIV (11) 170

[Clément Lévy]

- not groovy. It's contrary to many other passages where characters  
find something groovy. The word was even used in Pynchon's video  
trailer.
Page 174: "It's not 'groovy' to be insane" sez Denis

- "unknown regions of the Golden Fang building": sex and desire  
belong to these parts of the building, as well as of the human  
psyche. But the dentist and his receptionist having sex together is  
quite a cliché (it is "no nonsense"). It could even be mentioned in the

- Golden Fang Procedures Handbook: it makes the organization very  
strict. Why? It could be reference to the way political authorities  
in the USA tried to deal with the hippies. I found this reference and  
comments:

National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. The  
Politics of Protest: Violent Aspects of Protest & Confrontation.  
Executive Order #11412, June 10, 1968.
This is a national report written about the violent aspects of  
protests and confrontation. This report attempts to pinpoint the  
causes of these actions, while at the same time attempting to give  
solutions to this ever-growing problem of the 60-70's. There are  
slight dealings with the hippie community, but the text mostly deals  
with the more volatile political groups of the day. Gives good  
insight as to where the various groups were heading politically and  
allows for speculation on what the true motives of these groups, such  
as the hippies, were. Goes into different areas of protest such as  
student protest, black militarism, and racial protest. By learning of  
the different aspects of the more violent organizations, as well as  
the violent backlash of the authorities, the audience gains a greater  
appreciation for the pacifism of the hippie movement prevalent within  
Woodstock, while at the same time questioning this philosophy as a  
way of accomplishing things politically.

on this website: Reel American History: http://digital.lib.lehigh.edu/ 
trial/reels/films/list/0_33_6

- "a loud, violent chirp": this time, another girl comes into the  
office, but the sound of her arrival contrasts a lot with the "quiet  
but no-nonsense knock at the door"

- Japonica Fenway. Japonica is a species' name, and it is common  
among many plants' names. But a japonica is most of the time a  
Chaenomeles Japonica, as indicated by the Pynchon Wiki
http://inherent-vice.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php? 
title=Plants_of_Inherent_Vice (there's a link to a picture of these  
red flowers)
This plant is also called Japanese quince.

Her name is quite interesting, because it suggests a flat, low and  
wet land (see the Fens in Graham Swift's Waterlands, 1983). But the  
Fen–Wei Graben is a geological denomination of a region in central  
China. It is a depressed block of land but an upwarping region,  
caracterized by its low resistivity layer about 15 km deep in the  
crust (I'm not sure to have understood it properly). Here is my  
source, the proceeding of a great international conference of  
geology, on google books.
http://books.google.com/books?id=qP45KuKMgDsC&pg=PA83&lpg=PA83&dq=fen 
+wei 
+graben&source=bl&ots=MUnJoiwv_S&sig=LQYjx645xDgGCBxPQTJAJdxh3T0&hl=en&e 
i=6KXkSqm6D9Wd4QaXov37AQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CCM 
Q6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=fen%20wei%20graben&f=false
or to put it better:
http://books.google.com/books?id=qP45KuKMgDsC&dq=fen+wei 
+graben&source=gbs_navlinks_s
You'll have to look for the essay by Li Li: A Study of Geoelectrical  
Structure of Crust and Upper Mantle in Mainland China.

Her name also sounds like Petunia Leeway or Shasta's middle name:  
Fay. Many personal names are plants' names in IV, as you read in the  
Pynchon Wiki's page I quoted above.

- Japonica's outfit is quite remarkable. She's sexy, and the quote  
signs around "psychedelic" could mean that this adjective is not  
fully supported by Doc, or the by the narrator. It is similar to the  
"you'd call" (exotic, diagnostically in the preceding pages)
pagoda earrings: another temple in this chapter (after the church  
like building and the wet temple entrance). Shall we go further on  
the feminine connotation of the wet?

- Smile Maintenance: a very caricatural vision of the way dentists  
reshaped everybody's smiles (braces became famous in the 1970's).

Clement