IVIV Doc goes to find Wolfmann (may include some Spoilers)

[Robin Landseadel]

On Sep 1, 2009, at 7:42 AM, John Carvill wrote:

> When it comes down to it, quite a few of the principal characters
> are very much in the grey zone, aren't they?

Things are probably grayer in Inherent Vice than in any other Pynchon  
novel. Frankly, I think that's great and very much in keeping with the  
spirit of noir. Bigfoot may be some kind of enforcer from hell—Walter  
Sobchak now has a license to Kill ! ! ! —but if you look on down the  
road apiece, ya just might notice that Bigfoot notices that Doc may be  
stoned all the time, but he's still no idiot. Bigfoot knows that Doc's  
"dumb hippie" act is just an act & as it turns out the cop has  
feelings & quirks & a family—like he's some kind of  fuckin' rounded  
character & all that shit . . .

Come to think of it, Thomas Pynchon is no dumb hippie either. Forty  
years ago, out on the western edge of Manhattan Beach, just a short  
walk from TRW, lived a man who wrote Gravity's Rainbow. A significant  
amount of the anecdotal material concerning the aforementioned author  
circles around the subject of marijuana. And then there's all that  
space devoted to "that useful substance" in just about all of the  
man's books. In Gravity's Rainbow, The Crying of Lot 49 and Against  
the Day the subjects of spying and encryption are in the forefront,  
just like they were for those folks a few blocks from Doc at TRW. Of  
all the places to live in, Pynchon chooses to live in the core of  
everything that ever made you worry about what "They" were up to, but  
were afraid to ask. Pynchon kindly compiles all those worries for you  
in a tight little pamphlet known as Gravity's Rainbow.

And so it goes.

Take note of what TRW [now nominally defunct] was up to in 1970— 
basically creating Google Maps for the CIA way back in the day. Like  
this:

http://tinyurl.com/mf8trm

. . . an "Eye In The Sky" overhead view of Pynchon's old apartment.

That fog that Doc's riding into at the end of the novel is knowing  
what the future was going to look like from his vantage point way back  
in 1970.

And you all know how much the man hates cameras.