Golden Fang

[Dave Monroe]

On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 7:42 PM, Don Antenen <dantenen at yahoo.com> wrote:

> The idea I'm toying with right now, a week out from my first read of IV, is that the Golden Fang is mostly a distraction from what the LAPD is up to.
>
> Reading the book through the lens of 'the Golden Fang doesn't really matter' is sort of interesting, anyway.  That's the fun part of fiction; you can read and reread it so many different ways and make it all 'true'.  Unless you read it the wrong way, of course...


At the heart of all the divergent plots is something called The Golden
Fang. Pynchon keeps its identity mysterious, indeterminate. The Golden
Fang may be a luxury yacht used for drug smuggling, money laundering,
kidnapping and torture; or it could be a holding company used by
dentists in connection with a tax dodge scheme; or possibly a south
Asian heroin cartel, or a funny farm for the rich, or all these
things.

Whatever it is, The Golden Fang has its teeth sunk deep into the era’s
feel-good zeitgeist, and Sportello can sense it’s sucking the country
dry: “Was it possible, that at every gathering—concert, peace rally,
love-in, be-in, and freak-in, here, up North, back East,
wherever—those dark crews had been busy all along, reclaiming the
music, the resistance to power, the sexual desire from epic to
everyday, all they could sweep up, for the ancient forces of greed and
fear?”

http://www.playboy.com/articles/books-thomas-pynchon-inherent-vice/index.html

The Yellow Claw is a 1915 crime novel by Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward,
known better under his pseudonym, Sax Rohmer.

The story features Gaston Max, a Parisian criminal investigator and
mastery of disguise, and his battle with Mr. King, a master criminal
similar to Rohmer's earlier Fu Manchu character.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yellow_Claw

Sax Rohmer, The Yellow Claw (1915)

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2028
http://books.google.com/books?id=uX4OAAAAIAAJ
http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/r/sax-rohmer/yellow-claw.htm
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=2028

The Yellow Claw is a fictional comic book supervillain in the Marvel
Comics universe, created by EC Comics great Al Feldstein and artist
Joe Maneely in Yellow Claw #1 (Oct. 1956) from Atlas Comics, the 1950s
predecessor of Marvel....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Claw ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0907&msg=137408

Sax Rohmer is Pointsman's favorite author in GR.

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0907&msg=137417

Rohmer, Sax (c.1883-1959)

Sax Rohmer, aka Arthur Sarsfield Wade, was an internationally popular
British writer who created the evil genius Fu Manchu, the Chinese
hero-villain of many novels. Dr. Fu Manchu (1913) was the first in the
series of which there were several more over the next 45 years, over
which time Fu Manchu evolved from an entirely self-serving villain
into a dedicated anti-Communist; "great Manichaean saga" 641

http://www.thomaspynchon.com/gravitys-rainbow/alpha/r.html

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0907&msg=137419

Thanks again, János!