Meet the New Boss (Pynchon's THEY or The Firm is Dead)

[Robin Landseadel]

> From: Joseph Tracy :
>
> Shutting up only encourages them. They aren't going to shut up.  On
> and on they talk about the fineness of the silk, so light, such
> beautiful and exquisite patterns, a weave fit for the emperor.

Ok, yeah, I'll bite.

Alice/Terrance—I'm tired of your crap, it's tired.

I get this overheated lambast, doubtless from the soundless depths of  
a state of intoxication approaching blackout, a post that managed to  
spew invective while missing the target by a country mile.

On Aug 26, 2010, at 10:28 AM, alice wellintown wrote:

> If people refuse to "see the obvious", maybe, just maybe, itz cause
> they do see the obvious. Yeah, like maybe people see, maybe even more
> than you give them credit for. So, when you get all sad about it,
> well, itz kinda like them preachers tellin us all that we're gonna end
> up dead. Yeah, we know about that and global warming and we dig Pete
> Seeger's song, now every every every body, even if we don't like his
> ugly sweater and his dying man's voice. We get it man. Itz obvious.
> Right? That most don't want to see the sky or sea just now, let alone,
> be dragged down to the shore to look at the oil and plastic bottles
> all smeared with lizard scum and brown bloggog, don't mean they don't
> care or ain't cool. We know, we ain't busy bein born, we don't need no
> street preacher with fifty pounds of BP stapled to his heart reminding
> us that the end is near. Hell, when P gets on his soap box, like he
> does about technology and the bomb, I wanna stuff his face in an
> Indian shit pile by the tracks where poor tailors dump their mound of
> troubles. Itz America, dude; you got it good, just make us laugh and
> build something beautiful. Poetry is the stuff to drink for people who
> know how to think and who can see the obvious without some patronizing
> preacher quoting from GR chapter and verse.

The "obvious" I was pointing to was Thomas Pynchon's use of marijuana  
and the importance of that subject in the author's work, the high  
frequency of its presence in his novels. That fact that some  
disbelieve/ignore a preponderance of evidence pointing to all this  
seems to be one of those things that always goes boom on the P-List.

When I was speaking of paranoia and Marijuana and Thomas Pynchon I was  
pointing to the little bit of historical record we have concerning the  
man that we have access to right now. I was wondering about the  
historical concordance of the author's citations of "that useful  
substance" and likely levels of access at any given time. Marijuana—as  
major plot McGuffin—is central to both Gravity's Rainbow and Inherent  
Vice, but so far it's marginal in "V."—I just whizzed by a citation of  
"Panamanian Black" in the context of something "ethnic" & "exotic"  
involving Benny just a little before he gets back to street level. I  
suppose weed was more of a literary symbol than a lifestyle when  
Pynchon was writing "V." I recall a mention of  the paucity of product  
at the time in the intro to "Slow Learner." And there is that syndrome  
of certain imbibers of the chronic to become paranoid on the stuff.

Inherent Vice is a "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Stoner" and the  
Artist in question happened to be writing "Gravity's Rainbow."

I find that the author wrote the best critique of "V." you could hope  
to find in the intro to "Slow Learner." The dialog is weak. It's hard  
to be concerned with the fate of any of the characters. It's weird and  
it's different but it really doesn't add up to all that much.

Call Pynchon's novels what you want—you say Romances, I say Magical  
Realist Historical Satire [there's gotta be a truly awful acronym in  
there, somewhere]—whatever. You're looking at stuff that links to New  
England American Fiction centered in the general vicinity of Thomas  
Pynchon's ancestors. I'm looking at more recent stuff that's also in  
the books. What I'm writing about is not related to what you're  
writing about. And I kinda get it—I'm not really gonna "get" "V." till  
I read "The Education of Henry Adams." Ok, but it's not as if you make  
that sound like some tantalizing proposition.

It seems that most of your discourse is devoted to proving that you're  
smarter that the rest of us, often comically failing in the attempt.  
Of course as a man blogging as a fictional character—some sort of a  
Republican cross-dresser with a kink for Ayn Rand—your postings are  
naturally afflicted with the "Unreliable Narrator." syndrome

On the other hand,  "Alice Wellington" would be the perfect Pynchon  
Villain.