IVIV20: Maybe then, 368-369

[rich]

Robin I dig yr insights and yes I can see what yr getting at but yr
descriptions and connections and insights are alot more interesting than the
book itself. some books are less interesting than what people say about
them, at least that's how I feel

mother should know

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_egWfa5WD_Q



On Sat, Feb 6, 2010 at 9:18 AM, Robin Landseadel <
robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:

> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk8_a0eh2O4&feature=related
>
> I humbly offer myself up as the greatest and probably most obnoxious of
> Fanboys on this list and in so doing declare that I'm not anywhere near
> finished with Inherent Vice. Many have declared Inherent Vice to be "Pynchon
> Lite." I offer up "Pynchon Brut," where the text pushes the narrative harder
> and everything's a whole lot less overstuffed with florid descriptions of
> scenery, belabored explanations of obsolete technical terms and machinery,
> bumps in the narrative flow thanks to transformations of the narrator's
> voice [s], randomly placed ellipses . . . . What is going on in Inherent
> Vice is all very much in the tradition that the author is celebrating as
> he's parodying it—good ole' hardboiled noir [sounds like grandma's cookin',
> don't it?] always had a low-down, naturally preterite sound to it. Those
> that are appalled by Pynchon's little bagatelle of a noir exercise uniformly
> bemoan the lack of poetry. I say that the [comparative] lack of poetry makes
> for an interesting stylistic change-up, kinda like when the Beatles played
> at being the  Bonzo Dog Band in "Magical Mystery Tour."
>
> I offer up page 117 of Against the Day as further commentary.
>
>        Their fateful decision to land would immediately embroil them in
>        the byzantine politics of the region, and eventually they would
>        find themselves creeping perilously close to outright violation of
>        the Directives relating to Noninterference and Height
>        Discrepancy, which might easily have brought at official
>        hearing, and perhaps even disfellowshipment from the National
>        Organization. For a detailed account of their subsequent narrow
>        escapes hm the increasingly deranged attentions of the Legion
>        of Gnomes, the unconscionable connivings of a certain
>        international mining cartel, the sensual wickedness pervading
>        the royal court of Chthonica, Princess of Plutonia, and the all-
>        but-irresistible fascination that subterranean monarch would
>        come to Gert, Circe-like, upon the minds of the crew of
>        Inconvenience (Miles, as we have seen, in particular), readers
>        are referred to The Chums of Chance in the Bowels of the Earth
>        —for some reason one of the less appealing of this series,
>        letters having come in from as far away as Tunbridge Wells,
>        England, expressing displeasure, often quite intense, with my
>        harmless little intraterrestial scherzo.
>
>        "If you're not into that whole brevity thing, man . . ."
>
> I realized months ago that the only way to really get anything out of IV
> would be by reading Gravity's Rainbow again. I'm a third of the way through.
> The really shocking scenes continue to shock—completely passed over
> Pudding's little scene over in the D wing, wouldn't you know? I figured
> there would be plenty of parallels—there's that whole "Nick Danger" shtick
> of overlaying Noir conventions on top of current topicks, just like you find
> in every other book by TRP, most notably in Gravity's Rainbow, a book just
> bursting with what the Firesign Theater would later call "Dope Humor of the
> Seventies!!!" Try out this genre exercise: take the total number of pages of
> Gravity's Rainbow, divide by two—it's the passage where Rocketman gets his
> lights knocked by Vaslav Tchitcherine and a chunk of his hash is taken away,
> right smack dab in the middle of the book, wouldn't you know.
>
> What this little community that we're in really needs is a pharmacological
> guide to Thomas Pynchon.
>
> Meanwhile, back at der platz, there's twenty-one trumps in a standard Tarot
> deck, along with the four suits from ace to king and one more card, known as
> "The Fool" that, as noted Tarot expert Thomas Pynchon points out, has no
> assignment in the deck. The twenty-first trump is usually assigned the
> title: "The World." I sense that a possible reading of the twenty-first [and
> final] chapter of Inherent Vice would make one look at how "The World" card
> is scryed in Gravity's Rainbow: what will come to Weissmann is "The World."
> The world that was projected by Weissmann was imprinted upon L.A., in the
> fifties and sixties, notably over in Manhattan Beach & environs. All that
> paranoiac obsession with being spied upon—the hallmark of GR and the one
> thing that separates it from all of Pynchon's later books—was born of the
> author's prescient extrapolation of what was going down at TRW. GR's
> exploration of Gnosticism obviously points in multiple directions. I offer
> up the omniscient & electronic "Eye in the Sky" as one possible
> interpretation/explanation of gnosticism's presence in these novels. In any
> case, that world—that fog that Doc is entering into in chapter twenty-one—is
> the world Weissmann made.
>
>        "The system has no use for souls."
>
>        "Someday everybody's gonna wake up to find they're under
> surveillance they can't escape."
>
> http://tinyurl.com/yk2vnws
>
>
>>
>>
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