Greil Marcus: IV & "L.A. Women"

[rich]

is Sportello that young? thought he was a bit older than that. I could be
wrong



On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 11:55 AM, Robert Mahnke <rpmahnke at gmail.com> wrote:

> You write that you can hear “L.A. Woman” being played “between every
> other line” of Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 Los Angeles detective novel
> Inherent Vice. Could you talk about why you made the correlation
> between Pynchon’s work and that song?
>
> “L.A. Woman” is recorded in 1970 and comes out in 1971. Inherent Vice
> is set in 1970, just as the Manson trial is about to begin. And
> both—the book explicitly and the song not explicitly—is really
> shadowed by Charles Manson, by the crimes he and his family committed,
> and the specter of more crimes of death and destruction and revenge
> whether for real reasons or completely random, is just hanging over
> Los Angeles and a lot of the country at that moment. And both
> Pynchon’s book and “L.A. Woman” seem to capture both that sense of
> dread and fear, but also a sense of the absurd, the ridiculousness,
> the craziness of that moment too, and to laugh at it. “L.A. Woman” is
> a very funny, loose, free, open piece of music, and Pynchon’s novel is
> hilarious and scary and upsetting and confusing. And its hero is an
> almost 30-year-old private eye named Doc Sportello, and he’s part of
> the atmosphere in the song “L.A. Woman.” He’s the kind of person whose
> radio plays Doors songs. And maybe he’s too cool to be a fan of the
> band. Who knows? That’s not the point. Both Pynchon and The Doors are
> drawing maps of L.A., one in a song and one in a detective story.
>
>
> http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/12/greil-marcus-on-why-the-doors-still-matter/249697/
>
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