V-2nd - Chapter 13 - catch-up

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Technically, we're supposed to be covering chapter thirteen now, but Mark's zooming ahead with Chapter 14 (which Robin, I think, still plans to host on the 24th).  But I, wallowing in depression due to an apparent release of ice-nine, only just finished Chapter 13.  Dave Monroe, meanwhile, is flashing back to Chapter 4.  It's all good.  We can all talk about anything we want at any time, after all.  Anarchism rules!

Some stray thoughts on 13:

1.  Part I is tedious.  Profane doesn't want to commit to Rachel, even though she loves him and he probably loves her.  Yawn.  And a long-winded flashback to a time in the Navy when Profane indirectly saved Pig Bodine from getting his junk fried by radio waves.  Pig is probably based on a Navy shipmate of Pynchon's whose antics must have relieved the tedium at the time, and whom Pynchon, increasingly grudgingly as he matured, one might guess, committed himself to celebrating in his books (don't think he appeared in Inherent Vice - maybe the reign of Pig has ended), in  a Kilroy-Was-Here kind of spirit.

2.  Speaking of Inherent Vice, how far we've come from from Benny's "I smoked pot" confession in Part II, to Doc Sportello's non-stop toking.  On the one hand, it's the difference between white boys in 1959 and 1969/70.  But it's also the difference between Pynchon in 1959 and Pynchon in 2009.  At the same time, though, one gets the feeling that Pynchon's views on the topic have come full circle by 2009.

Rachel seems to be speaking for young Pynchon when she tells Benny that smoking pot makes him a phony, even if he smoked only once, for the experience.  Speaking of the pot-dabbling Whole Sick Crew hipsters:  "That Crew does not live, it experiences.  It does not create, it talks about people who do."  One can guess that Pynchon ran off, first to the Boeing job in Seattle, then to Manhattan Beach, desperately looking for some sort of authenticity after whatever minimal exposure he had to the self-conscious, self-alienating hipsters of NYC.

Living and toking on the beach in '69 amidst hippies, acid freaks and flower children may have given Pynchon the inspiration to write GR, but his 2009 self, looking back on the times via Inherent Vice, seems a little sadder and wiser.  Were Doc Sportello's friends any more immersed in reality than the Crew?  In their dazed condition, weren't they sitting ducks for COINTELPRO, the mafia, the "Me Decade"?  Eventually, Pynchon crawled back to NY. The yo-yo string is a state of mind.

3.  The list of foods Benny encounters on his Jewish mother's table is every bit as improbable (who'd leave all that stuff unrefrigerated?) as the menu of the Banana Breakfast in GR, and must be a precursor to that scene.  Food is love, food is comfort, food (like Malta) is the cradle of life.

4.  We get handed some overt snippets of information that Stencil's dug up about V.: stealing an airplane, crippled in Corfu, giving tango lessons in Rotterdam, etc.  Scenes that mostly don't make it into the book, although one of them is coming right up in Chapter 14 - taking time out for love in 1913.  It's odd that the death of the priest in Malta sequence precedes the 1913 love sequence.  Most of the other episodes in V.'s life seem to be told in order.  HArd to see what advantage Pynchon gets from this.

5.  Benny conjures up his own image of V., one Violet who gives willingly, a woman who springs into existence from the inanimate world of the electronic resistor.  On a side note, I learned that mnemonic as an apprentice electrician.  It's alive and well.

Laura