IV Random thoughts

[Al Liszt]

I disagree. First, while it's easy enough to knock down the arguments of
some, perhaps most reviewers because reviewers, most reviewers are not
digging deep into the text, its politics, its humanism...etc., but are
reviewing the novel for those who might or might not pick it up and read
it. There is no conspiracy against including anything "not safely trivial"
and, surely, with the Internet, no "shut up" can be enforced.

In any event, you have it upside down because P's argument is not that
the counter-culture dudes, the Docs and Zoyds, Frenesis and Van
Meters....so on... were so tuned into the conspiracy of power that
oppressed them, but were tuned out, tuned into the Tube, or Drugs, Fucking
and Fucking one another over, following the charismatics, like
Manson...and...if want to get all deep and shit, loved getting fucked by
the Man. The kind of negative paranoia you advocate here, that you extend
to the reviewers of P novels, is satirized in Pynchon works from the shorts
to the last and best novel, AGTD. That kind of paranoia is impotent, it
spreads a contagion of helplessness and surrender, it promotes resignation
and mindless pleasure. The brutal oppression of peoples become a spectator
sport for the paranoid Tube pothead who buddies up with law enforcement,
who turn out to be suffering in a counter-the-counter culture paranoia that
is also infected with and saturated with, media paranoia complacency, but
sometimes, like their pothead buddies,  show or extend compassion.




On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 6:12 AM, Laura Kelber <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:

> Great discussion, Joseph. Really elevates IV in my mind. Don't know if
> Paul Thomas Anderson is up to the task of conveying all the politics. Nor
> does he seem to be capable of churning out some light hippy nostalgic fluff
> (which is fortunate). Many are hoping for Lebowski II, but I can't see him
> going that way. He seems to favor over-the-top psychodrama and light
> mystical flourishes. Not crazy about him, but will rush out and see his
> movie as soon as it's out.
>
> Laura
>
>
> On May 17, 2013, at 2:30 AM, Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> Shit, no Like button.
>
>
> On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 8:56 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>
>> Many reviewers and some listers have majored on a Cheech and Chong,, ha
>> ha dumb stoners playing detective, approach to IV.  Ok, maybe, but the way
>> Sportello unpacks his multilayered investigation of  LA/West Coast/
>> American entry to the  70's cosmos is pretty damn sophisticated and
>> Sportello in some sense represents the intelligence of a generation that
>> may have been smoking some serious shit but saw through the war propaganda,
>> and was correctly skeptical about the Nixon/ Reagan  economics, and Father
>> knows best kill the commies psychology and the whole package of tube-fare
>> anaesthezia  that facilitated the rise of the criminal far right into the
>> center of world power and ended whatever remained of a politically
>>  anti-fascist progressivism in the US. ( I am using fascism here as
>> Mussolini used it to describe an aggressive world seizing union of
>> government and corporate power)
>>
>> I would argue that  the stoner jokes are  a smoke screen for a serious
>> attempt to use what might be called the soft boiled or possibly sunny side
>> up detective genre to look at some of the real criminality of the cultural
>> period it explores. Sportello ends up pointing at some real issues that are
>> with us still. The revival of a  McCarthyist police state, the hollowing
>> and financialization of the economy, a war on drugs run by a government
>> funding its secret police with heroin money, the power of ultra rich
>> capitalists like H Hughes to assassinate and silence opposition, the war to
>> control the internet, the violence against whistleblowers, the flow of
>> wealth to the 1%, the inherent child abuse of much american culture, the
>> omnipresence of porn and pop during a period of supposed cultural
>> conservatism and return to family values. All this and underlying
>> everything, debt, lies and violence.
>>
>> Most reviewers don't talk about these things, not because they are not in
>> the novel, but because most reviewers never talk about anything politically
>>  or socially substantive or potentially abrasive, preferring to stay safely
>> in the domain of  apolitical humanist literary talk. This timidity infects
>> writers too.  Shut up, shut up, don't talk about anything not safely
>> trivial.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
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