IV Random thoughts

[Keith Davis]

Right on, Joseph.


On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 7:24 AM, Markekohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Yeah, P's satire is multi-pronged...but the mystery gets solved in IV and
> the child gets back with
> Its family.
>
> That's the text and that ain't paranoia, negative or positive.
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> On May 17, 2013, at 6:56 AM, Al Liszt <alliszt at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>


-- 
www.innergroovemusic.com
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