IV Random thoughts

[Ian Livingston]

Art is no longer art when it becomes didactic. It becomes teaching--or
preaching--instead. I am always glad for Pynchon's genius at allusion. Just
speaking for myself, of course, I think infrastructure is important, and
that it is much more demanding than superstructure.


On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 8:39 AM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:

> I don't question what you relate, Joseph just that maybe Inherent Vice
> isn't all that informative. All those big issues you mention are barely
> touched on in IV to any degree of in-depthness. IV and to a certain extent
> AtD didn't really teach me anything or pointed to things I as an informed
> person should've been aware of. not to sounds like a jerk but I knew all
> this stuff already. all Pynchon did was lay down the highways and proper
> street signs.
>
>
>
>
>
> On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 11:56 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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>
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