IV Random thoughts

[rich]

again I'll say you would not know such things by reading Inherent Vice.


On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 2:16 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> Well it is a short novel after all and to my mind written to be adapted to
> film which a couple of us suggested early in the group read. I think part
> of what P is getting at is that while the Manson story stole the show and
> fed the  Right wing paranoia  and narrative, any deeper investigation of
> the era reveals criminal violence on a far greater scale which the novel
> explores through police abuses, FBI coziness with the Mob, etc.  We now
> have a generation of people who don't remember the bombing in Vietnam and
> Cambodia, don't remember the Church hearings or cointelpro, or the
> questions surrounding the Kennedy murders, but who will recognize that the
> stories and tactics favored by Nixon and Reagan continue today and who
> might, by reading IV, be provoked to question the official history,
> particularly of Ronald Reagan.
>
> Very central to IV is an address in LA where Bigfoot meets Sportello. It
> is the HQ of Hughes Aircraft Co. This and other leads in the story led me
> to  John Meier who worked for Hughes and points to  H Hughes ex-CIA  lawyer
> Robert Maheu  and claims Hughes  and Maheu organized and funded the killing
> of Bobby and probably John Kennedy. I personally do not find this
> improbable and it is certainly informative if true.  But regardless of that
> the role of the extraction, gambling( financial markets)  and aircraft
> industries in US global dominance which HH represents is as potent as the
> IG Farben story in GR.  Part of the point is that beneath the facade of
> economic growth, law and order etc. is a world of violent criminality and
> anyone who gets close to that criminality will be targeted, silenced or
> marginalized.
>
>  If you think of Mickey Wolfman's crisis of reverse cash flow, free
> housing plan vs predatory real-estate speculation as a stand-in for the
> choice between Kennedy/McGovern and Nixon/HH/CIA/J E Hoover, and that as
> soon as Kennedy was dead Hughes hired his campaign manager, you might see
> that P considers this an important period in US History with many
> implications for current events.
>
> Another area about which I knew little was the specific history of racism
> in LA real estate.  A history which is currently being revisited in Police
> racism in LA both against  blacks and latinos and in school
> districting/funding throughout the country.
>
>
>
>
>
> On May 17, 2013, at 10:39 AM, rich 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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