IV Random thoughts

[Al Liszt]

what the fuck are you talking about? What you know about art? Art aint art
my ass. Shit, who taught you about art? Read a little and come back later.


On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 12:33 PM, Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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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