IV Random thoughts

[Joseph Tracy]

Try first learning to read English, and try then not to forget what you just read. What I said was " Another area about which I knew little...." Not" about which  I know 'a' little.  I am surprised because you are noramlly so astute, and such a charmer . Do you act like this in public too?
On May 17, 2013, at 8:14 PM, Al Liszt wrote:

> you know a little? shit. The little you know is what I forgot today. Get lost with your cosmic debris.
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> 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.
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> 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.
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>  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.
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> 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.
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> On May 17, 2013, at 10:39 AM, rich wrote:
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> > 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.
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> > 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)
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> > 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.
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> > 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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