More Vineland

[J Tracy]

So as I mentioned, I am re-reading Vineland, and finding details in the back stories that are drawing my interest and attention more this time around. I am glad there are others reading Vineland and commenting  and hope disagreements can be respectful and enjoyable. I already wrote a bit about my overall take on the novel and its thematic continuity with other P novels and will be adding some more specific thoughts and areas of focus as I read and ponder. 

Zoyd- 1) has to renew his qualifications as disabled every year and does so with certain flair by acts of defenestration, this is humiliating but we find he is doing so to protect an agreement by which he survives in obscurity  removing him and his daughter from a past with LA cops and Federal agents. The defenestration feels loaded to this reader. He is both breaking the law and at the same time limiting the ability of the agents of law to completely bury him. He was more someone who was thrown out of his place in society than someone who broke away. He married a beautiful revolutionary  from a family of lefties who got turned into an agent of  FBI  Cointelpro type program and appears to have made a profoundly miserable choice for herself and those ho actually care for her. Zoyd got caught in the crossfire.
  I find Zoyd both unimpressive and sympathetic. He has many friends, knows his small community, loves his daughter, is a versatile survivor-band keyboardist, carpenter, crayfish hunter,  and has a sharp sense of humor. His deep sadness over his lost love is not being handled in a good way, alcoholism, shallow sexuality, pot, un handled debts.  He has a powerful internal feistiness against authoritarianism though he is no idealist, no revolutionary  and would rather avoid trouble. It is this quality that oddly distinguishes him from Frenesi’s more self-serving connection to anti fascist rebellion.

Suddenly his worst fears have come to town with hectoring Hector Zuniga( our introduction to the role of TV and cop shows in US culture),  possibly Frenesi, and Brock Vond.  He is not passive in the face of this, He sends his teenage daughter away with a rock band leader to a gig he helped set up. , giving her a card from the strange figure of Takeshi, and moves out of his house. 

Kahuna Airlines  and Japan Airlines  flight 1628 -  Pynchon loves the weird, the intersection of  the real strange and the fictional/mythical strange, probing at how our imaginations and possible other dimensions interact with what is deemed normal and real. One of the telling and rich threads of Vineland involves the character Takeshi Fumimota  whose name appears over 130 times  ( I lost count)  He first appears during an act of air piracy on Kahuna airlines where he escapes the attention of the pirates by sitting in with Zoyd on uke ( P has a thing for ukulelesTraverse as Z entertains passengers with his keyboard. This was written in the 80s and there was an interesting incident over Alaska  where the crew of a transport plane of Japan airlines saw 3 ufo type crafts near their 747 . It was rare in that the unknown crafts were tracked on radar and the description by the pilot and crew was detailed. Seems a likely candidate as inspiration for this humorous and slightly ominous scene. Hectors card is important to the plot.

OK enough for today. Plenty of fun stuff in these opening doings along with the sad story of Zoyd’s  last try to contact Frenesi.  Next up  a look at The Traverse and Becker Families the Wobblies and Sasha.