Robin's research on Pynchon family and Pre Hays Code cinema.

[Robin Landseadel]

Joseph Tracy: “Welcome back to the list Robin.”

Thrilled to be back.
 
JT: “Reading Robin's posts has been , for me, a really intriguing and well directed investigation
of the world of Shadow Ticket. But I felt I was missing something critical. As it turns out
THIS first post on the topic went into my spam folder for some reason and so I missed the
foundational ideas behind his other posts. Wow! Some challenging  research with plenty to
consider. Also a very artful unfolding of the ideas and information covered.”

Thank you. I actually have a very simple principle behind my research over the years, seeing
as that idea goes back at least to our group read of Against the Day back in 2007.
 
   JT: I too was disappointed with Shadow ticket, and to some degree I still am for, I think,
similar reasons.  I did feel there was probably more of a coherent probe, a more directed
satiric target hiding in the shadows and beneath the too noirish dialog, the magic battles
and cheese gags. I felt also that Shadow Ticket is connecting forces that need to be
connected to understand where we have been and where we are. Gangsters and Private law
enforcement are linked to corporate survivors or losers of the crash. Movies as new
american mythology and culture maker are connected to the question of who succeeds in
riding social breakdown to political and economic power. The devils in the details of those
connections is where that coherence might lie. The question for me is still whether it
evokes the massive violence that lies ahead at the end of the story arc, whether there is a
shaking awake kind effect to it all or is it too much Simpson's and not enough Against the
Day.”

Shadow Ticket is more Gravity’s Rainbow than anything else. However, Shadow Ticket is a Pre-
Code movie thru and through, in every conceivable way, thus the (very successful if this is in
fact the standard) “too noirish dialog”, starting the flick off as a classic gangster movie, moving
on to spycraft al-la Hitchcock—didn’t the author have words of encouragement for John
Buchan’s writing in “Slow Learner”?—name-dropped Pre-Code stars, descriptions of scenes as
explicit directions in a film script . . .

Every element of the book is related to the emergence of talkies aligning with the Great
Depression, the Great Depression is the fork in the road that would inevitably lead to WWII.
It’s there, but the specifics are buried deeper here than in any of his other books, as far as I can
recall. And it races by in spite of the density of the data in the text.
 
   JT: “Pynchon has moved the reader into what on the surface is an alternate history. Or is
it? I have long argued that part of the disquieting power of GR is to look at WW2 not as a war
aginst fascism, but as a war between versions of fascism where far too many of the dark
habits of control, police state spying, sick medical experiments, and raw greed-led
theft are fundamental to western empire building. In order to gain personal liberation the
protagonist has to climb out of the sewers of Calvinism, corrupt military hierarchies, false
US self images, and a kind of chemical poisoning of his natural self and also to witness
where these things, taken to their extreme lead in the darkest slave powered war machinery
of the Reich.”
 
I agree that a lot of what goes on in GR are international cartels playing both sides off the
middle to “monetize their assets”, to paraphrase Weird Al. Of course, there’s also a lot of
excuses to quote Rilke and the funniest 22 continuous pages (720, 732, Penguin edition)
that I have ever read, like I said before, this is a very complicated case, Maude. A lot of ins, a lot
of outs. Fortunately, I'm adhering to a pretty strict drug regimen to keep my mind limber.

My sense is that Pynchon’s novels are like the work of Gustav Mahler. They are maximalist,
they want to contain the world, they quote each other, they really are a unified body of work. And
a central aspect of Pynchon’s projected world is family, either by its presence or absence but
particularly its legacy and the history of what happened when the Pynchon
family, once America’s Elect, sitting with the captains of industry, very suddenly and drastically became preterite, April 24, 1931, and because of that, the course of world history shifted onto a
different, and arguably bumpier, track

I watched One Battle After Another Last Night. I can hardly express how much I loved it.     
Some personal background, make of it what you will. My parents were civil rights activists  
in the 1960s, sit-ins, picket lines, union organizing, specifically dealing with “red-lining”
in Southern California. Wound up in jail a number of times. We were told our Uncle ratted
on us as communists, we got "tapped". Parents divorced 1963, remarried “persons of the
colored persuasion” to use a popular euphemism of the time.” Mom went off with a beautiful ex-
cop working on a novel. Dad married a Creole lady from South Central via Shreveport
Louisiana, very smart, college educated, worked for the United Auto Workers. This led to a job
for the Watts Labor Community Action Committee, aka the WLCAC. This was 1966. I’m sure
Pynchon bumped around the office researching “Inside the Mind of Watts”. Mom broke up with
Chuck but kept his last name and decided we were going to call her “Bea” from now on. She
more or less disconnected from us kids and more or less attempted to become a professional
activist or artist or bohemian or something like that and frequently stoned.
 
I understood the character of Pefida, my mom was a variant form, just as Frenesi Gates is
another variant. While Pynchon’s novels contain a lot about counterforces vs. the elect,
the aspect of family legacy is just as important and, for me, offers the clearest path to
understanding what the hell is going on. And, so, my father, who I always underestimated,
takes care of five children of his own (Bea didn’t want to be a baby-maker anymore), has
two more with second wife Ernestine—“Ernie”—divorces Ernie, then marries Phyliss, who
has seven kids but dies prematurely, then remarries Ernie after that. Through it all he becomes
more forgiving and compassionate.

Oh workers can you stand it?
Tell me how you can
Will you be a lousy scab
Or will you be a man?
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?
Tell me, which side are you on?
Which side are you on?

Why am I telling you all this? What’s more important at the end of the day? The cause?
Or the family? That’s the motor of Vineland, the heart and soul. The selling out, the ego
attached to one’s revolutionary “good works” that follows in the wake of following the wrong
path, like Perfida, like Frenesi. The movie miraculously captured the most important
element of the novel, made the story linear, emotionally riveting. It's a fuckin' masterpiece.

So, what I look for are references to Pynchon Family history, like the American Waste Law,
aka Pynchon vs Stearns:

Understanding W.A.S.T.E. - Thomas Pynchon Wiki https://cl49.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Understanding_W.A.S.T.E.

   JT: As Pynchon's novels from recent history show, and post ww2 US wars and technologies
themselves show, these cruel authoritarian habits are an active part of humanity and America,
whatever that is. Do we want to know? to that kind of question Robin quotes ST pg 235
 
  Beyond this, the plaintext rapidly proves elusive. An encryption that cannot, must not, be
broken, allowing Alf only glimpses behind a cloak of dark intention at something on a scale far
beyond trivialities of known politics or history, which one fears if ever correctly deciphered will
yield a secret so grave, so countersacramental, that more than one government will go to any
lengths to obtain and with luck to suppress it. Which will no doubt mean a death sentence for
any poor blighter unlucky to have broken it.
 
It ain't all fiction, and it didn't all start with Trump.
 
Epstein,  Oliver North, Dick Nixon, LBJ, Allan Dulles, Weinstein, Angleton, Kissinger,Beszinski
 
JFK, RFK, MLK, 9-11, Covid, MK ultra, Chemical warfare, war profiteers, Zionist bribery and
violence CIA, NSA, FBI, Abu Graibh, Gaza, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, El Salvador.
........victims in the millions.”

It does bring the Epstein files to mind, don’t it? One tangled skein o’ stars goin’ on there.