Vineland - Thomas Pynchon

"I'm not gonna forget," Zoyd vowed, "fuck 'em. While we had it, we really had some fun."

"And they never forgave us," Mucho went to the stereo and put on The Best of Sam Cooke, volumes 1 and 2, and they sat together and listened, both of them this time, to the sermon, one they knew and felt their hearts comforted by, though outside spread the lampless wastes, the unseen paybacks, the heartless power of the scabland garrison state the green free America of their childhoods even then was turning into.

Penguin Books, 1991

So let's see if I get this all straight here, In the mid 60's Zoyd Wheeler and his buddies in Gordita Beach have a psychedelic surf combo named The Corvairs gigging around the Inland Empire. Somewhere near El Paso, on one of their gigs, Zoyd hooks up with Frenesi Gates who is on the lam, kinda sorta, from a turn in a militant anti-establishment hippie gang known as the 24 fps, They were something of a documentary film group who liked to stir up shit on college campuses and film it happening. Frenesi had a major role in turning the formerly uptight buttoned down College of the Surf into its own self contained nation called The People's Republic of Rock and Roll. This came about by the seemingly innocuous introduction of a joint shared between two students, whose eyes were opened at once onto the oppressively fascist Nixonian truth of their USA, and fueled somewhat by popular professor of mathematics, Weed Atman. Frenesi and Weed have a hot affair of sorts going on the side, but unknown to Frenesi's comrades in the 24 fps, Frenesi has been also ensnared by the mesmeric Brock Vond, a federal prosecutor who has made it his mission to eradicate hippies and their drugs permanently from the landscape. Brock Vond seems to have the inexhaustible backings of the government behind him, giving him free reign to use whatever means needed to accomplish his mission. Frenisi, thanks to Brock's sexual manipulation, is something of a double agent until she goes off the grid and runs into Zoyd.

But our pal Zoyd's got his own issues. He's been set up by DEA federale Hector Zuniga to turn stoolie on Gordita Beach's marijuana supplier. Zoyd and Frenesi tangle briefly before she's swept into hiding by Brock Vonn. Frenesi's pals in the 24 fps include DL Chastain, who herself is a female ninja (yes, a lot like Uma Thurman's character in Kill Bill) who is later lured into a bizarre assassination attempt on Brock Vond in Japan by Ralph Wayvone, a sort of nefarious millionaire with connections to the underworld. DL Chastain will pose as a Japanese schoolgirl prostitute and seduce Brock Vond into a compromising situation wherein she'll deliver a Vibrating Palm death-blow on him, from which he'll live approximately one year before dropping dead of a heart attack. Brock Vond gets hip to Wayvone's scheme to kill him and arranges a substitute patsy to meet DL Chastain in her slutty little schoolgirl disguise by kidnapping Takeshi Fumimota and sending him into The Gentlemen's Tits and Ass Club in his stead. Before getting kidnapped by Brock and his agents, Takeshi has his hands full investigating the total destruction of Chipco by what appears to be a giant dinosaur-like taloned footprint, not unlike Japan's favorite celluloid monster Gojira! But instead, Takeshi and DL tangle and Takeshi gets laid the Vibrating Palm on him. Wayvone, realizing Brock has outsmarted him, whisks DL back to the U.S. Takeshi follows her, after discovering he's got about a year to live thanks to the deadly Vibrating Palm that DL laid upon him.

Where does this leave Zoyd? Remember Zoyd? He's the sap in the surfadelic combo who had the bad luck to fall in love with Frenesi Gates, who has left him high and dry with a daughter named Prairie before disappearing. Brock Vond eventually hooks up with Zoyd and frames him with a shit-ton of marijuana. Or was it Hector Zuniga who framed Zoyd? Shit, now I can't remember myself, and I just read the damn book about a week ago! Anyway, Zoyd's looking at something like 900 years in prison if he doesn't come clean on Frenesi's whereabouts. 'Course he doesn't know, and neither does anyone else.

Now dig, all this is told in retrospect of sorts through various characters in the present day, in this case 1984 in Reagan's America. It's come to a head because Zoyd has been paid a visit from Hector Zuniga again after all these years since the wild and crazy hippie 60's. Now Zoyd is older, mellower, sadder and living on mental disability checks. Only thing is, to keep these checks coming in Zoyd has to perform some kind of public act of insanity once a year, like jumping through a plate-glass window for TV cameras. Hector reappears in Zoyd's life, looking for Frenesi Gates, with word of warning that Brock Vond is back on the scene. But Hector is now addicted to his own narcotic, The Tube, meaning that one-eyed monster sitting in household living rooms across the U.S.A. Hector quotes Star Trek, Gilligan's Island and The Brady Bunch indiscriminately as he carries out some quest to film a documentary on the drug-fueled 60's produced by one Sid Liftoff and which he hopes he can get Frenesi Gates to star in. The Tube is this ubiquitous force that's got Frenesi masturbating to Ponch and Jon in CHiPs as though "some Cosmic Fascist had spliced in a DNA sequence requiring this form of seduction and initiation into the dark joys of social control."

This all goes to show that Vineland is Pynchon somewhere between the grandiose chaos of Gravity's Rainbow and the loopiness of Inherent Vice. The connection is Gordita Beach, where Doc Sportello himself probably caught a few gigs of The Corvairs with Shasta Fay at his side. Mucho Maas from The Crying of Lot 49 makes a cameo as well. I think that V. had a guy jumping through plate-glass window for kicks but I can't be sure. I can't be sure of anything anymore...

There is a lot in Vineland to admire. The plot is Pynchonesque, obviously, but never too hard to follow. There are dense slabs of prose that mine the craziness and contradictions of America and freedom and growing old and love and loss and dreams. There are puns and songs and movies and TV, and there is warmth and soul throughout. I'd recommend it.

The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon

She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well tended crop from the dull brown earth; and she thought of the time she'd opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. 

Bantam Books 12th Printing

This is the second reading of Thomas Pynchon's novel The Crying of Lot 49 for me. The first time was in college almost 30 years ago when I was too busy to let all of the novels I was reading at the time really make an impact. It's one of those English major reads that students had to go through to get their degrees. It's also one of Pynchon's most accessible novels, and my recommendation for the Pynchon novel newcomers should start with.

Consider this before starting though. You know how it is when you're going along through day to day life, then you happen to notice that odd little thing that's out of place, whatever it is, that's been there the whole time but you've just never paid any attention to it before? You think about it, remark upon it to your friends, and then shrug it off. But then you see it again in another part of the city, or hear it mentioned in a coffee shop, and soon you see the trail of this very thing everywhere, that it's infected everything around you in a subtle way, daring you to pursue it, to pull the threads of meaning loose from it, but the more you try, the vaster it becomes until...

The novel follows a suburban wife Oedipa Maas after she's named co-executor of her former lover Pierce Inverarity's vast estate. Oedipa is now married to a DJ named Wendell (Mucho) Maas. Oedipa faces her duties with vague consternation and arrives in San Narciso at a roadside motel named Echo Courts which lies under the tall highway sign featuring a nymphet (yes, you're supposed to think of Lolita when seeing the term nymphet). There she meets Metzger, lawyer and co-executor who will be working with her on Inverarity's vast estate. Metzger has a deep understanding of all the property and holdings and investments that Pierce Inverarity controlled. He's also a former child actor and so good-looking that within hours both he and Oedipa are bumping fuzzies after after an exploding can of hair spray wreaks havoc in her motel room which resulted from a stripping game made up of a bet on the ending of one of Metzger's old movies that just happens to be playing on the TV. You got all that? Because that's pretty much the kind of looping zaniness you're going to deal with when reading this, or any other novel by Pynchon. It's a love hate, patience or not, kind of thing with Pynchon's plots. But since this novel clocks in at only 138 pages, you can take it. And doing so you'll get rewarded with some really cool conspiracy stuff involving an underground mail system, a Jacobean play of murder and revenge, a sinister entity known as Tristero, a muted post horn symbol showing up in the most bizarre places, heaping doses of paranoia, LSD, a Nazi disguised as a therapist, and a Beatleesque band of pot smoking mop-tops and their sexy teenage girlfriends. You also get mythic men in black, entropy, gay bars, a play within a novel, nocturnal wanderings into the seedy side of San Francisco, a used bookstore that holds more clues to a vast network of a society off the grid, or a big fat grand fucking hoax played on our heroine Oedipa as she follows a thread of conspiracy that seems everywhere around her. In addition, the short novel is rife with references to TV shows, songs, and mores of the 60's.

In a short novel like this, giving much of the plot away would ruin the fun for anyone who may be interested in reading it. Is it all a farce? Or is it something far more dark and sinister going on. The last paragraph of the novel could be interpreted in different ways. Forget about Gravity's Rainbow, or V. or even Inherent Vice. Yeah, those books get the spotlight from the intelligentsia but let's face it, a vast majority of people who start Gravity's Rainbow will never finish it. Pick up The Crying of Lot 49 instead and you'll get Pynchon's themes without having to tax the noodle, and your patience.

Sunday Morning Folk: Richard & Mimi Farina

Richard and Mimi Farina put out two good albums on Vanguard Records with some pretty interesting music. I'm not the biggest fan of folk music around, but sometimes I get in the mood for it. This song "Reno Nevada" can be found on their album Celebrations for a Grey Day, released in 1965.

Richard Farina is most well known today for his novel Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me published in 1966. Mimi Farina was Joan Baez's younger sister. The two married in 1963. Farina was good friends with writer Thomas Pynchon, who dedicated his novel Gravity's Rainbow to Farina. Farina died at the age of 29 in a motorcycle accident just after the release of his only novel.

I found both albums by Richard and Mimi Farina for inexpensive prices at a used record store. I would imagine anyone looking to pick them up would find them easily enough. Farina's novel is also still in print and is worth reading as a sort of bridge between the Beats of the 1950's and the Hippies of the 1960's.

RocketPorn

Gravity's Rainbow byThomas Pynchon - 1973 - Bantam

I’m in 10^th grade and see the book on the shelf at Maida’s Used Books, thick paperback, golden spine, name and author. I pull it out and look at the back cover. "Fantastic", "Dazzling", "Brilliant", "Tremendous", but nothing telling me what the book is about. The first line is a grabber, okay, but what’s the book about? I open it randomly and read a passage where a guy squeezes a certain Jessica Swanlake through her damp knickers and think, okay I can maybe get into this, and take the book home with me.

Later I realize, somewhat to my consternation, that there is a whole lot of white noise to wade through to get to that babe with her damp knickers, and I’m not sure I want to bother. I put the book down and decide to read NORTH DALLAS FORTY instead. But then my English teacher, Mr. Patterson, unkempt in his wrinkled sport coat and long black hair, sees GR among my jumble of textbooks. “Kurt! You’re reading that book? Heh heh heh…”

“I guess so,” I tell him. “I just started it. What’s it about anyway.”

Patterson gives me a look like something made it worthwhile to come in that day and face his bored and listless students after all.  “Just read it,” he says with his Hollywood smirk.

Years later, I’m TDY in Germany and drinking in a discotheque in Bremerhaven, checking out a woman with a shaved head at the bar near me. I’ve been separated from my comrades and I’m alone in this place with music something a lot like Kraftwerk loud all around me before Der Schprokets brought them to Saturday nights in America, and much preferable to Laura Branigan’s “Self Control” that is heard multiple times at every club we go to. I glance at the woman with the shaved head, fuzzily aware that I can’t do anything about it without knowing more than a few words in German, to the shame of my ancestors, when a pretty young woman approaches me and asks if I’m American. Immediately my defenses are heightened, envisioning a drunken American rolled of his money in an alleyway because of the lure of a Cute German Girl but I know that denying it would be futile. “Yeah, I’m American,” I tell her. “It’s that obvious?”

The Cute German Girl invites me to join her and her friends, one of whom is also an American. I like the way her dark hair sweeps down her shoulders and her dusky eyes (no, not really Bette Davis Eyes but sleepless and slatternly and she could be a spy regardless) and follow her. Her American friend is some hipster from New York, and we talk about American shit as I think of ways I could make it with the Cute German Girl next to me. Hours pass and we part the night as best friends who will never meet again and saddened by the loss of the Cute German Girl to the night I hail a cab and say “Luftwaffe, bitte...” The cabbie nods his head and says “Drei Funf” (with Umlauts) and we roll.

Back in the barracks I pull GR out of my duffle and try reading, but can’t concentrate while thinking of the Cute German Girl and her dusky eyes, Kraftwerk, bald chicks, beer, nocturnal emissions at La Club Femina and the touch of a dewy female thigh under the spinning lights as “Self Control” spins yet again, and I barely make to the porcelain plates for toilets to spew foamy beer, bratwurst and Pommes Frites mit Mayo against it, splashing tiles and porcelain like that cow in Texas pissing on a flat rock. I wipe my mouth and flush twice because it’s a long way to England and stagger back to my bunk, dreaming about the Cute German Girl kissing me goodbye beside the incomprehensible graffiti on the wall at my back before turning her dusky eyes away, and my book falls on the floor next to my bunk, ignored and rejected once again...

At FSU my senior year in English and my professor is the same Douglas Fowler who wrote The Guide to Gravity’s Rainbow and I’m thinking, shit, I’ve got to read GR after all, and write a 5000 word essay on it and be tested on it and I don’t think he’s going to give a tinker’s damn about my Jessica Swanlake fantasies spun out into reveries about Cute German Girls with dusky eyes and the back of my trench coat stenciled with graffiti in reverse, but it turns out that we’ll be reading THE CRYING OF LOT 49 instead. Not a problem, I can put that baby down in an afternoon and still be ready for beer and wings at Bullwinkles where maybe I’ll catch that little blond twist from my Chaucer class into a moonlight dance.

So years go by, not measured in coffee spoons but in cigarette butts and midnight stints as a hotel dick in Scottsdale, psychotic girlfriends, corporate whiners, layoffs, spreadsheets, year-end closes, 3AM airports and dirty buses and trips to Germany, and that goddamn book still sits on the shelf when I finally take it down one afternoon after turning 50 and notice my scrawl at age 16 still there on the first page. The one I wrote so long ago in anticipation of a good dirty read about WACs with wet knickers.

I finish GR at last, this thick friend now faded and furry from 35 years of neglected companionship, but waiting for me regardless from bookshelves to duffle bags, smelling the beer and the bongs and the discount perfumed bedsheets and dirty laundry and burnt mac ‘n cheese and desperation, elation, failure and success, it waited for consummation at last, and I wonder what my old high school English teacher, Mr. Patterson, would say now that his once greasy black hair has turned snow white with his black eyes peering out beneath albino caterpillars. He’d probably give me that Jack Nicholson sneer he does so well and say “Jesus, Kurt. What took you so long?”