Where to Start, with Photos!

So there I was, screaming up the 101 on a photographic scavenger hunt. It was a Wednesday, an off day from the j-o-b, and I was out gathering data for a series of philosophical essays about how you can see the issues of America easily, with the right eyes anyway, right here in Los Angeles.

Well, that and getting these first two pictures.

The title of this blog is "Norm and Pat Talk Pynchon", and I know we're going to get all over the place pretty quick. There's a street in Northern LA, Vineland Ave, and after finding it on the map, I made it the last stop on my scavenger hunt.

There are, as of August 2012, seven novels written by Thomas Pynchon, and when suggesting a starter for someone uninitiated, most people suggest his shortest work, a work he himself considers not a novel but rather a short "story with a glandular problem", The Crying of Lot 49. Clocking in at less than 180 pages, Crying... has everything fans know and love: weird scenarios and a labyrinthine plot, and enough beautiful and intricate sentences to start a class.

But, even with it being as short as it is, I still think it's better for a second Pynchon book. The first, and the one I have suggested to people is Vineland. We had a talk about back in '09, Norm, about how this was probably a better starter novel.

Hence the photos.

Jamming up 101, out of downtown, and I realized I'd missed the first opportunity, and was scrambling for the camera. I almost wrecked my shit.

Just kidding. It just sounds better that way.

Vineland was greatly panned by the hardcore Pynchon supporters when it was first published because it didn't live up to their expectations. The last novel that Pynchon had written had been nearly twenty years before, Gravity's Rainbow, and a more haunting and impenetrable novel may not have been written in English since the end of WWII, and to those folks who expected the greatest work ever every time out, this would be disappointing. Not to say that I found it disappointing.

Vineland (1990) is split between the end of the sixties in LA, and the 1984, right before Reagan's reelection. 1969 and 1984. The sixties lifestyle and the ramifications that that lifestyle brought to our heroes in the book.

I realize the cover doesn't shout about the colorful characters and scenarios going on inside. After reading it you get the sens that Pynchon must have had a daughter in between writing two of his hardest novels, Gravity's Rainbow (1973) and the heir apparent to that dense novel, the one the critics had been expecting, Mason & Dixon (1996).

This book's main character, Zoyd Wheeler, jumps through windows in a dress for a living; pre-cogging The Bride, there's a sexy blond kick-ass ninja who rides a motorcycle; a badguy who goes by the name Brock Vond (such an awesome asshole/badguy name); and there's still time for the briefest discussion of a giant lizard footprint having destroyed part of a nuclear plant on the Japanese coast. If you know LA, you'll get it; if you know the rocky northern California coast, you'll get it; even if you know the stormy Oklahoma City autumn evenings, you'll get it.

Plus, you can be on page 200 of this 380-something book and still have barely any idea what's going on...enjoying the shit out of it, but still.

But, Norm, you know all this already. I figured, since we started a Pynchon blog, it would only be fitting to start off with Vineland. This isn't a review, by any means.

If you're not Norm and still reading, and not familiar with Pynchon (uhh, thanks for reading?), this is the book I would say is where you should start.