Inherent Vice

I finished Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice last night and enjoyed the book thoroughly. I read his Crying of Lot 49 last year and found this book, as most did, more accessible and funnier. Much like Lot 49, the plot is intricate with many characters and all of it groped at through a marijuana/acid/heroin style California fog during the transition from the free love hippie dippie 60’s to the not so much free love hippie dippie 70’s. Is this book about the naivety of the 60’s?, is this book about the end of 60’s innocence and altruism?, with a prelude to a more corrupt, cynical, post baby boomer “who has the most toys wins” as George Carlin put it, 70’s-80’s-90’s tricade?, is this book about the fine line between reality and drug fueled reality a la Descartes?, or is this book skin deep and just a detective romp set among drugs and sex and cops and…wait for it…vice?     

I would love to see the movie version directed by Paul Thomas Anderson but with two small children and babysitting rates tantamount to supermodel rates, I may have to wait to rent it but we’ll see.

I was listening to Marc Maron’s WTF podcast yesterday and his guest was Paul Thomas Anderson and he was very engaging, funny, and very everyman, if you will, cursing and talking about his Dad getting drunk and dealing with his kids. One interesting thing I learned is that he was a student in a class of David Foster Wallace. Also, both he and Marc Maron enjoyed Don Delillo’s White Noise, which I read just before Crying of Lot 49 in a postmodern lit frenzy.

In talking about his work Anderson posed the question “What is the difference between ambition and survival?” Not the finest line but a line nonetheless. I might start that ambition won’t initiate the fight or flight response but survival, yeah that’ll kick the ole fight or flight into gear. Not to say ambition can’t feel that way. Isn’t that what Bigfoot has and Doc Sportello lacks in Vice? Maybe ambition IS a vice? 

Random(ness)

Thinking about the randomness of things right about now. Here is what happened.

I think I went to ‘I write like’ and pasted in my prose and it spat back “David Foster Wallace.”

I think I had heard the name somewhere but couldn’t recall the context.

I went to the library and took out his novel The Broom of The System and loved it. I loved the humor and I loved the stories within the stories, and the references to philosophy, especially the tale of the barber who shaves himself. I loved this because I translated that during my undergraduate symbolic logic class. I think it goes like this:

There is a small town and in this town every man is shaved by the barber. So I think the sentence to translate in class was something like for the barber shaves every man who doesn’t shave himself. The problem, or question, based on the sentence (as Bertrand Russell so brilliantly pointed out) is who shaves the barber?

I think I did some research and discovered that Wallace studied philosophy and English during his undergrad and actually wrote The Broom of The System during his undergrad. I also learned that Wallace killed himself and suffered from depression.

That Christmas, I got a kindle. The first book I wanted on the kindle was, wait for it…Infinite Jest. I loved it. It went nowhere and there was no closure and I didn’t care. The intelligence, the depth of ideas, the pain conveyed in addiction was like nothing I’d ever read. Or will read, I think.

This set off a bevy of reading I had not done since my undergraduate days. 

I lost my job at one college and got a job at another college as an online advisor. At this new college I decided to look at some of the online English course offerings and read the books. I started off with American Lit since 1945. This put me in touch with Vonnegut, In Country, White Noise, The Crying of Lot 49, On the Road, and Everything Is Illuminated to name a few. From here I moved on to Madness in Lit which put me in touch with Catch 22, Breakfast of Champions, Foucault, Girl Interrupted and…wait for it…back to David Foster Wallace. 

I am currently reading Every Love Story is a Ghost Story by D.T. Max and am riveted. Reading about his childhood and especially his undergrad at Amherst has me thinking about my intellectual past and future. I revel in the fact that he really liked The Crying of Lot 49 and White Noise. And it also has me thinking about madness. I am eager to learn what “tripped” things for Wallace and if his genius made things too easy. Or was it “simply” depression? If this is the case, isn’t it just random, random that some people suffer from depression while others don’t despite similar circumstances? What randomness awaits me?