Photo by Elaine Glusac
By OZ FRITZ
Special guest blogger
"But the games Joyce played – and the games played by Welles, and M.C. Escher, and Borges, and Pynchon, and a lot of our current post-modernists – while just as cute as Doyle's games, have a serious side, just like cutting-edge science and philosophy, which also have encountered Uncertainty. A Final Answer seems impossible, to post-modern artists ... Ergo, the post-modern artist now offers us, not the Problem Solved, but the Problem as Puzzle." – Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger Vol. III.
Hector Zuñiga, Sylvester the cat to Zoyd's Tweety bird, experiences this great uncertainty with his career as described at the top of page 25. His uncertainty with life gets compared to the labyrinthine Casbah topography. The Casbah describes the old, fortified part of a North African city. I know the Casbah of Tangier, Morocco which proved extremely easy to get lost in with its narrow, winding streets and high walls. We were strongly advised not to enter that area without a guide. In Tangier, multilingual kids with 5 or 6 languages hang around the hotels hoping to get hired as a guide. Casbah architecture makes a good metaphor for Pynchon's writing, in general.
Last week I got some sense of the Vineland locale when I went there to record a Queer Country show in Mendocino. I arrived the day before at the house of their drummer and bassist Reyna Cinnamon Coupe and her partner Cynthia Coupe who generously put me up. Reyna met me at the door and we talked for about an hour about the area before I left to record another show in Fort Bragg. I don't recall how we got there but when she mentioned the bombing of Earth First! activist Judi Bari in 1990 and the apparent collusion of the FBI with said bombing, it started sounding like the same violent and fascist tactics employed by law enforcement in Vineland. With all the humor, satire and parody Pynchon uses in his story it's easy to regard the over-the-top police tactics as fiction, but after hearing about some of the things that went down in that era, I realized this shit really happened; Pynchon isn't making it up. We returned to the subject at a later time.
Reyna herself had been an Earth First! type of activist in a former lifetime engaged in non-violent civil disobedience with the intention to protect the environment from destruction by the thoughtless, careless and destructive tactics of the timber industry. In an interview in The New Settler, issue 68, July 1992, Todd, as they were known at the time, details step by step their protest method of tree sitting and how to go about doing it. He even describes how to monetize climbing trees by collecting seeds for the California Department of Forestry. Cinnamon reports that at the time, "they paid $35 a bushel for Douglas fir seeds, $45 a bushel for incense cedar, $20 for Ponderosa pine, and $45 for Redwood. You can get three or four bushels in an hour." After the bombing, Reyna became Judi Bari's virtual bodyguard for the next few years. Darryl Cherney was in the passenger seat when the bomb exploded, but fortunately had relatively minor injuries. He made a low budget film called Who Bombed Judi Bari which is available on You Tube. Along with Bari, they sued the F.B.I. and the Oakland Police Department for negligence (they didn't conduct an investigation), false arrest, illegal search and seizure, and falsifying evidence. "A predominantly conservative jury awarded Judi's estate and Darryl Cherney $4.4 million dollars in compensatory and punitive damages." Quoted from The Ghost Forest - Racists, Radicals, and Real Estate in the California Redwoods by Greg King.
Though not central to the story, the malfeasance of the logging industry plays in the background in resonance with the war on drugs. The first American edition of Vineland shows a black and white photograph of a massive pile of dead trees. It's the same image used in the introductory post for this group. It was taken by Darius Kinsey known for his photographs of the logging industry. This one shows a logging camp with the title "Crescent Camp Number One." It makes a great visual metaphor for the struggles and battles in Vineland. Trees, in general, play their part in Vineland, especially at the end.
I asked Reyna and Cynthia if they recalled anything about the war on drugs. They said all through the 1980s it was like a war zone. Choppers were constantly flying overhead. The CAMP (Campaign Against Marijuana Production) program as it appears in Vineland was a real thing operated by the California Department of Justice from 1983 - 1996. A multi-agency task force, it comprised one of the largest conglomerates of law enforcement at the time. Now we have Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at the top of the American fascist heap. Coincidentally, Gabriel ICE, a tech billionaire, shows up as the evil and antagonistic character in Pynchon's Bleeding Edge (2013).
The third chapter describes the relationship between government agent Hector Zuñiga and Zoyd starting with when they first met. The cartoon duo Sylvester and Tweety seems an apt comparison. Hector brings various Spanish words and phrases into the novel. According to Christine Wexler, Pynchon's lover at one point, he knew enough Spanish to read in it. Looking at the Spanish spoken by Hector in this chapter, it starts with an exclamation, "Caray" (p. 28) = Wow in English followed shortly by ése = that; next we see "Ay se va" = Oh it's gone; then "¡Ja ja!" = ha ha; finally "¡Madre de Dios! = Mother of God. The Spanish in this chapter reiterates the theme: Wow, that, oh it's gone ha ha Mother of God.
Pynchon's fondness for the letter "v" comes out in this chapter. Van Meter, one of the Corvairs hopes to score from Hector. The latter uses the phrase "Vaseline of youth" later on. My favorite in this week's offering (p.28): "there's gonna be some local person about your age come runnin' up, two fingers in a V, hollerin, 'What's your sign man,?' or singíng 'In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida' note for note.
Two fingers in a V symbolized peace in the 60's. In the 40's Winston Churchill used it to represent V for victory. Some say it also presented a semiotic weapon to counteract the swastika, a symbolism of fascism in Nazi Germany. A well-known story in the music biz holds that the song "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" by Iron Butterfly was originally supposed to have the title and lyrics "In the Garden of Eden" but the singer got too stoned to sing that properly so it became as we know it now. Whether true or not, Bart Simpson used it for a joke on an unsuspecting congregation.
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The bit on p. 25 where Hector plays with his food to sculpt something meaningful only to him recalls a scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. This foretells the UFO scenario coming up, but it also qabalistically connects with Hector giving Zoyd news about his ex-wife Frenesi. I believe this marks the first mention of her in the story.
I'll end with a statement by Hector that can be heard in at least two different ways (p. 30):
"'The Lord, as they call him around my office, created all of us, even you, with free will. I think it's weird you don't even want to find out about her.'" The "her" refers to Frenesi whom they've been discussing, but it can also refer to the Lord in that sentence. This seems another possible link to E.J. Gold who wrote a two person play called Creation Story Verbatim featuring the Lord God Herself and the Archangel Gabriel.
Next week: please read chapter 4, pages 35 - 55.
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