Los Angeles, a mock paradise, is so perversely beautiful and so fundamentally unsatisfying that maybe just about everybody there secretly longs to see it come rattling down. (1974)
It’s uncanny how hard it is to make anyone else truly understand the specific desperation of your individual life but also that there’s almost nothing unique about it and we inevitably spend most of our time communicating exactly this
@mcmansionhell I read this because of your rec! Lovely book. Kept me company during my lonely strolls around the neighborhood I've grown up in and grown tired of
happy 89th birthday to thomas pynchon, the great american writer, whose perceptive, bitter, ecstatic appraisals of the modern world, its movements and personages, have proven extremely important to me. i mean...
“There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”
@tolstoybb I used to work at a Starbucks downtown and then one de la vina. we got decent tips, goleta and iv locations were infamous for no tips, Montecito for baller tips. One of our regulars offered my manager $400 to drive her to the valley for her doctor's appointments
The shooter being a centrist liberal American makes perfect sense. He saw the obvious evils of the administration, but as a centrist liberal he had no ideological framework for fixing it so he did what an American does, take a gun to the problem and see what happens.