Reader's Guide to Vineland

p. 57 "Feel like Mildred Pierce's husband, Bert"   Another movie reference, this time to a 1945 Joan 

Crawford movie, Mildred Pierce, based on James M. Cain's novel. 

p. 58 "ankling"   Variety show-biz usage, meaning to walk out of, or quit. It's very appropriate for Sasha 

with her film-biz background. 

p. 59 "those eyes of blue painted blue, as the Italian oldie goes..."   The oldie, which is "Volare," goes, 

"nel blu, nel pinto di blu," or however it's spelled in Italian. 

p. 59 "on the astral night flights he would make to be near and haunt her as best he knew how..."   As 

Zoyd describes to Prairie (p. 40). A sad, moving rendition of lost love. 

p. 60 "sex fantasy...[or] ex fantasy"    Always ready for a play on words, that Pynchon. 

p. 60 "Book him, Danno..."    Zoyd's suicide fantasy features a Hawaii 5-0 denouement. The Tube forces 

us to look at the real world via its pre-packaged perceptions. (Incidentally, the Hawaii 5-0 theme surfaces at 

least two other places -- including the tune played by Takeshi's electronic Giri card.) 

p. 61 "zoot-suit effect"    Pynchon is still hung up on these baggy zoots, which were radical black/Latino 

fashion statements in the early-mid forties. Read more about 'em in Gravity's Rainbow. 

p. 61 "gig of death"    Typical Pynchonian mysterioso. 

p. 62 "dash-one" = military slang for the user manual. A common element in Pynchon's work is his 

peppering of slang phrases and references stemming, presumably, from his two years in the US Navy.  

p. 65 "Takeshi"    Pynchon is fond of transplanting characters from one novel to another. Takeshi 

Fumimoto is a perfect example. He made his first appearance as a bit player in Gravity's Rainbow, where he 

was one of a pair of wacky kamikaze pilots. His first name is almost surely borrowed from Takashi Shimura, 

the star of Godzilla -- a film referenced in the very same sentence, when Zoyd plays the Godzilla theme music 

to accompany Takeshi's first appearance. (Pynchon seems to have been thinking about this beast for some time: 

There's a boat named Godzilla II in The Crying of Lot 49 -- and the word is that he loves Japanese horror flicks. 

In fact, at one point rumor had it that he was writing a book with Mothra as a major character.) 

 

 

CHAPTER 6 

 

This chapter is very beautifully written. We finally meet Frenesi in present-tense, at home (presumably 

somewhere in Texas or Arizona), with her current husband Flash. There's a flashback to her leaving Vond, and 

some exposition on her subsequent career (and her "specialization" of betraying people she sleeps with.) In a 

complex triple-flashback we learn about Frenesi's early history, then her mom Sasha's Wobbly background, 

then her grandma Eula's involvement in even older left-wing activities. Back to Sasha in San Francisco in WW 

II, then back to Frenesi in Texas/Arizona in the present. Flash says people are disappearing from the computer. 

Frenesi tries to cash her latest government "snitch" check, and discovers that someone has stopped payment. 

  

p. 68 "a pale humid Sun Belt city whose almost-familiar name would soon enough be denied to 

civilian eyes by federal marker pens"   That is, censored in Frenesi's Freedom-of-Information file. This 

marker-pen image recurs later, too. One gets the feeling that Pynchon has, at one time or another, worked with 

such files -- or looked at his own. 

p. 70 "once you get that specialist's code..."   Frenesi has the specialist's code for sexual betrayal. Cold. 

p. 71 "a zombie at her back" = Frenesi's past. Embodied, we shall see later, by the Thanatoid Weed. 

p. 71 "full-auto qualified"    More military usage. Technically, this means qualified in automatic-fire 

weaponry, but the meaning here seems more like: empowered, into her own. 

p. 71-72 "When the sixties were over...a world based on the one and zero of life and death..."      A 

moving section, extremely fine writing, and the first appearance of Pynchon's powerful binary metaphor -- 

which rolls on to the end of the chapter, and indeed, throughout the book. Actually, it first appeared near the end 

of The Crying of Lot 49: "For it was now like walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeros and 

ones twinned above.... Ones and Zeros. So did the couples arrange themselves...[for example,] either an 

accommodation reached...with the Angel of Death, or only death and the daily, tedious preparations for it. 

Another mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none." 

p. 75 "all over the jukeboxes..."    Pynchon makes a rare departure from his usual devil-may-care style to 

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explain one of his weird names. Frenesi's parents named her after the popular Artie Shaw swing tune.  

p. 75 "Crocker 'Bud' Scantling"    An appropriate name for a logging goon, since a scantling is, among 

other things, a small wooden beam, or a small timber. As Pynchon tells the tale, Scantling was hired by "big 

timber" (the Employers Association), to help eradicate the "timber beast" (the IWW). Scantling's first name may 

be a reference to Charles Crocker, a 19th Century California tycoon who made a fortune building the Union 

Pacific Railroad.  

p. 75 "the Employer's Association" of the State of Washington was the anti-wobbly arm of the Lumber 

Trust. In April, 1918, its hired thugs raided the IWW headquarters in Centralia, Washington -- leading, 

inevitably, to yet another massacre in Centralia during the Armistice Day parade, November 11, 1919.  

p. 75 "...a local attorney for the damned, sure no George Vandeveer..."   George F. Vanderveer (either 

Pynchon, his editor, or his typesetter has misspelled the name) was a prominent Seattle attorney in the 'teens, 

popularly known as "counsel for the damned." In 1917 Vanderveer successfully defended IWW members in the 

legal free-for-all following a series of violent confrontations in Washington state in which Wobblies were 

slugged, kidnapped, shot, hanged, tarred and feathered, driven out of town -- and, when all else failed, jailed 

and charged with treason for endangering the war effort. 

Subsequently Vanderveer became chief counsel for the IWW, and in 1918 headed the defense of 101 

Wobblies against bogus charges of sabotage, and conspiracy to obstruct the war. The trial lasted five months; it 

was the longest criminal trial ever held in the United States to that date. Despite Vanderveer's best efforts, all 

101 defendants were found guilty, and given long sentences by Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis (later the first 

Commissioner of Baseball). This was the beginning of the end for the IWW, although it lingered long enough to 

contribute to the events described in this chapter, and remained technically active well into the sixties. 

p. 76 "Wobblies, sneered at by property owners..."   Wobblies = members of the IWW, the International 

Workers of the World. And definitely preterite. 

p. 76 "bindlestiff life"    Hobolike. Bindle = bundle, usually a hobo's clothes and stuff, rolled up in bedroll. 

Hence, "Bindlestiff" = hobo, a stiff with a bindle, but sometimes a thief who will stiff you of your bindle. 

p. 76 "One Big Union"    Often confused with the IWW, this was actually an earlier labor movement that 

led to the formation of the IWW. First seen around the turn of the century, it was supposed to be organized 

along industrial, rather than trade lines. The Lumber Trust, which controlled the authorities in the area, called 

this movement "The Timber Beast," and did its best to eradicate it. Nonetheless, in the early 'teens it took hold 

among Northwest loggers, most of whom eventually joined the IWW.  

p. 76 "Joe Hill" (1882 - 1915) was a Swedish emigrant who arrived in the US in 1901, and fought in the 

Mexican revolution before becoming an IWW organizer in California in 1912. A songwriter as well as a soldier 

of fortune, he is credited as the author of many labor union songs, including Casey Jones (The Union Scab), The 

Preacher and the Slave, Rebel Girl, Pie In the Sky When You Die, and many others. In 1915, Hill was framed on 

a murder charge, and executed by firing squad, in Utah. Whether in spite of, or because of, his murder, he went 

on to become a legendary labor hero, inspiring countless thousands of working men and women. Hill's life fully 

justifies his legend.  

p. 76 "piss on through"    As opposed to "pass on through." Nice bit of local/period usage -- unless it's a 

typo. 

p. 76 "the City"    There's only one: San Francisco. Pynchon's flawless idiomatic usage reveals him to have 

spent at least some time in the Bay Area.  

p. 77 "a rip-roaring union town..."    Excellent details of pre-war labor history in San Francisco. 

p. 77 "the General strike of '34"    The surprisingly successful San Francisco General Strike of July, 1934, 

was initiated by Harry Bridges' Longshoremen's Union, along with a number of other unionized maritime 

workers. Jack London wrote about it in his story, "South O' the Slot." Although the authorities eventually 

succeeded in putting it down, some of the strikers' demands were actually met. As a result, "strike fever" spread 

throughout the US, especially in the coal mining, and textile industries, and among agricultural workers. 

Pynchon lists some of the west coast agricultural strikes. 

p. 77 "standing midwatch guard"    Midwatch is a Naval term, probably an abbreviation of "midnight 

watch" since the midwatch (also known as the "balls to four") is the stint between midnight and 4 AM. It's 

followed by the dogwatch (4 AM to 8 AM). 

p. 77 "Tom Mooney"    Thomas J. Mooney was a famous jailed radical, for whom thousands of picket 

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