ENDLESS SUMMER

Petit décryptage, si tout est signe…..l’illustration de la fameuse couverture de Inherent Vice, qui semble-t-il fait débat, est de l’artiste hawaïen Darshan Zenith. On notera que la boutique devant laquelle est garée la Cadillac, « the endless summer surf shop » est un clin d’œil à la compilation Endless Summer, des Beach Boys, sortie en 1974 (155 semaines dans les charts, 3 millions d’albums vendus). Thomas Pynchon et les Beach Boys ?

« In his March 1977 Playboy article, "Who Is Thomas Pynchon...And Why Did He Take Off With My Wife?", Jules Siegel claims he visited Pynchon in his one-room apartment in Manhattan Beach, California, while on assignment to do an article on Bob Dylan for The Saturday Evening Post, to wit:

"I told him [TRP] about the Dylan assignment. 'You ought to do one on The Beach Boys,' he said. I pretended to ignore that. A year or so later, I was in Los Angeles again, doing a story for the Post on The Beach Boys [ultimately published by Cheetah magazine]. He had forgotten his earlier remark and was no longer interested in them. I took him to my apartment in Laurel Canyon, got him royally loaded and made him lie down on the floor with a speaker at each ear while I played Pet Sounds, their most interesting and least popular record. It was not then fashionable to take The Beach Boys seriously.

"'Ohhhhh," he sighed softly with stunned pleasure after the record was done. 'Now I understand why you are writing a story about them.'"

Then later...

According to the 2006 bio of Brian Wilson, Catch A Wave: The Rise, Fall and Redemption of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson (Peter Ames Carlin, Rodale, 2006), Jules Siegel and Pynchon paid a visit to Brian in Beverly Hills:

When Siegel brought his friend Thomas Pynchon up to the house one night, the famous hipster novelist sat in stunned, unhappy silence while the nervous, stoned pop star — who had dragged him into his then-new Arabian tent to get high — kept kicking over the oil lamp he was trying to light. "Brian was kind of afraid of Pynchon, because he'd heard he was an Eastern intellectual establishment genius," Siegel recalls. "And Pynchon wasn't very articulate. He was gonna sit there and let you talk while he listened. So neither of them really said a word all night long. It was one of the strangest scenes I'd ever seen in my life." (p.103-104). »

Pour en finir avec la couverture, c'est finalement la version bleue plutôt que la rouge du catalogue Penguin qui semble avoir été retenue.