Chapter 1

Please keep these annotations SPOILER-FREE by not revealing information from later pages in the novel.

Title

"Inherent Vice" has a number of meanings. See Inherent Vice Title

Cover

The cover illustration is by Maui artist Darshan Zenith (see his Official site). The piece is called "Eternal Summer," and subtitled, "A 'Retired' Caddy Hearse Greets Daybreak at a Beach Surf Shop." Prints of the painting can be purchased here. The 1959 Cadillac Hearse is parked in front of the "Endless Summer Surf Shop" (namechecking the Beach Boys Greatest Hits collection and Bruce Brown's 1966 surfing documentary!).

More info at Inherent Vice cover analysis

Book jacket description

Pynchon himself wrote the copy to the book jacket description of Against the Day (text here). It is possible that Pynchon did the same for Inherent Vice.

Epigraph

Under the paving-stones, the beach!
"Sous les pavés, la plage" - slogan dating from the 1968 Paris student riots. Wikipedia Literally, it refers to the paving stones thrown at the police. Figuratively, it refers to the ideal life to be found beneath the confines of society.

Dedication

Like Against the Day, Inherent Vice has no dedication. Pynchon dedicated previous novels to friends and family: Mason & Dixon ("For Melanie, and for Jackson"), Vineland ("For my mother and father"), and Gravity's Rainbow ("For Richard Fariña").

Page 1

Country Joe & the Fish T-shirt
A Berkeley-based rock band most widely known for musical protests against the Vietnam War, from 1966 to 1971

Shasta
Shasta is a soft drink brand that reached the peak of its popularity in the 1980s. Wikipedia. Note that Pynchon has named characters after soda before, e.g. Wicks Cherrycoke in Mason & Dixon.

However, more to the point, "Shasta" is name-connected to Mt. Shasta, long believed by some to be where the Lemurians came after Lemuria sunk into the sea. They also believe in the presence of Bigfoot here, as well as wolfmen. See Mt. Shasta and the Lemurian Connection. Located near the northern end of California, Pynchon would likely have been familiar with this mythology.

They stood in the street light through the kitchen window there'd never been much point in putting curtains over and listened to the thumping of the surf from down the hill. Some nights, when the wind was right, you could hear the surf all over town.

Like Vineland, and http://gravitysrainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/Gravity's Rainbow], here a Pynchon book begins with light coming through a window. Also like Vineland, the sentence structure and rhythm is just slightly jarring - that '...in the street light through the kitchen window...' seeming to echo Vineland: "Later than usual one summer morning in 1984, Zoyd Wheeler drifted awake in sunlight through a creeping fig that hung in the window, with a squadron of blue jays stomping around on the roof." In both cases, it's just a little odd that Pynchon doesn't refer to the light 'that shone' through the window. And that creeping fig makes an appearance on page 33 of Inherent Vice.

Page 3

Hancock Park
Just south of Hollywood, and one of the most desirable locations in Los Angeles. Hancock Park was developed by the Hancock family and is named after developer-philanthropist G. Allan Hancock, with profits earned from oil drilling in the former Rancho La Brea, home of the famous tar pits. Wikipedia

Can't Buy Me Love
This well-known Beatles hit has a curious connection with two other Beatles tunes touched on in The Crying of Lot 49.

She Loves You is cited outright and there is the parody title I Want to Kiss Your Feet in reference to I Want to Hold Your Hand. Can't Buy Me Love was recorded on 29 January 1964 at EMI's Pathe Marconi Studios in Paris, France along with the German language version of She Loves You—Sie Liebt Dich, and Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand—the German Language version of I Want to Hold Your Hand. Wikipedia

'fro pick

An "Afro" pick, aka a comb for the Afro hairstyle; this doesn't necessarily mean Doc has an Afro, only that he borrowed one "for protection" as they generally had fairly sharp metal tines.

Page 4

Evelle Younger
Evelle Jansen Younger, District Attorney of Los Angeles County 1964-1971, Attorney General of California from 1971-1979. Wikipedia

Page 5

1959 Cadillac Biarritz
a luxury version of the Eldorado. Wikipedia.

1959 Cadillac Biarritz, Creative Commons licensed photo from here

Page 6

Gordita Beach
This fictional Los Angeles beach town where Doc lives and works is, according to the article "Thomas Pynchon and the South Bay" Pynchon's fictionalized Manhattan Beach where he lived in 1969-1970 (33rd Street)while working on Gravity's Rainbow And in Vineland, Gordita Beach is where Zoyd Wheeler lived "shortly after Reagan was elected governor of California" (on Jan 3, 1967):

Zoyd was living down south then, sharing a house in Gordita Beach with elements of a surf band he’d been playing keyboard in since junior high, the Corvairs, along with friends more and less transient. The house was so old that all of its termite clauses and code violations had been waived, on the theory that the next moderate act of nature would finish it off. But having been put up back during an era of overdesign, it proved to be sturdier than it looked, with its old stucco eaten at to reveal generations of paint jobs in different beach town pastels, corroded by salt and petrochemical fogs that flowed in the summers onshore up the sand slopes, on up past Sepulveda, often across the then undeveloped fields, to wrap the San Diego Freeway too. (p. 22)

• Pynchon owned a '65 Corvair. the car was so light that one he did a wheelie on the freeway for which the cure was putting a 50 pound bag of cement in the truck which was in the front of this rear wheel drive car-CW?

The Corvairs surf band figures in Inherent Vice, as well.

Tree Section
Section of Manhattan Beach west of Sepulveda Blvd, filled with family homes. Generally more upscale than Doc's neighborhood. And, as we know, it is believed that Pynchon lived in Manhattan Beach in 1969-1970 while working on Gravity's Rainbow. Gordita Beach is the fictionalized Manhattan Beach.

Page 7

2001: A Space Odyssey
This 1968 film by Stanley Kubrick is also mentioned in chapter 14 of Vineland. It includes a computer named HAL that gains consciousness and kills the ship's crew members. Talking computers also show up on pg. 115 of Vineland.

Page 8

Channel View Estates

Echo of "Channel Valley Condoms"—"If you lived here, you'd be home by now"— from the Firesign Theater's "How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All." Also continues the theme of rampant Tubaholism from Vineland.

The Channel Islands are a chain of islands off the coast of southern California.

Page 9

Freak Power
Hunter S. Thompson ran unsuccessfully for mayor and sheriff of Aspen, Colorado in 1969 and 1970. Wikipedia Unsure if "freak power" was a term Thompson coined?

SAG
The Screen Actors Guild

Zody
An anagram for Zoyd, one of the main characters in Vineland.

Cal Worthington

If Used-Car dealer Cal Worthington didn't exist, someone would have to invent him. Famous for his TV ads throughout California and his dog "Spot" [usually an exotic animal] the many parodies of Cal never exceed his own bizarre ads. YouTube

Page 10

Godzilla
Pynchon apparently wrote a letter to his editor, Cork Smith, in the 1960s saying that he was working on two books: one on Mason & Dixon, and one loosely inspired by Godzilla. See Crying of Lot 49 Chapter 3] & Vineland, page 142.

Gottlieb machines
Gottlieb is a corporation that makes pinball machines and arcade games.

Page 11

Sad but true, as Dion always sez.
"Runaround Sue" ("Here's my story, it's sad but true...") was a 1961 hit for Dion DiMucci (b. 1939). Dion only said it once, but then again he "said" it everytime the song was played. Have a listen on YouTube... At Playa Vista High Shasta was beauty queen four years running...Mira Costa High is the HS in Manhattan Beach

"Dennis came back with Pizza. I forgot what i asked for on it." Pynchon had a passion for pizza and had proposed making a film with the FPS group of San Francisco entitled "Mondo Pizza".

Page 12

wasn't that they were fucking, exactly, but it was something like that.
This sentence structure is a Pynchon trademark found throughout his works: "not X, exactly, but Y..." For instance, Gravity's Rainbow, pg 137: "...you begin to wait for something terrible-- not exactly an air raid but something close to that."; Gravity's Rainbow, pg 580: "Not as an enterprise, exactly, but at least in the dance of things."

""He stumbled up the hill to Wavos and had breakfast with the hard-core surfers who were always there.""
Huevos [pronounced, in Southern Californian American English, Wave-ohs] Rancheros: fried eggs served on corn tortillas with salsa, a popular dish with surfers and other beach people in the sixties and seventies.

Page 13

DOC'S OFFICE WAS located near the airport, off East Imperial

The southern edge of Watts. Imperial Highway goes from west to east right after the Harbor Freeway, changing about a mile and a half from the center of Watts.

Frederick's of Hollywood
Famous retailer of lingerie, started by Frederick Mellinger (inventor of the push-up bra) in 1946. The original flagship store was a landmark on Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California. Wikipedia

Page 14

a rendering of a giant bloodshot eyeball
The logo for LSD Investigations might be a parody of the logo for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, a famous and long-running agency started in the nineteenth century. Their logo is an eyeball with the phrase "We Never Sleep." See it here.

karmic adjustment
Karmic imbalance is an important theme in Vineland. See pg. 173, for example.

Page 15

Olivetti Lettera 22
A portable typewriter. See it here.

Page 16

Black Guerrilla Family . . . George Jackson's outfit
The Black Guerrilla Family was a prison gang founded in the mid-1960's by George Jackson in San Quentin prison.

Page 17

Watts . . . the riots
In 1965, there was a widespread and brutal riot in the streets of Watts, CA. It lasted almost a week and resulted in several deaths and hundreds of injuries. Read more here.