Charles Hollander's challenge to fence-sitters and skeptics, fwd
JOHN M. KRAFFT
krafftjm at miavx2.ham.muohio.edu
Sat Jul 1 10:26:03 CDT 1995
Sunday, June 25
Yo Dude,
I'm a little surprised you say you're unsure the Tinasky
letters are by Pynchon's hand, but I'm not and here's why. The
earliest suspected letter is so silly it could only be a Thomist
joke. One Muriel Titmouse -- Muriel Titmouse -- is soliciting
funds for a "Protest Our Thieves" [P.O.T.] foundation, and is
seeking to raise funds for an "Onan generator." The letter
writer is an I.R.S. agent who is warning that the POT Foundation
is not tax-exempt and suggests members write to the Infernal Rev-
in-you Serve-us. His name; Phullup N. Bloated. Titmouse=body
part pun, like Dewey Gland in V., Peter Pinguid in Lot 49. POT
foundation = subculture of lawbreakers, like the Sons of the Red
Apocalypse in "Lowlands," or the Inner Junta in "The Secret
Integration." Onan generator = pun on whacking off, reminiscent
of the guy who made love to a liquid oxygen generator in
Gravity's Rainbow. I.R.S. puns flips the finger at the Gov't.
Obviously bogus nom de plume flames real IRS agents. All in two
graphs. Next letter, signed Tinasky, wants to change name of
paper to The Boonville Bugle whose masthead, I anticipate, would
be a muted posthorn. Next letter, "people are being murdered so
that I can have bananas three pounds for a dollar." That's
allusion to all the United Fruit Co. governments in Latin America
whose police are trained in torture tactics at Langley. And
there's reference to the Muse of Poetry, which divides the world
between Cops and Art. Give unto United Fruit that which is
United Fruit's, and give unto the Muse that which makes it
tolerable for the rest of us to live under the boot; including
bad jokes, questionable puns, and feigned controversy and
indignation. The Phoebe Caulfield 2/15/84 letter contains a
limerick, certainly a Thomist trope, not as good as those in
Gravity's Rainbow,
There once was a fellow named Ritter,
Who slept with a guidance transmitter,
It shriveled his cock,
Which fell off in his sock,
And made him exceedingly bitter.,
but not bad. 5/15/84 used "86'd" again: I'm told it's a commonly
used idiom, but it's one TP has been using a long time. Someone
could word-search through TP's entire oeuvre to identify exactly
where. Alone, "86'd" proves nothing; but together with the above
and what will be the below, a familiar pattern is building. A
"horsewhippable editor" makes explicit Wanda's sensitivity to
raising state affairs to public ridicule, her alertness to the
wages of Menippean (political) satire, to which Pynchon has been
pointing since Lot 49, thirty years now. Also, the first
sentence of that letter is 19 (nineteen) typewritten lines long,
and you can parse it if you can. I'd say it's a Thomistic
synthesis, as identifiable as the brushstrokes of Van Gogh, or
the trills and gracenotes of Mozart (not Haydn, nor Scarlatti).
The 5/8/85 letter makes fun of the Norm de Vall Circle jerks,
another adolescent whacking-off put-down, and Brent Pusberger, a
body-secretion put-down of the TV sports guy Brent Musberger, like naming
Trasero County in Vineland for the hind quarters of a
burro. Of course Voltaire's name was Arouet, but he didn't hide
behind Voltaire: he used it as his new identity as Cassius Clay
became Mohamad Ali. Not sure what Wanda's getting at here,
beyond putting "Ecrasez l'infame" into print: "Crush the
infamous." I guess that meant, during the Enlightenment, on the
eve of the French Revolution, "crush the Church-State." The
5/15/85 entry is just pure writerly Thomism. The first paragraph
is filled with his strokes, like developing a long sentence with
a series of clauses set off by commas (with an illuminating
parenthetical inside many of them because otherwise the
punctuation would become too cummerbund), and dropping a quote
here and there, and using italics, and setting connectives used
as connectives next to connectives used as italicized nouns, and
seeming to work himself into a snit, only to undercut the whole
construct by making yet another questionable pun linking his
Underwood to his underwear at the end: well, if that's not
Pynchon it could only be someone who's studied his prose style
for twenty years like me or Ed Mendelson. Come to think of it,
where was Mendelson 1984-1990? You know where I was. Auntie
Gwladys is a name heisted from a P.G. Wodehouse story of Bertie
Wooster, another dropped allusion, in which Bertie falls for a
girl named Gwladys. His Auntie Dahlia is appalled. "No good can
come of association with anything labelled Gwladys or Ysobel or
Ethyl or Mabelle or Kathryn," she says. "But particularly
Gwladys." You have to read your Wodehouse, or The New Yorker, to
know that there is an implied anti-Welsh snobbery there. With
Ethyl may come a not too thinly veiled anti-petrochemical slur as
well (The Brits were duly peeved when old Andy Mellon stole
Kuwait from them back in the thirties, when Bertie was most
popular.). You don't think Uncle Thom would use another author
whose anti-petro views were well known to take a knock at the
State for him, do you? On the other well worn hand, who else is
subtle enough to pull a ploy like that? The unashamed John
Calvin Batshitter? The flag waving Andrei Codfishstu? One trick
Willie Mnemonic? If not Pynchon, Who? After a circumcision-
castration joke (not unlike the longer one in Gravity's Rainbow)
at the expense of the editor, he uses the word "assassinated" in
the P.S. "Assassinated," not "executed," "snuffed," or merely
"killed" puts a particularly political spin on it. We hear of
"gangland-style executions," and "pornographic snuff films;" we
read of "drive-by shootings" and "spousal abuse"; but we seldom
hear of apolitical "assassination." Assassination implies
politics. And Wanda's Jewish background implies whatever. In
Lot 49 Germans implied Jews. Is the author using the enthymeme?
Elsewhere Wanda will say something like, "It was my worst hair
day since I got out of Buchenwald." He's using a Jewish persona
to carry the narrative here, as I think he did in Lot 49. The
6/6/85 letter introduces the fable form by name, and we know
Pynchon has liked fables since his first short story, "The Small
Rain." Also there is mention of a possible auction, and we know
the auction has special significance for him as well, and he used
it in "The Secret Integration" and Lot 49. The old bleep was
bullbleeping us. Isn't that another example of the enthymeme,
conjuring up in the mind's ear the unspoken word? Another
fingerprint? No? Who else? In addition to the next fable in
the 6/20/85 letter, which ends in a proverb, like the GR
"Proverbs for Paranoids"; "For some people, you can't be too
obvious." In addition there is the Spoonerism, "ious pshit" that
could have fallen from the keys of only one old Underwood. In the
6/27/85 letter there is word play about "Cork" boots, then stuff
about look-alike Russians that reminds me of his Vineland passage
about a Hollywood treatment of a basketball film using look-alike
stars to double for NBA players. Then there is a bunch of half-
names Willie Bleep, Charlie Bleep, and Assembly Speaker Bleep,
that is like Lot 49, Secretary Foster, Secretary James, Senator
Joseph. Everybody in Mendo knew who he was dumping on. "I see
England is still looled by mandolins" converts to "ruled by
Mandarins" is classic Pynchon political punning. Let's see. In
these mere pages I've demonstrated to my satisfaction that Wanda
(et al.) is Pynchon. Let me count the ways. 1) fables, 2)
proverbs, 3) limericks, 4) enthymemes, 5) politics, 6) puns 'n
wordplay, 7) spot that quote, 8) assassinations, 9) look-alikes,
10) Jewish narrator, 11) body part jokes, 12) wages of satire
alertness, 13) pot jokes, 14) writerly sentences and paragraphs
of a kind that appear in Pynchon's credited work, 15) making a
fag of Nellie Rockefeller (3/13/85), 16) alluding to Voltaire,
Swift, Orwell, all of whom are visible in his oeuvre, 17) dumping
on Doctorow's prose style similarly as dumping on Brubeck's piano
style in "Entropy," 18) hinting that Mailer plagiarized NAKED AND
THE DEAD from Lawrence's THE PRUSSIAN OFFICER, 19) mentioning he
worked at Boeing and having the mid-air refueling passage so like
the Vineland passage, and then 20) playing with his audience,
"Well Maybe I'm Pynchon and Maybe I'm Not! Can you prove it?" No
one ever suggested Wanda was George F. Will!?! Or William F.
Buckley. And the photo of the statue; I wouldn't be surprised if
it were Houdon's "Bust of Pynchon," his nose a little puttied,
wearing a wig, pulling the legs of those who claimed Pynchon
sightings. "See, I can publish my photo here and you dolts still
won't recognize me." C'mon, dude, who among our contemporary
writers has this same set of fingerprints, this same sense of
hoodwinking humor. No one. Maybe Dada-Surrealist, Salvador
Dali, in his "Slave Market," later known as "Slave Market with
Disappearing Bust of Voltaire," could do something so audacious
as to paint the "Father of The Enlightenment" during the height
of the fascist regime in Spain, cuz everybody knows Dali had
heavy enough stones to get away with it. But what other writer,
living or dead, would be so playful: Dante? Swift? Twain? It's a
pretty short list. Let's bet: if Wanda Tinasky (et al) isn't
dada Thom I'll eat my copy of Gravity's Rainbow; but if she is,
you'll eat yours. Whatsamatta? Chicken? If any of your critic
pals can make a case that Pynchon is not Wanda, can successfully
rebut my twenty points, let him do it. Put up or shut up.
CHUCK
World's Most
Invisible Robot
John M. Krafft, English | Miami University--Hamilton
Voice: 513-863-8833, ext. 342 | 1601 Peck Boulevard
Fax: 513-863-1655 | Hamilton, OH 45011-3399
E-mail: krafftjm at muohio.edu
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