nearly a Wanda sighting

[Brian Stonehill Media Studies Pomona College]

Hi friends,

As near as I've come to a Wanda sighting was last week when Alexander Cockburn
(pronounced Coe-burn, of course) showed up in L.A. County on a leisurely
national tour to promote his new book called "The Golden Age is In Us."  About
a hundred folk gathered in the back of the "Midnight Special" bookstore in
Santa Monica to hear Cockburn speak; on the walls are flyers for the
bookstore's own web page at http:www.msbooks/ or something that starts like
that at the more thoughtful edge of dot com.

"The Golden Age is In Us" -- Cockburn started by saying the title is a
shameless attempt to capitalize on the hot market for anything New
Age-sounding.  He quickly undermined the happy-face sound of the title by
reverting to the paranoid plot-mongering familiar to readers of his column in
_The Nation_ and "Column Left" on the _L.A. Times_ op ed page, to name but two
of his outlets.  Another is the _Anderson Valley Advertizer_, since Cockburn --
though the son of a famous journalist for the _Times_ of London, and sounds it
-- calls Mendocino, California, his home.

Cockburn's been following gun-toting cults lately, with surprising sympathy,
and he likes to say provocative things such as that Janet Reno's handling of
"that so-called 'cult'" in Waco, Texas was "enough to make anyone go down to
the hardware store to stock up on fertilizer and fuel oil."  The CIA's ongoing
plans to murder and exterminate Third World citizens provided another recurrent
theme.

The first question he took -- all the others were political, and at least one
was plainly kooky -- was about Wanda Tinasky.  Cockburn politely explained
exactly what we know -- that the letters sent to the _AVA_ over that name
display "extraordinarily high literary quality" and that Thomas Pynchon is
known to have been in the area at the time.  Cockburn is slated to write the
introduction to the volume of WT letters that Bruce Anderson & Co. are bringing
out in October, which might lead one to suppose an expert.  He claims not to be
much of a Pynchon reader, though, certainly not an expert, and not an on-line
kind of guy either.  But he knows we're here.  "Apparently there are parts of
cyberspace all worked up about this," he offered.  And, "I think the book will
ultimately *not* take a position on whether the letters are by Pynchon or not."

***

"She is his space of sky and bough in a time of hope before hopes were called
wishes to warn they might not come true"  -- David, that's not verbatim, it's
badly watered down by memory from Roger/Jessica, but the original is what I've
mentally been trying to send you on the occasion of your nuptials.

Cheers,  Brian