Mish MAAS, Gates, & Wheelers

[Steelhead]

No doubt Pynchon scholars have endlessly deconstructed the _significance_
of the following passage.  But upon rereading CoL49, shortly after rereading VL,
it does speak to me of a kind of prescience.  Don't you think?  Especially
the Wheeler and Gates bit (which, I know, has geophysical roots, but
nonetheless...)

_It was summer, a weekday, and midafternoon; no time for any campus
Oedipa knew of to be jumping, yet this one was.  She came downslope
from Wheeler Hall, through Sather Gate into a plaza teeming with courduroy,
denim, bare legs, blond hair, horn rims, bicycle spokes in the sun, book
bags, swaying card tables, long paper petitions dangling to earth, posters
for undecipherable FSMs, YAFs, VDCs, suds in the fountain, students in
nose-to-nose dialogue. She moved through it carrying her fat book,
attracted, unsure, a stranger, wanting to feel relavent, but knowing how
much of a search among alternate universes it would take.  For she had
undergone her own educating at a time of nerves, blandness, and retreat
among not only her fellow students but also most of the visible structure
around and ahead of them, this having been a national reflex to certain
pathologies in high places only death had the power to cure, and this
Berkeley was like no somnolent Siwash out of her own past at all, but more
akin to those Far Eastern or Latin American universities you read about,
those autonomous culture media where the most beloved of folklores may be
brought into doubt, cataclysmic of dissents voiced, suicidal of commitments
chosen--the sort that bring governments down._
                                               [CoL49, pg., 71 Picador Ed.]

One is also struck by the reference, on the preceeding page, to a J.-K.
Sale, who decodes a fairly significant pun in the "Whitechaple" (another
reference to GR?) version of ole Wharfinger's play.  Mr. Sale, no doubt,
is a nod to TRP's Luddite buddy Kirkpatrick.

BTW: Does anyone out there know how many times since, roughly 1917, the
word "flinders" has appeared in an American novel?

PS: Is anyone else struck by the way the inestimable Genghis Cohen, he of
the Barry Goldwater sweatshirt (who, as with Pierce, Mr. Toth and the
posthorn-tatooed sailor, prompts "motherly" feelings from OED), addresses
Oedie as "Miz Maas," an appellation which, when articulated with a slight
lisp, can easily transmute into Mish-Mash, a recursive trip back to V.,
which is precisely where Mrs. Oedipus My Ass, ends up.

Steelhead