Windows, Ears, and Assassins

[Steelhead]

So the Big Guns from the Big Books seminars are getting their kicks beating
up on Koop again (with some gratuitous t'ai chi-like jabs thrown at lowly
undergrads, too)-no doubt this is a delightful way to blow off accumulated
steam after a trying day of tracking down the ever elusive hypertexual
connection, which can be especially wearisome after you've jettisoned the
plot(s).

But while this most recent bout of nastiness was going round, I became
transfixed by another strange phenonmenon, a creepy epiphany, of sorts,
that some of Thomas Pynchon's recent minor characters appeared to be
lurking right here in Pynchon-list land, not even lurking, but, yes,
a-actually participating...

It all started with this raging discussion on the socio-political
implications of Pynchon's Progress from "defenestration," as applied to
Rooney Winsome, all the way over to "transfenestration" in the case of Zoyd
Wheeler.  "Transfenestration," it was argued, being a word coined, if not
minted, by Pynchon--a neologism destined for a stirring entry in the 2005
edition of Pynchon's favorite 20 volume reference book:  the OED.

Some New Agers suggested that the shift to "Trans-" implied a softening of
Pynchon's entrenched nihilism, a hint at trans-cendence, that he had moved
beyond trite Heideggerisms, and awakened to the fact that there, just
beyond the window, was a utopia-in-waiting, if we could only break on
through to the other side.

Others, however, rejecting the Jim Morrison influence (and sniggering
outright at the idea Pynchon may have once owned a copy of Neil Young's
strangely neglected "Trans," a now long since remaindered album which
describes the robotic takeover of rocknroll), argue that the adoption of
"trans" was purely a case of Pynchon's evolving poetics.  They suggest that
tranfenestration, when spoken with a certain upward lilt of the voice,
almost rivals the word "cellardoor" for pure phonemic beauty--and, what's
more, can easily be sung to the tune of Carly Simon's Anticipation.

Still others, a growing faction, point to a recurring autobiographical
obsession on display here.  It appears some of Pynchon's long-lost
relatives (distaff branch) may have been heretical puritans hanging out in
the wrong speakeasies in Prague back in the 17th century and, when their
covers where blown (no doubt after suffering some kind of babbling
abreaction wherein they defamed the pope in the most scatalogical of terms)
were duly pitched into the stinking streets below.  At which point the
neo-Freudian followers of Lacan noted the syntactical similarites between
fenestration, menstruation, and castration...which opened up entirely new
avenues of inquiry...To which, the Guattari and DeLeuze contingent shouted
back:  We're beyond that anti-feminist, Oepidal tripe, now, aren't we...or
were you guys just _faking_ it?

Then it hit me.  I've heard these voices before.  Yes, early in that much
maligned book Vineland (and now we know who did the maligning, and why,
don't we?...no such thing as a medium-sized book seminar!), there is a
discussion very much along these lines, too much in line, in fact, for mere
coincidence:

"Next came highlights of his previous attempts, at each step into the past
the color and other production values getting worse, and after that a panel
including a physics professor, a psyhchiatris, and a track-and-field coach
live and remote from the Olympics down in LA discussing the evolution over
the years of Zoyd's technique, pointing out the useful distinction between
the defenestrative personality, which prefers jumping out of windows, and
the transfenestrative, which tends to jump through, each reflecting an
entirely different subtext, at about which point Zoyd and Prairie began to
drift away."  No doubt..

Now, I will come clean.  I too have aspirations toward becoming a minor
character in TRPs next novel (hell, I'm ashamed to admit it, but I'd even
settle for a slightly more developed appearance in...gulp....Tom Robbin's
next outing).  So I offer two additions to this most enlightening
discussion.  First, as close readers of Michel Foucault's Birth of the
Clinic are smugly aware, "fenestration" is also a rather diabolically
painful surgical "procedure," performed on the inner ear in the hope
enhancing the reception of aural messages.  Hmmmm.

Second, and no doubt much more interesting (especially when translated into
High German), is the following unsigned clipping, recovered from my long
neglected stack of The Realist, about the strange cult known as The Process
(or the Church of the Final Judgement:

"The Process stuck me as a group of occult provacteurs, using radical
Christianity as a front.  They were adamantly interested in Yippie
politics.  They boasted to me of various rallies which their _vibrations
alone_ had transformed into riots.  They implied that there was some kind
of connection between the assassination of Bobby Kennedy and their mere
prescence on the on the scene.  On the evening that Kennedy was killed at
the Ambassador Hotel, he had been to a dinner party with Roman Polanski and
Sharon Tate.  Bernard [get this!] Fensterwald, head of the Committee to
Investigate Assassinations [a-ha!], told me that Sirhan Sirhan had some
involvement with the Process.  Peter Chang, the district attorney of Santa
Cruz, showed me a letter from a Los Angeles police official to the chief of
police in San Jose, warning him that the Process had infiltrated biker
gangs and hippie communes."

Suck on that awhile, Mr. Hollander!

Steelhead