LAST WANDA, & Out

[WildForest at aol.com]

OK, I have been pummelled by private e-mails of the most scurrilous nature.  

I have been publicly accused of perpetrating a vast and malign falsehood on
the linked-up legions of Pynchon-heads.  

I have also been viciously slandered as being a "Koop(RIP)," whatever the
hell that might be.  

And, yes, yes, yes, I am offended!  Mightly so.  

Thus, I am prepared to absent this mailing list, let it settle back into the
thrilling debates of yore...such a Mandelbrotesque explication of the
mandela-like pattern of Katje's arse when viewed from the perspective of
B-Gen. Pudding...

Before I retire, however, as a final bon mot for the one or two secret
watchers who might share my passion for the perverse, I post this, my
favorite Tinasky letter, written on June 27, 1985.  

Adieu.

Wanda Clears Up A Few Things
Dear Mr. Anderson:
RE:  Recent issues of AVA:  I knew it wasn't true when they told me that B.
Traven was dead.

Cork boots are really calk boots (alternate spelling:  caulk).  Calks being
those metal things like hobnails that stick out the bottoms.  I think all
loggers call calk boots cork boots.  I wondered where the cork was for many
years, and hope this save you some time and worry.

The photograph the Lewallens found is mine; I don't know how it got there.  I
took it in Leningrad in the summer of 1928.  The little man in the middle you
thought might be Trotsky is President Kalinin; he was much older and more
frail looking than Trotsky, but they really did look a lot alike; in fact, we
used to kid Lev about it.  That IS Stalin behind Kalinin.  Trotsky never let
Stalin get behind him.  The man on the right that you thought looked like
Lenin is Bukharin, and he DID look like Lenin; we kidded HIM about THAT, too.
 The naval officer was a Russian admiral.  I never did catch his name.  Who
knows Russian admirals?  I will be staying under the Jughandle Creek bridge
for the next few weeks, and if you would put the picture in an envelope and
have somebody throw it under there, I would appreciate it.  Although Bucky
and I never made it together, we were close friends, and I have no other
picture of him.

When I heard on somebody's car radio that a North Coast editor had been
censured by a bunch of our Sacramento slopjaws for insulting Willie Bleep, I
naturally assumed it was you, and then I was relieved to learn that it was
that punk in Sebastopol (home of Charlie Bleep) even if you don't get
censured by anything by the Cloverdale city council, because Assembly Speaker
Bleep is going blind, and it is definitely in poor taste to insult the
appearance and whatnot of someone who is going blind, and it isn't true
anyway about him being so ugly that if they dropped him through a cloud the
fruit flies would die; for a politician he is not bad looking at all, and if
they ever had a rainbow in Sacramento his raiment would put it to shame.  

Speaking as one whois really tired of Polack gags, I hope you and AVA never
descend to racial slurs...that is all too easy for an editor, since the
editorial position in this respect is even better than that of God Almighty,
who could be suspected of having led up to his own jokes (HG Wells.  Didn't
know Wells could crack 'em like that, did you?  I could have passed that off
as my own.  In the same book, Wells makes what I still think is the best pun
in the language, when he had a Chinaman say:  "I see England is still looled
by mandolins.")

I hope you and AVA never put people on to ways to hurt other people either.
 I'm sure you read that letter in the Mendocino Commentary signed "Thor" that
told how to protect trees from being logged by driving spikes in them.  Yuk.
 I can see chunks of fresh off-bearer meat flying across the sawmill.  That
creep "Thor" could have said that you could get the same effect easier by
just TELLING the people involved that you spiked the trees, without really
doing it...anonymously, of course.  "For some people, you can't be too
obvious..." WT

Look, Mr. Anderson, there are a couple of things I would like to get off here
about Thor, since I may never have this much of an opening again:

1) Thor landed from Asgard in San Francisco, and since he had absolutely no
money for a flop he spent the night with a David Bowie type he met around
Castro.  On waking in the morning, the god said:  "I guess I should tell
you...I'm Thor."  And his frail friend replied, "YOU'RE thore!"

2) In Scandinavian mythology, it is related that the famous hammer of Thor
(which is, incidentally, a war club, not a bungstarter or naildriver...a fact
perhaps not known to those raised on Marvel Comics) had a short handle.  Of
course there was an exegetical explanation, but this was rather obviously
after the fact, and, like the cork boots, I wondered about this for a half
century or so.  In later life, I thought there might be the implication that
Thor was overcompensating, like John Wayne, but eventually I came across the
answer in some book or other in some public library; it had this photograph
of a Greek statue of Zeus hurling a thunderbolt, which looked sort of like an
old-fashioned potato-masher hand grenade...definitely with a SHORT HANDLE.
 Explanation:  the Viking types saw this or similar statues in Constantinople
(which they call Muckleburg) and called it Thor because that was their name
for the thunderbolt-hurler and made up a story to explain why the "hammer"
had a short handle.  (For a variant explanation covering the possibility of
actual extraterrestrial potato masher grenade throwers of pre-history, see my
book, "Chariots of the Dudes.")

Wanda Tinasky
Under Jughandle Creek Bridge

PS If you won't consider changing the name of the Anderson Valley Advertiser
to the Boonville Bugle, will you consider changing it to the Philo Vance?

PPS  There is a word for the process of deriving or manufacturing myths for
interpreting paintings or statues, but I have forgotten what the word is.
 Robert Graves knows.  Perhaps you or your readers know.  Forgive the
cliffhanger

WT