Pynchon exposed on TV?

[V055QRSH at ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu]

Here, in classic Stensilly fashion I offer this week's
installment of "TRP = ..."  Watch closely as I dig deep,
connect passages, set loose some canaries, make fools of
us all...

Imagine the monitor before you as a tabletop podium, a
monolithic tombstone, an epitaphic pixelation...

We've gathered here today to pay homage to a TV show.
Not just any TV show, but a TV show with class, charm,
intelligence, a TV show with an aboveness over the rest,
a "northernity" one might say.  It had the unprecedented
power to reveal, to show sought the hidden, to "expose."
Northern Exposure (hereafter NorEx) will be sorely missed.

Some, here gathered, I notice as loyal friends to NorEx,
others as casual acquaintances, and some I understand are
just grateful that it's touched the ones they love.  I see
also among us, and I won't point yous out, a few horsewives
(sorry, meant "housewives") who on many a Monday Night have
sneaky-peted 'round the kitchen half-wall to see what was
the cause of the hairy fist unclenching out of the potato
chip bag, reaching now, yes, actually moving toward the
remote control, an arrow button... primitive urges can be
expended peacefully on other channels, easy as changing
from ABC to... that one network... the one's got all that
B.S. on all the time.  Here it is!  (Morty strutting to
the music)  And just in time!  But to what will all these
men turn this season, now that NorEx is gone?

Maybe we should have seen it coming.  The signs were
certainly there for quite some time.  First, the great
American traditional Nielson Family burst Mike's bubble,
giving him the opportunity to go off and nerd around on
that hospital show, the one about the emergency room I
forget the name of.  Then barefooted Adam became a less
frequent fixture having stepped into his slippers at that
quirky Chicago Hope (Plug! Plug!)  Finally Joel, Eve-like,
left paradisic Alaska for Bigger better Apples.  And all
the while new characters were showing up.  Initially it
was Eugene and Walt, delightful additions.  But then, like
so many koopmen, a character by the name of Hayden (sp)
Keyes started doing these inconsequential walk-ons.

Hayden's a tall, dark-haired, fiftysomething dude, big
mean mother.  Well, maybe he only looks mean.  He's got
that thick beard, and it's so thick you can't see his 
teeth so you don't know if he's smiling or snarling or
what.  If you wanna find him you just go on over to The
Brick and listen for his deep thunderous voice when his
mouth ain't full of the local game.  He's paunchy and I
seem to remember him suffering from a condition of some
sort, perhaps sciatica, or was it joint trouble? Anyways,
there seemed to be a mystery surrounding his twin bro
who I was hoping would appear in the last episode.  Alas!

After CBS killed NorEx, I was in denial for quite awhile,
scribbling "NorEx Lives!" on overpasses, bare sidewalks,
national monuments, not wanting to believe it was gone.

"Must preserve!  Must preserve!" I panted.  And in krept
NorEx's ghost... Could TRP have had anything to do with 
its production, like some puppeteer up its poopshoot?
There was that one episode that I realized (I must admit
it was chemically induced) that it was entirely written
around the phrase, "liquid gold."  Wasn't that something
like what TRP did with those wrong frenchmen, using word
play to construct an entire story?  What if that Hayden
really was Pynchon doing the Hitchcock cameo-thang?

I started videotaping re-runs, looking for connections 
to TRP, and found a plethora of literary mentionings:
Salinger, Rushdie, Bellow, London and others.  A coupla
acads like Freud, Jung, Nietzsche, the usual.  But never
any Pynchon.  Hmmmmm, thought I.

I decided to do the unmentionable: I became a good little
Dickens-reader, and started to read into the NorEx names.

Fleischmann (self-interested meat-eating, conservative at
heart, would newyorkly eat his mum to get ahead in this
world); Minnifield (a small piece of property perhaps in
reference to a lacking in his pubic region, and therefore
a chubby republican); Officer Szymanski ("she's Man's
key," Maurice's untameable fox, not the kind of gal you'd
find in any film noir, dat's for sure); Holling Van Coeur
(kinf of sounds like hole in the heart, Holling's got goil
problems, Who doesn't?)  Chris Stevens (sounds and looks
alot like "Christ evens," uses his voice to get the mess-
age out); Shelley Tambone ("she let 'em bone" her, your
stereotypical cheerleader, almost as witty as Praire, but
not quite).  These characters frolicked around with their
inability to understand the world, however well-read this
one seemed, or cultural that.  Yes, Cicely was a town-
system that was entropically freezing in this tundric
social universe we call "modern times."  But isn't there
always that outside chance that one can escape from some-
thing so powerfully centered?  Didn't Maurice, as an
astronaut, do it?  (Ground Control to Major Tom...)

Sadly, as any good Roger Mexico would tell you, what
comes up must come down.  Which brings me to our heroine,
Maggie O'Connell and what I'd like to be the first to say:
She is The Inverse Slothrop.

All of Maggie's boyfriend's died.  Not the kind of "your
contract's up, buddy, and the audience just don't like
your style" soap-operic kill-offs.  These deaths occurred
even before the show started.  It took her a season or so
to become self-aware of her boyfriendicidal tendencies, 
and we were finally given the full impact of her power
when that 8-is-enough actor got hit by a satelite. What's
that you say?  A metal object falling, striking and kill-
ing someone Maggie's slept with?  There wasn't an owl
present was there?

Well, yes, in fact, there was, but that's not important.
What is is that Mary Margaret O'Connell (I'll leave that
one to your imagination) never really gets together with
Joel (who incidentally is mistaken for a Joseph by the
hired hand who's painted Joel's name leaving out the L
on his office window).  But in The End she does seem to
hook up with Chris.  Sound anything like Last Temptation
to you?

Hmmm... now where else have I come across a sublingual
anti-Christian swing.  Ummm-  GR maybe!

Well, this is already a belated eulogy so I'll turn off
right after I praise what made NorEx alive: the writers.
However sinisterly crafty they seemed, the show was
endowed with an ambivalence, appealing to everyone along
the political spectra: conservative, liberal, on the 
wall, or off the wall.  If you possessed the want to feel
what the world's been going through and you tuned in, 
then you could truly say you enjoyed yourself.  But if
you never seen NorEx, then you missed television at its
greatest potential - if there is one.

<-----sighs

Well, I guess if I can't bring it back, I can at least
use my pinky to help and raise it to cult status.

<------bows head for a moment of silence.

Rick
back from the West
my horse badly wounded

p.s. a list'll be going around for anyone interested in
being a pallbearer.  We can use all the strong pinkies
we can get.

Oh, and the banana brunch has been rescheduled to take
place a little later and right up here on the altar.
Apparently there's a moose running around loose in the
cafeteria.