Frenesi

[Chris Sweet]

David Jordan wrote:
> 

> Salman Rushdie pointed out in his review of _Vineland_ that "Frenesi" is
> an anagram of "free sin" and had something (he mentioned in passing) to do
> with TRP's concern with sin and free will.  Maybe, maybe not.  Rushdie may
> just have been in the throes of a clever but unsupportable thought.  I
> mean, why not "sin free," and what would that mean in a critical analysis
> of _Vineland_?
> 
> At the time, I was learning C and thought it would be clever to turn my PC
> into an exhaustive anagram generator, but I didn't have the time and still
> have many other unarguably more urgent things to do.  Also, I had a small
> hard drive and the anagrams of too many personal names of even twelve or
> fifteen letters would have taken way too much space.  But just think, one
> could thereby look for hidden or multiple meanings in "Zoyd Wheeler,"
> "Hector Zuniga," or many others.  For instance, "Zipi Pisk" looks like it
> has possibilities.
> 
> Actually, I've heard there's a Web site with an anagram generator.  Maybe
> someone reading pynchon-l, with more time that I, could compile a complete
> list of personal and place names, and any other expression that looks
> interesting, run then through, and report back if anything interesting
> turns up.
> 

Theres a good anagram generator at:
http://csugrad.cs.vt.edu/~eburke/anagrams.html

I have run some names through before and a lot of interesting results
have come up. Sometimes it can be quite overwhelming. For example, I
entered the keywords 'Thomas Ruggles Pynchon' and selected a minimum
word
length of 5 and I got back over 1500 combinations before the search
stopped
because of an overloaded system. At 6 letters plus (for each word) it
only pulls
up 20. 

Some good ones:
Tyrone Slothrop : Help story or not, ply her ton torso, sorry he not
plot, north to leprosy,
  lot thorny prose.

chris