Providence, Lovecraft, and TRP

[Jeffrey L. Meikle]

        Obviously TRP knew his way around Providence, or at least tried to
navigate through it on U.S. 1 sometime prior to construction of I-95.  It
was one of those makeshift routes employing lots of different streets and
thus lots of turns (miss one and you're lost for hours).  And even if you
didn't get lost, it would take an hour or two just to get through the
city--meantime, you get a good view of the place, just like Pirate's taffy
leads him through hell.  And of course there's the pun already pointed out
by Don Larsson:  Providence equals city equals God's plan/plot.
        I enjoyed Rich Romeo's question about TRP and H. P. Lovecraft.  I
was a Lovecraft fan back in 1971 when I wrote an M.A. thesis at Brown on
Pynchon's use of entropy and information and thought I noticed some
parallels between Lot 49 and Lovecraft's short story "The Call of Cthulhu."
It took ten years to get around to writing it up, but it finally appeared
as "'Other Frequencies':  The Parallel Worlds of Thomas Pynchon and H. P.
Lovecraft," _Modern Fiction Studies_, 27 (Summer 1981), 287-294.  Some of
you may find it interesting, if not convincing.  Apparently I wasn't the
only one with the same idea however.  In 1971 the Ophelia Press of New York
published _The Erotic Spectacles_, a pornographic science fiction novel
written by one Genghis Cohen (TRP's stamp dealer) that takes place at
Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts (Lovecraft's fictional
world).  Could ol' Tom himself have written this pastiche?  Or maybe Philip
Jose Farmer?  Oddly enough, one of the characters is described as having a
"probability" of 37.5869 percent (similar to "temporal bandwidth").  A
stoned friend of mine with too much time on his hands deciphered the number
as follows:  37.58 equals 1937 May 8 (Pynchon's birthday).  And while we
all might think we know what 69 is all about, especially in a porn book,
it's really 6 times 9 equals 54, which is the number of days between
Lovecraft's death date in 1937 and Pynchon's birth date that same year.  At
that point I decided one could carry these things too far...
Cheers,
Jeff Meikle