SENSATIONAL! STUPEFYING!

[Jeff Meikle]

HEIKKI YOU ARE BRILLIANT!!  You are so right ON TARGET about Jules as
MEDIUM (talk about an electronic MASSAGE!).  What are we to make of medium
Jules, as weird as any of GR's sensitives and psychics, who bursts into
dark flower just at the very time we were all supposed to be pondering and
pontificating over the bizarre sensitives and seances of GRGR(3)?!  Maybe
Pynchon IS possessing him, controlling him, running him. I've always been
fascinated by the spiritualism in TRP (much of it only subliminal to those
who don't know the lingo), but you're getting beyond its mute presence, its
surface signification, to what it IS.  Of course:  fouling up the
transcendentalists, the purist Emersons and Hawthornes and Melvilles, those
official symbolists with their ones and zeros, instead mixing the high and
the low, the spiritual and the material.  And don't forget that for the
early spiritualists of the 1850s, those who truly believed in the reality
of communications from beyond, the key problem was separating the voices of
the BENEVOLENT spirits from those of the MALICIOUS, who just loved to MUDDY
THE WATERS by talking gibberish, inciting to evil mischief. Talk about
EXCLUDED MIDDLES.

So, anyway, here I am, Monday night, just like you, back from the American
Studies meeting at Kansas City, an oddly empty city not far removed from
the minimalist WEST of CRUTCHFIELD, wading through these wild 350 messages,
a palimpsest of conflicting communications from beyond, a layered
archaeology of the past five days of ever-stranger Pynchon-talk, already
oddly outdated, coming at cross-purposes from some not quite parallel
spheres, like a welter of dimly heard radio signals wavering in and out
through crackling patterns of static back when I was a kid dx-ing the AM
band.  And then comes your AMAZING POST in the midst of it all.  WOW!  Say,
what'dya think of Calvin Trillin anyway?

We all owe you a major DEBT OF GRATITUDE, an HOMAGE.

Jeff