tantivy, 8 to 4

[Dkipen at aol.com]

Dear 'chonheads,

For what it's worth (2 pounds in a London used-book store supposedly co-owned
by Graham Greene and frequented by Gustav Hasford, the late author of Full
Metal Jacket and only man unfortunate enough to have a warrant issued for his
arrest for bibliokleptomania the same month he was nominated for an Oscar),
my 5th edition of  the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English (1964)
has as guide words, those ever more familiar-growing field markers to a
writer's best unfermented friend, the following: "tantivy," "bloat,"
"Corydon," and maybe another I can't just now remember. 

Didn't Harold Bloom supposedly run into Pynchon, who literally ran the other
way, in London around the time GR was getting written? Could this British
lexicon have been the man's (our man's, not to be confused with, or by, The
Man) vade-mecum during GR's composition, and might one of his nomenclatural
methodologies have been the christening of minor, sorry, characters after
some cool-sounding, dogeared minor words he ran across every time he went to
look up something else? Just a theory.

And by the way, to continue with this geographically inflected line of
inquiry, I just returned from a day and a half in the Berkshires. Why the
Berkshires in Slow Learner and then GR? Sure, his umpty-umpth ganderfeather
founded Springfield, but TP says the closest he's ever come to Melville's
former and Pauline Kael's current home is the WPA Guide, which I picked up in
a Bennington used bookstore. Why this WPA Guide, and not some other, like
that nice one John Cheever and Richard Wright helped put together about NYC?
Chance? Luck? And did the Great Aspinwall Hotel Fire of 1931 really happen?
It's not in the Guide, although Aspinwall is.

Between Siegel and M&D, loving all this like crazy,
David