Wanda Tinasky, and cetera

[Gardener Cady]

I would be very interested in hearing anything else about this book 
mentioned below, y'know the letters of that Bag 
Lady/Pynchon(supposedly).  Publisher? Title? Anything?

On Mon, 28 Oct 1996 Dkipen at aol.com wrote:

> Dear Jules and Chrissie,
> 
> Don't let John Mascaro get you down. He's just grumpy because he and I don't
> have the recently deceased LA Reader in which to vent our splenetic book
> reviews anymore. 
> 
> I find myself wondering if you've heard at all about the controversy
> surrounding letters mailed during the 1980s to the Anderson Valley Advertiser
> over the signature of a putative bag lady named Wanda Tinasky. Rumors persist
> that Wanda was Tom, doing a kind of literary calisthenics some mornings
> before sitting down to the more demanding work of creating Vineland, which
> takes place in Northern California right in the middle of the AVA's
> circulation area. A book of the letters was published earlier this year, and
> some of them are pretty good. My question is, would this kind of pseudonymous
> letter to the editor-writing strike you as consistent with the Tom you knew?
> Might there be a trove of undiscovered pseudonymous letters to the Manhattan
> Beach Reporter somewhere? Did he ever use any pseudonyms that you know of?
> 
> And to all Plisters in the LA area: The Malibu Book Discussion Group is
> taking up The Crying of Lot 49 this Wednesday at 1 pm on Point Dume at the
> Community Center. Let me know if you'd like to come, or just stop by. And
> more generally, does anybody have any pointers for justifying the ways of Tom
> to a nice bunch of duffers whose ideas of great writing apparently include
> Rushdie, but who quite probably think Lacan is where La French go to the
> bathroom?
> 
> Pynchon for everybody,
> David Kipen
>