NADA

[Dave Monroe]

"'There's no girl, Oed.  Let me tell you.  The bad
dream that I used to have all the time, about the car
lot, remember that?  I could never even tell you about
it.  But I can now.  It doesn't bother me any more. 
It was only that sign in the lot, that's what scared
me.  In the dream I'd be going about a normal day's
business and suddenly, with no warning, there'd be the
sign.  We were a member of the National Autmobile
Dealers' Association.  N.A.D.A.  Just this creaking
metal sign that said nada, nada, against the blue sky.
 I used to wake up hollering.'" (Lot 49, Ch. 5, p.
144)

Could almost be a David Lynch vignette, no?  Like that
recurrent swinging stoplight in "Twin Peaks," perhaps
also that Big Tuna sign in Wild at Heart, and, of
course, the blue skies of Blue Velvet, WAH, The
Straight Story ... but I digress.  This is, however,
one of those seemingly incidnetal images which has
stuck with me here, though ...

Of course, Pynchon has a thing for acronyms, e.g., ...

"When 'Who's Who' asked him to supply a biographical
note ... Pynchon debated replying that his parents
were
named Irving Pynchon and Guadalupe Ibarguengotia and
that he was 'named Exotic Dancers Man of the Year in
1957' and 'regional coordinator for the March of Edsel
Owners on Washington (MEOW) in 1961.'"

http://www.salon.com/media/1998/03/10media.html

And, of course, W.A.S.T.E.  Anyone get the feeling
here ...

"But at last in the shadows she did come on a can with
a swinging trapezoidal top, the kind you throw trash
in: old and green, nearly four feet high.  On the
swinging part were hand-painted the initials
W.A.S.T.E.  She had to look closely to see the periods
between the letters." (Lot 49, Ch. 5, p. 130)

... that maybe, just maybe, we've been had?  I
remember luaghing out loud the first time I read this,
thinking, of course, I'd seen it coming, but ... but,
then again, that "hand-painted," that mitigate the
possibility that, say, that "kid dropping a bundle of
letters into the can" (ibid.) is ultimately albeit
unknowingly simply throwing his letters away? 
W.A.S.T.ing his effort?  Merely disguised as a plain
old "WASTE" ("'It's W.A.S.T.E., lady'" [p. 87])
container?  Undercover ...

>From J. Kerry Grant, A Companion to V. (Athens: U of
Georgia P, 1984), "H144.22, B107.37  'N.A.D.A.'" ...

"The sign also reminds us of Hemingway's 'A Clean
Well-Lighted Place' (among other stories), with its
understated invocation of a profound hollowness at the
center of human experience." (p. 120)

But note that (car) "lot," lots of "lots" in The
Crying of Lot 49, as well as "suddenly, with no
warning, there'd be the sign," a revelation, an
apocalypse ...

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