ATDTDA p115 a paragraph of wackiness

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

mikebailey:
These might be overtones...but also messages in bottles are such
a "preterite" way to communicate that linking them to gleanings
from jewelry - offshoots of the WASTE system, are they? -
would place the Chums within a satrapy of the Tristero...

Well, frankly, throughtout the book we find all this Tristerian spoor, an 
overabundance of truly bizarre systems of communication, like totally Rube 
Goldberg, man, and pretty much zero explaination or commentary from the author 
as to why every single goddamned message that gets through in this novel has to 
pass through some weird, and I mean really really baroque modes of transmission. 
Maybe it's on account of a whole lot of these modes of communication were shiny 
and new at the time (got all them previously undiscovered electro-magnetic 
radiations to play with, don't you know [soon we're gonna find ourselves in a 
junkyard full of Time Machines]) and obviously plenty of these novelties were 
soon to be discarded. Here's your Gas Transmission, what's your hurry? 
Which is pretty much shows us the author letting on that he's conveying his 
present day attitude as regards the Crying of Lot 49 and all obviously related 
bits in Against the Day whilst wallowing in a state of extreme satire, high 
hilalrity, total dirision, somewhere within the Jay Ward to Bob Clampett spectra, with 
perhaps a few peak readings in the Jones and Avery bands. Of course, on a 
certain level, COL 49 is a success on account of being, quite frequently, 
screamingly funny. In fact, Against the Day ends (one of several endings, btw) 
on one of these Koans (Cohens?) from Tristero, in Lord Overlunch's hotel. 
Shambahla appears to incorporate Elmer Fudd, and send out its letters via 
W.A.S.T.E. Or maybe it is W.A.S.T.E. Anyway you wanna slice it, the Grand Cohen 
(Is Gengis related?) is involved and when all is said and done Against the Day 
might end up as the most throughly convoluted koan ever concieved.  

http://www.filatelia.fi/forglinks/index.html

Bogus stamps
Bogus stamps purport to be produced by an entity 
that exists and could have produced them, but didn't. 
Unlike forgeries they do not even resemble anything 
that the entity did produce, and only rarely are any 
of these labels ever shipped to the place that is 
shown as issuing them. They are generally issued 
to deceive collectors. Among these are the issues 
for South Moluccas and the uninhabited Scottish 
island of Staffa. The 1923 famine relief stamps of 
Azerbaijan were bogus, but these too were also 
subsequently forged.[3]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philatelic_fakes_and_forgeries

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/23/2005]

The good thing about THE CRYING OF LOT 49 by 
Thomas Pynchon (ISBN 0-060-93167-1) is that it is 
short. The bad thing is that it is incomprehensible, 
and does not even have a real ending. Having 
slogged my way through this for our reading group, 
I now know I can skip all the rest of Pynchon's works. 
Oh, there is one other good thing--according to 
Charles Harris, Pynchon got all the philately correct, 
or at least wrong in an explainable way. (For 
example, the ink on some of the stamps seems to 
react to chemicals incorrectly--but since the stamps 
are forgeries, that is excusable.)

http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper/rev-p.htm