CoL 49 Pynchonwiki

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

          Then there's my brittle but beloved 1967 Bantam paperback 
          at 138 pages with its Peter-Max-ish "psychedelic" cover: a 
          paisley rainbow Oedipa all a-frug with a vaguely Ringo-ish 
          drummer in the background. Sub-title lines:
 
          A bizarre, saturnalian plunge into the underground
          "A streamlined doomsday machine."
          -The New York Times

Pulled my first, 'stripped', 'streamlined doomsday machine mass 
market' copy out of the waste bin of Berkeley's 'Campus Textbook 
Exchange' in 1979, completely absorbed in Elizabethian times and 
ways as a Duck Monger or Apocathary at the Renaissance Faires 
in California. Alarm bells went off in my head like you wouldn't 
believe, half-living on the  Novato/Agoura circuit for quite a few years,
having a number of rather strange experiences in the process,
many of which would slide in to an expanded 'Vineland' without 
so much as losing a paradiddle. Right after reading CoL49, ended up
living in a 1/16th mock-up of a Tudor Castle [Tudor Nightmare 
Village] along with at least 16 so-to-be-evicted black widows.
While living on the Northern Ren Fair site, also read Gravity's 
Rainbow, mostly at this utterly absurd part-time job where I 
had to call 40 people a day who just got that new-fangled 
'modular phone' [this was in Marin, I had to call up Marinites 
in 1980 and ask them "Is you're phone working?", which, in
addition to suppling at least an hour a day of dialog straight of 
Vineland, also left me with about 5 hours where I could read, 
undisturbed. I never laughed as hard as I did when crossing the 
little shindig those counterforce boys fuck up in a totally Satiricon 
Styl-ed manner, the Gross Suckling Infant Conference v. the 
BBH/I.G. Farben/Ma Bell/Big Oil/Big Bizness crowd.
As I Recall, the Gross-Out won a little patch of ground that 
was immediatly paved over and turned into a Wal-Mart.
I must have sounded mad to those uptight assholes 
at Pac Bell, still suckin' on big Ma Bell's teats back then, 
it was fuckin' hysterical.