AtDTDA: Something I managed to miss

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

So I'm surfin', checking out Google to see if anybody's made any GR/New Ken 
Burns WWII Doc. connections yet [will Slothrop get any airtime?], and I run 
across this Newsweek review of AtD. You remember, the guy who SPREAD HIS REVIEW 
ACROSS THREE SEPARATE ISSUES!!!! and by golly he loves it and here's some 
reasonable proof of that:


Complicating things, Pynchon’s not merely eccentric and erudite, he’s a sneaky 
game player. (And he inspires bizarre acts in others: the illustrations at the 
top of this review are excerpted from graphic artist Zak Smith’s “Gravity’s 
Rainbow Illustrated,” for which Smith created over 750 drawings, paintings and 
photos, each inspired by a page of Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow.”) He tosses in 
little things just to see if we’re paying attention? Just to amuse himself? 
Dunno. But he made me laugh with a minor character named Al Mar-Faud, who speaks 
just enough English to say he’s going out hunting “gwouse.” And he made me 
wonder just how far he’ll go to perpetrate a literary prank. On the basis 
of the Marty Robbins reference, I’d say pretty darn far. Yeah, 
white-sport-coat-pink-carnation Marty Robbins. More precisely, “Gunfighter 
Ballads” Marty Robbins, because that’s where, in the song “El Paso,” you’ll hear 
all about Rosa’s Cantina and the doomed cowboy who’s gunned down at the end ri
ght after he sings, “Off to my right I see five mounted cowboys/ Off to my left 
ride a dozen or more.” Which will help you (at least for a paragraph or two) 
when “Against the Day”'s action shifts briefly to El Paso, and a character 
complains that the Law & Order League has been making complaints, “but not so 
much since ‘em seventeen mounted cowboys started runnin their patrol.” Now 
that’s math I can do. The point, though, is that while I’m catching one 
reference, I feel like I’m missing three more.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15996230/site/newsweek/

. . . .I'll probably go back to this well later, there's plenty of good obs. in 
this review.