When the secret world of spying starts

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

 "Yibble, yibble. . . ."

         Mark Kohut:
         [Oedipa lived at Echo Courts]..

NOT!!!

Oed lived [lives?] in Kinneret in the Pines, not to be confused with
Clint Eastwood's Carmel by the Sea where Richard & Mimi Farina
were residing as both Richard and Tommy Boy put finishing touches 
on their respective literary enterprises in 1966. San Narcisco is 
somewhere on the periphery of Hollywood. Ventura would do quite 
nicely, thank you. It would only be natural, then, that Echo Courts
would be in San Narcisco. I am not aware of any psychologically 
inflected exegesis of The Crying of Lot 49, but the following is on point.

L.S.D. therapy, still on the table in 1964, lies at the heart of CoL49.
L.S.D. therapy was dispensed in the context of psychological therapies.
This is pre-new age [though, like Crowley and his cohorts, in fact the 
first wave of the New Age/Aeon] use of this innately shamanic 
substance. So there are a great many psychological terms thrown in just
for laughs, as this is after all a form of satire and  psychology was a very 
popular target for satire in the mid-sixties. Thus Oedipa, San Narcisco 
and late night calls from Dr. Hilarius.

A lady who worked at University Press Books [I've conveniently 
forgotten her name] told me that she was in a car with TRP as 
they drove into South San Francisco and he blurted "San Narcisco".
But of course, San Narcisco is a place in Southern California where 
Oed goes to chase after mirrorings and projections. Ventura comes to
mind due to a combination of those impossibly high street numbers
[noticed that as a kid, during the time the book was in progress] and the 
regions affiliation to Hollywood, all that suntanned decadence.

The earliest Renaissance Faires were there with parodies of
Jacobean theater emerging via various productions at the Faires.
The Firesign Theater's "Anything You Want To", a Shakesperean
Parody, first emerged at those early faires. The lot in Agoura happened 
to be the lot where a lot of Westerns were made, it was also known as 
the Paramount [or paranoid] Ranch. Any of you who perused a 
little pamphlet entitled "Gravity's Rainbow" might have noticed a whole 
lot of references to early talkies? Remember that when William Fox's 
investments and developments in sound on film resulted in Fox 
getting the shaft from "Them" [Western Electric, G.E., RCA, I.G.  
Farben, usw. . . .], the investment firm of "Pynchon & Co. went 
down with it. Co-incidence? I think not. . . .

Fernando Arrabal's "The Automobile Graveyard" obviously was on TRP's 
mind, both Oed's coupling with Metzger [as Metzger is mirrored on the 
tube] and "The Courier's Tragedy" openly display their various debts to 
theater of the absurd/theater of cruelty. Think of Mucho Maas' nightmare,
"Nada, Nada, Nada. . . ." Which brings us back to psychotherapy and 
another reminder that, after all is said and done, it is basically a satire.

The deeper and scarier levels of The Crying of Lot 49 are expanded to 
their fullest in Against the Day. Oedipa Maas is investigating the legacy 
of Pierce Inverarity, who collected evidence of an earlier, deeper legacy, 
a buried history. If Thomas Pynchon is projecting himself into Oedipa 
Maas we see the author looking at his inheritance. Pynchon's inheritance,
his legacy, is his family name. Ultimately, the big issue is heresy. "The
Courier's Tragedy" shows what heresy meant in William Pynchon's time.

Attached Message	
From:		Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>  [ Save Address ]
To:		pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Subject:		When the secret world of spying starts
Date:		Sun, 27 Jan 2008 01:08:08 +0000

one loses one's identity...
on Cyprian: "allowing a lurid carnival of identities to enter his writing"-p697
 
one's very words are no longer one's own:
"while using your intersting mouth, while it remains yours to use".--p.698
 
One prostitutes oneself: "the price they settled on"--p699
 
And loses one's "home: "And don't imagine home as a very safe place to 
be"--p.699
 
and one's very "freedom":
as he grew more aware of the surveillance"...."see what radius of freedom the 
watchers would allow him".---p700
 
until one was led to a room with a "peculiar absence of echo"....like 
interrogation rooms everywhere,as in Darkness at Noon, elsewhere....
[Oedipa lived at Echo Courts]..
but there is no possibility of an echo here.......
 
Awful....