ATDTDA (33) - p. 942 chick lit?

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

          Laura:
          p. 942:  "It was her old need for some kind of transcendence ..."

          Where's the multi-layered, enigmatic TRP in this paragraph?  
          This explicit rendering of what's going on in Yashmeen's 
          mind seems to be more in the realm of  "chick lit."  An homage?  
          Or is Pynchon just off his game here?

Local context for just about anything in AtD is usually a full page fore or 
aft. Thus:

"What are any of these 'utopian dreams' of ours but defective forms of time 
travel?"

And what is a Tarot card reading but a defective form of time travel?

I always see Yashmeen as the "Star" card, this one in particular:

http://i32.photobucket.com/albums/d39/thumbelina93/the-star-thoth-1.jpg

This and the following page from "Book of Thoth" demonstrates what the two "N" 
T.W. I. T.S. were talking about as they introduced Yashmeen to Lew:

http://tinyurl.com/68oajl

So the I.D. is a spot-on match. The question is, what do these thoughts of 
Yashmeen's have to do with the Star card?

I'll let that boil in my head for a bit, let it boil in yours as well. But I do 
recall my niece "Thelma" telling me that the Harris/Crowley "Star" card always 
gathers trancendence and yet wastes as much as she gathers, sometimes so 
overwhelmed by the jewels and riches and rewards as to lose as much as she 
gains, enabling her to gain more, enabling her to lose more and so on, an 
Erisian edition of Maxwell's Demon, now in Goddess form. But note as well that 
good old Nickey Nookshaft had to re-arrange his Tarot deck around the Star, 
therefore this a card of great significance for Crowley. 

His "New Aeon" envisioned in the era of AtD was soon to re-emerge as what 
we now think of as the "New Age" movement that popped up alongside personal 
computers and the Goddess movement of the eighties. This might seem like 
grasping at straws for some of you but please note that Vineland, with its many 
rich and varied parodies of "New Age Thinking" is a particular favorite over 
here. I spent a fair time in the regions mentioned in the novel. This Pynchon 
guy knows his New Age nomenclature and from whence it came. 
And the Nicky Nookshaft/O.T.O. stuff ain't no Red Herring in AtD, it's central.
The Star certainly belongs in "that unmapped country waiting beyond the 
frontiers and seas of time."