The revolutionaries of May

[Robin Landseadel]

On Jul 27, 2009, at 4:07 AM, Tore Rye Andersen wrote:

> John:
>
>> As I say, there's likely no more significance in these details than  
>> I am personally
>> finding in them, but then that's half the appeal of GR, some days  
>> anyway: on top of
>> the countless immensitoies which Pyhchon has deliberately sewn into  
>> the fabric, we
>> each of us have found our own resonances and meanings. Haven't we?
>
> Righto. In the words of the man himself:
>
> "But the Rocket has to be many tings, it must answer to a number of  
> different shapes
> in the dreams of those who touch it - in combat, in tunnel, on paper  
> [...]. Each will
> have his personal Rocket."

My "personal rocket" is Geli Tripping's tale. Of course, for "rocket"  
we can substitute "great white whale" or "idee fixe." My scrying of  
the Hagiography of OBA indicates more than passing familiarity with  
such things as tarot and astrology:

	. . . She told me that, when she knew him, Pynchon was very
	thin and full of eccentricities. He would let his rent lapse three or
	four months and then pay it all at once. For a while he carried
	around a Russian history book that he was translating with a
	Russian dictionary. He once gave her a deck of Tarot cards as
	a gift, saying that he had to part with them because they were
	always true and scared him to death. . .

	. . . Hall also noted that Pynchon was intensely private and
	extremely paranoid.

	"I think he studied people," Hall said. "I don't think you were
	allowed around him if you weren't interesting and you weren't
	allowed back if he couldn't trust you."
	Hall is sure that he was being studied because a conversation
	he recalled having with Pynchon about the police using
	computer surveillance to track drug dealers turned up in the
	author's novel "Vineland" 20 years later. He claimed that
	horoscopes Pynchon did of Hall and others turned up on behalf
	of characters in "Gravity's Rainbow."

	http://www.theaesthetic.com/NewFiles/pynchon.html

Los Angeles, circa 1966/1974 was full of astrological talk [my mom  
would go off on a high speed-rap on the subject about three cups o'  
joe in to her morning routine] and for what ever reason I managed to  
get onto the circuit that leads to where the denizens of the Witches'  
Woods [that sector of the original Renaissance Faire where you could  
get your cards read] joined up with far left. Like Geli Tripping.  
Shasta in IV can be see in that light as a portrayal of what was once  
"hippie love magic," only this time the script reads more like  
something from  "Out of the Past."

	"Build My Gallows High, Baby."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNuORUFx81g