VLVL (13) p 274 - "...Hooking a U" [Hidden SS's]

[richardryannyc at yahoo.com]

"'Only to let 'em know we've been here's all,' muttered Rosco, hooking a U and peeling away, halfway to the gate getting into a skid, leaving behind a set of big S's that remained awhile on the wet blacktop."

Hard not for me to encounter this image and think of it as a good-humored flip of the Pynchon bird at the critics like John Gardner who complained about all the hidden "SS's" in GR:

"[Gardner being interviewed:]...You come into a classroom with Gravity's Rainbow and you can talk and talk and talk because there are tricks coming out of tricks. You know, you can find the secret hidden SS's everywhere. You can talk about modern history and you can talk about existentialism, you can talk about Freud, you can talk about Marx, and so on. There are millions and millions of things to talk about. The book may not be a very good story, it may be philosophically unsound, it may be psychologically unsound, it may be overwrought, it may be boring, it may be wonderful, too. But whatever the case, the fact is that it's much easier to teach. The result is, as we get more and more courses about literature, you know, which is happening--more and more courses are being taught about books. The result is that you get more and more courses about books that are easy to teach, because they're arcane, or they're weird, or something else. You get farther and
 farther away from a sense of what is a good book."


http://www.gargoylemagazine.com/gargoyle/Issues/scanned/issue11/gardner.htm