Pynchon feature for new online mag?

[Joe Allonby]

Very Slothropian. If only you had been sticking pins in a map.

On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 11:24 AM, Robin Landseadel
<robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
> Down the Rabbit Hole.
>
> My early education prepared me to become Pynchon’s biographer, a heuristic
> fabulist. Learned to read before I could talk, read Sherlock Holmes,
> Voltaire and Swift before Wonderland/Looking-Glass.  Was thrown into the
> center of the Civil Rights movement, L.A. chapter. Spent the summer of ’66
> in Watts, had rocket tests in my backyard—J.P.L.’s front yard—in ‘64. Three
> decades later I.G. Farben moves into Berkeley via the Bayer Labs
> gene-splicing factory, conveniently located two blocks from my old house.
>
> It’s not simply that I know where our fair-haired boy came from—I’ve lived
> there when he was living there including a few places not, strictly
> speaking, on the map, Stencilizing his every move without being aware of my
> actions—because all this trail-seeking was going on before I read any
> Pynchon. In any case, my narration cannot be trusted, God knows how much
> projection is going on here. And yet—I know where and when and managed to
> bump into a few whos as well. But like the master said, I only get to tickle
> his creatures.
>
> I moved to Berkeley in 1979. Learned about “stripping” mass-market
> paperbacks—tear off the cover and mail back to the publisher/distributor,
> throw out the book— while working at Campus Textbook Exchange, directly
> across the street from Sproul Plaza. One of the books being thrown out was
> The Crying of Lot 49, then being taught by a number of Profs at the UC. Felt
> like a moment right out of Fahrenheit 451. I retrieved a copy from the
> dumpster and started reading.  The Campus Textbook Exchange gig didn't last
> long and the next few months involved bumping around a lot of temp jobs—one
> involved taking AC Transit buses to the Transbay Terminal. Eventually got
> familiar with the general territory of Oedipa’s wild Midnight Climax of a
> ride, that late night tour through San Francisco’s land of the dispossessed,
> Yo-Yo-ing through the fog. After this adventure in temping, landed at the
> Northern Renaissance Faire, living in a spider-infested 16th scale Tudor
> mansion. Managed to get another temp job, this time from the phone company,
> an assignment that enabled me to read the entirety of Gravity’s Rainbow on
> the job.
>
> Then things got strange.