THE SALT SHAKER RITUAL

I have never read Thomas Pynchon until recently. I found a book of his titled Vineland in a used book shop known as The Iliad in North Hollywood late last year. I bought it for a dollar and just barely finished it last week.

I've been told by many intelligent people that not only should I read Pynchon but that I would like him. I always resist the things that people think I would like, however, and so it has been some time since I've felt comfortable enough to pick up one of his formidable novels.

I can see why people have stated that I would enjoy Pynchon: he is one of the most 'pataphysical writers of the 20th Century.

To update: 'pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions, treating every event as singular and extraordinary.

I am currently immersed in The Crying Of Lot 49. Reading the novel reminds me of a game I used to play with my Theater Arts friends in high school.

We would convene at Twain's, a rundown coffee shop in North Hollywood, bordering Studio City. We were young, broke, and stoned, ordering plates of fries, cups of coffee, and smoking cigarettes like pistols found at a murder scene.

We would spend hours at a time, monopolizing one booth, bored and wondering if there was anything better to do than sit in a coffee shop eating fries and going out to someone's car for an occasional pot smoke-out.

To kill the time, someone would start up this game where one person would pick up the salt shakers on the table and commence to perform some far-out combinations: rotating the shakers around each other, placing one atop the other, clicking them together, and so on. Then, the person handling the shakers would stop and ask aloud, "What number?"

Those of us in on the joke would know what the number was, and anyone not in on the joke would be stymied. They would ask to see the "pattern" again, and it was always different. Yet, the same number would arise even out of a different pattern. Sometimes, it was a different number, but it was always between one and ten. No amount of logic could guide a novice through the machinations of the salt shaker ritual. You either knew the secret, or you went insane trying to figure it out.

Sometimes, the ones not in on the joke would get frustrated to the point of tears and tantrums. This only made the others laugh, because the answer was so deceptively simple. Time would fly, and maybe one or two smart cookies would break the "code": the solution lay in the number of fingers the shaker handler would leave out on the table after he was done performing ther ritual.

Of course, no one blew the joke, affording the ones who did not get it a chance to figure it out on their own. Eventually, everyone would get it, just by glancing down at the table and seeing the corresponding number of fingers laying out on the table.

Afterwards, everyone felt like they were somehow superior to anyone else outside of the closed circle of our friends. If the Salt Shaker Ritual was ever introduced to an outsider, everyone who was previously in-the-dark but now in-the-know would pounce on the chance to drive someone else crazy.

That, to me, is what The Crying Of Lot 49 is all about... at least, for now. I haven't finished it yet.

Like with Joyce's Finnegans Wake, I'm going to wait until I have a tremendous amount of free time to try and decipher Gravity's Rainbow.


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My life has been all about being in the "excluded middle". Maybe it's because I'm the middle child in my family, and so the concept of the excluded middle resonates wildly with me...

I have struggled to divine meaning from things that seemingly have no pattern. I am constantly trying to arrange chaos into something resembling order. Art is the ultimate expression of the corralling of chaos into some sort of ordered holding pen. To take elements that have no surface relation and "connect the dots", so to speak, is a hobby that I never tire of, and the arranging of language is a prime example of this.

I also have been on the other end of the analytical side of art, having created things that left others in a fog trying to figure out what it signifies. Many times, I get armchair psychiatrists trying to take what they know of my life and drawing inferences from my works.

Sometimes, they are correct, but often times they are off by miles. At any given time, I pick a name for a character because I like the sound of it. There is no other correlation, but it is interesting to see others interpret my choices. They might be incorrect in their assumption that I deliberately made a choice for a certain name, but I am also impressed if their explanation holds water.

A good example is the name "Eve". Obviously, this is not her real name, and it doesn't resemble her real name in any way. In fact, Eve's real name can have a myriad of different literary meanings in and of itself. But when I first started mentioning Eve in my blog, a few intelligent readers commented that I may have chosen the name as a reference to the biblical Eve, the woman who unleashed sin upon the Western world.

This was an interesting line to draw, because although I didn't intend for that to be the case, one could argue it very well. At the time, I was lamenting my relationship to her, and someone who didn't know either myself or Eve personally could make that leap of logic soundly.

For the record: I chose the name Eve because of a picture she drew for me once, of a naked woman holding an apple while standing next to a tree in a garden with a snake leering at her. She drew the woman in the picture to look like her, but I can guarantee that if I brought up the resemblance to her, she would write it off as coincidence.

So, in other words, I did choose the name as a reference to the biblical Eve, but not for the same reasons that others have divined.

This is what makes art and the analysis of art so fucking fascinating to me.

I read an analysis of the first chapter in Lot 49 yesterday that touched upon this network of near-misses and connections in art. There is a character named "Mucho" Maas in the novel. The author of the chapter analysis brought up the similarity between the words "mucho" and "macho". They used that to explain why Pynchon may have chosen such a name for this character.

I laughed aloud and said to myself, "What about the fact that 'mucho mas' means 'much more' in Spanish?"

Again, an example of how people read between the in-between lines. But whose analysis is more correct, mine or the chapter analyst?

The answer: Pynchon's analysis would be more correct than either of ours.

And, of course, Pynchon is famous for being a recluse.


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I admire the romantic image of the anonymous benefactor. For instance, the creation of the pseudonym "Sex McGinty" was first intended as a red herring. To further this elaborate high school ruse, I started writing under the name "Hunter S. Thompson" so that people would actually wonder if there was a "Sex McGinty" or not.

On a small scale, it worked. Classmates would come up to me, asking who Sex McGinty was, wondering if I was pulling their leg or not. I never let on, because I thought it was obvious that I was Sex McGinty. But, because I never tipped my hand any which way, the curious minds of my peers veered off into other tangents, other possibilties. The answer was right there in front of them, hidden in plain view.

Pynchon is a genius for becoming invisible. This allows people to analyze his work without rifling through his life and times for answers to the difficult questions his novels elicit. Because of his cipher status, his work resists categorization and rational analysis. No one can take a publicized incident in his life and superimpose it onto any of the themes in his novels.

What little is known about him tends to go this route. Evidently, before he wrote Lot 49, he worked as a technical writer and engineering aide for the Seattle division of Boeing Aircraft. Thus, the use of technical lingo and jargon in his books has a root in his actual life, but I sense that he realized the paradox of being a writer and trying to separate his life from his work. Shortly before Lot 49 was published, he embarked on a mysterious life-mission, to become a spectre, to render himself as unrecognizable in the real world as the author is in the body of his fictitious works.

Recently, The Simpsons ran a new episode where Thomas Pynchon was parodied. Imagine my shock when, as the end credits rolled, his name was mentioned as being a guest voice!

It was a scene straight out of one of his novels, and because of his insistence on remaining an enigma, the weight of the joke is spectacularly heavy.

Pynchon has been credited with writing other novels under pseudonyms (William Gaddis' The Recognitions is one of them) but I don't think it's him-- I think the name "Thomas Pynchon" stands alone and invites intrigue because he smartly made an early decision to let the work speak for itself, and the only way to do that is to remove the ego from the process of creation... which, of course, is an act of ego itself. No matter who the real Pynchon is, you just know he's having a laugh to himself when he does a guest spot on a show as subversive and 'pataphysical as The Simpsons.

Just as I got off on the narcissistic forfeiture of the identity of "Sex McGinty", I must also assume that Pynchon sometimes finds his covert status all-too-amusing. And nowadays, with cyberspace allowing us to be whatever it is we wish to be, it only makes sense that Pynchon's following grows daily online.

Now that I've shaken the salt and pepper up a bit here, please tell me:

What number?