searching for trystero

Came across this while vainly searching for Trystero among the virtual ruins of the Google waste land:

"[Thomas] Pynchon supplied the liner notes to Spiked! The Music of Spike Jones. In his notes, he writes of Spike's unique blend of music as being 'like good cowbell solos, few and far between.'"

Spike Jones was the "Weird" Al Yankovic of his time, a novelty songster supreme, not to be confused with director Spike Jonze.

Thomas Pynchon writes dense, seemingly complicated books with simple messages at their core. He is a recluse, and I ascribe the attributes of 'pataphysics to him and his work.

"More Cowbell" is a catch-phrase nowadays, thanks to a hilarious sketch on Saturday Night Live, featuring guest Chrisopther Walken as the producer for the underrated rock band Blue Oyster Cult. Will Ferrell plays "Gene Frenkle", who plays the famous cowbell on "Don't Fear The Reaper".

I love this sketch because, as a fan of BOC, I know that there is no such person as Gene Frenkle. He exists in the mind of an SNL writer.


*/*


In an unrelated anecdote, I transferred an old song of mine from the 4-track cassette player to my computer last Sunday night. There was a cowbell section in the middle of one of the parts, one that I felt somewhat embarrassed by... only because the cowbell was TOO LOUD in the mix.

I reversed the section (using my Wavelab plug-ins) and came up with some weird sonic texture, but now that I've read that Pynchon quote I'm going to restore the cowbell section. After all, I wrote the fucking song ten years ago, and if anyone accuses me of jumping on the cowbell bandwagon I'll kick them in the coccyx.


*/*


I own a copy of a book that I discovered through an anthology entitled Writers In Revolt, compiled by Terry Southern, Richard Seaver and Alexander Trocchi.

This book is called The Recognitions, by William Gaddis.

Years later, I found the book at a yard sale, for one dollar. I bought it and read it. I can't say I fully understand it, but thanks to that book I was later able to tackle Ulysses and other dense masterpieces with some relative ease, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest notwithstanding.

One interesting thing about Gaddis-- like Pynchon, he was a recluse. No one ever took a photo of him, I suppose. This led many to believe that Gaddis, whose literary debut preceded Pynchon's by a considerable amount of time, was actually Pynchon writing pseudonymously.

I'd never read Pynchon before Gaddis, so when I finally read The Crying of Lot 49, I was intrigued by identity games going on.

Seems that the notion of Pynchon and Gaddis being one and the same was put forth by an obscure poet named Thomas Hawkins. Hawkins was a fan of Gaddis' The Recognitions, and so when he came across an indie San Francisco publication called newspaper, published by one "Jack Green", Hawkins couldn't help but notice the stylistic similarities between Gaddis and Green.

At the time, Hawkins was an aspiring writer who never was fully accepted by the SF Beat poets like Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Working as a postal worker to make ends meet, Hawkins suddenly became obsessed with finding out about Jack Green and William Gaddis.

Hawkins sent letters to Green loaded with traps and snares, but Green never admitted any complicity with Gaddis. And when Thomas Pynchon published his first novel in 1963, Hawkins took notice and began to actively promote the idea that Gaddis and Pynchon were the same person.

Add to all of this a strange sidenote: the tongue-in-cheek letters of one "Wanda Tinasky" were being published in Mendicino County and later in an Anderson Valley newspaper on a regular basis. No one knew who Wanda Tinasky was, so once again the names of Pynchon and Gaddis-- two notorious recluses --started to emerge above the fray. Chief among the spreaders of this train of thought was none other than Thomas Hawkins.

It got to the point where a man named Don Foster, who was successful at outing Joe Klein as the anonymous author of Primary Colors, was put on the trail to deduce whether Pynchon was indeed the author of the Tinasky letters, much to Pynchon's chagrin. Foster couldn't find any tangible proof linking Pynchon to Tinasky.

Then, in September of 1988, Thomas Hawkins killed his wife and left her rotting corpse in his home for almost a week, before torching the house and driving his car off of a cliff. By this time, his proposition (that Pynchon was in fact Tinasky) was met with near-universal agreement in the literary world.

That all changed when Don Foster uncovered the "smoking gun" behind the identity of Wanda Tinasky: Foster found much evidence pointing to Hawkins as the author of the letters, including the typewriter he wrote them on and several original drafts of content used in the letters themselves!

Eventually, William Gaddis died in 1998. Thomas Pynchon is still alive, making occasional cameos on The Simpsons, but in 1997 his privacy was almost violated when CNN, doing a feature on Pynchon, photographed him in public. Pynchon agreed to do a short sit-down with CNN provided that they didn't expose his identity.

Oh, and no one knows too much about Jack Green.

Imagine if Karl Rove had been Pynchon or Gaddis' literary agents... would I even be writing this right now?


*/*


Thomas Hawkins searched for his very own Trystero, the imaginary alternate postal system immortalized in Lot 49. That he was an actual postal worker is intriguing, given the labrynthine extremes to which this (mostly) true tale stretches.

That he didn't heed the cautionary moral of that novel is telling. Although there is no direct message in Lot 49, it can be inferred that the hero of that novel, Oedipa Maas, reads way too much into everyday things, perhaps in an attempt to transcend the mundane banality of her existence.

Either that, or there really is an alternate postal system.

All I know is, when I see or witness things that can't possibly be a mere coincidence, my tendency is to obsess over them for as long as I can milk them... then I laugh it off and let it go.

I mean, I don't think I have the smarts to uncover all the hoaxes, no matter how badly disguised they may be.

Better to keep that information inside your head... or better yet, write about it in some esoteric code. That's the smart way to approach it.

Isn't it?