As a teenager, I remember, hanging out with some friends in a basement den and watching the Dan Ackroyd and Jim Belushi Anti-Classic Neighbors. About halfway through the film Tad - the most logical one among us - fell off the couch screaming, "It doesn't make sense!!! It doesn't make any sense! What does it mean! It does not compute!!!" - and nearly clawed his eyes out. To which I sat there thinking, no Neighbors. makes perfect sense. The world needs a little bit of anarchy to help keep life from becoming so streamlined that we zip right past it without blinking an eye. Sometimes we need to dance a strange ahrythymic belly dance to a convoluted and impossible song if only keep Shiva the destroyer well aware of our enmitable presence.

Other times we just like f*cking with people.

Which is why I hope Tad never picked up this slim, little volume of ultradense prose because he would probably read it and wrap himself in bacon and dive headfirst into a scorpion pit. Which is not to say that The Crying of Lot 49 does not make any sense. Quite the contrary, the book is masterful in how it keeps its balance right on the very edge of possibly making sense and making no sense whatsoever.

The problem is the tell-tale Pynchon density which makes it seem like you are watching a cartoon animated with shopping mall brand magic eye technology. There's something back there admist all the colorful fuzz, and if you could just tweak and turn your eyeballs to the correct linear alignment you might be able to see it - but the story keeps moving with frames spinning almost too fast to keep up. There are definite elements of 1960's culture vs counter-culture wrapped up in its spindling fractured tale of competing postal services, but you can never confidentally say that this is what it's all about - a running motif in Pynchon's work. He writes with so much density in so many different directions that you can never say with honest conviction that this theory or another is what it's all about.

But is this good?

Ad maxis, The Crying of Lot 49 also has a lot that is wrong with it. The characters sometimes feel like 2-D cut-outs in a 3-D world. There is no great sense of drive, just a steady flow forward. And often Pynchon will go off on a tangent sounding caught half-way between being the horn-rimmed editor of Popular Mechanics and an acid dropping speed freak. It's no wonder the guy doesn't give interviews. Ah. But every now and then he does treat us to some simply excellent and outlandish writing.

One thing that I kept wondering while sliding through the pages, is not what or who is behind the Tristero conspiracy, but would Pynchon even be published in today's literary climate. Could a boiled down synopsis even be made of one of his works? Lets say he didn't have the famous name. Let's call him Richard Farina - a talented nobody from somewhere out in the heartland. No discernable formula, audience, or marketing tie-ins. He won't go on book tours or even let his picture be taken, and he's going up against the thrice strained pap of mass-marketted fatntasy author/clones whose first names are Terry (with the one exception of Pratchett). It could be that the greatest anarchistic prank is the presence of Pynchon himself. Just another strange convoluted belly dancer that the literary world keeps employed to make sure Shiva the destroyer is well aware of its secret emnity despite the god's dominance over our postmodern age.

Or maybe not.

Well one thing is certain. If you throw Richard Farina's manuscript in the WASTE it will definitely be transported via a secret system of underground postal workers to arrive in someone's grubby hands somewhere.

And that's what it's all about.