The Crying of Lot 49: Chapter 4

In this chapter I found that WASTE wasn't waste but W.A.S.T.E. What did it stand for? Who would chose that acronym for anything he/she should have come up with something else which didn't have two meanings. However, there is another option, Pynchon might have chosen this acronym to fool the reader and then to mock him if he/she thought it meant really waste (which unfortunately, I did). On the other hand I thought the Hymn of the Yoyodine workers was ridiculous and it made me remember the Umpa Lumpas in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

In this chapter, things start getting messed up. I didn't understand how exactly the Nefastis machine or the Maxwell's Demon and what its purpose was apart from proving wrong a law of thermodynamics. I think Oedipa is somewhat paranoic, she thinks that behind this symbol there is a huge conspiration and she tries to find out everything. Sometimes and some things are coincidences but she has an obsession with the trystero symbol and that is why she notices it wherever she goes. Apart from that I think it's very unlikely for someone to remember a play for so long and remember what exactly the actor said the in a specific line.

During the visit to Mr. Troth, I realized that Oedipa after all might not be as crazy as I thought. However, not everybody carrying the Trystero symbol had to know what it meant and had to be a part of a secret society. I liked the story about the Pony Express and the Indians, and how before there were other systems for communicating, I liked the idea that some secret society might have lasted since then. I thought it strange that Oedipa even found stamps with the Trystero symbol on them; I thought it was too forced. That couldn’t be a casualty, it had to be planned by someone: probably by Pierce. Cohen’s work made me remember the movie “Catch me if you Can” because Cohen examined each stamp so thoroughly and well that if he had wanted to falsify one he could have done so perfectly well. In “Catch me if you Can” the main character looks as closely as Cohen but to checks and he falsifies them, maybe, if he wanted he could have made an almost imperceptible mock in one of the checks just like the ones Cohen noticed in his stamps.
I thought it made the book more interesting when the Taxis and the Thurn postage systems came in the picture. Why is she so obsessed with the mail system? What is so exciting about another mailing system apart from the government’s one?
Vocabulary:
Philatelist: expert who studies stamps.
Adenoidal: sounding as if the nose were pinched; "a whining nasal voice"