THOMAS PYNCHON

American Novelist

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    • Slow Learner (1984)
    • Vineland (1990)
    • Mason & Dixon (1997)
    • Against the Day (2006)
    • Inherent Vice (2009)
    • Bleeding Edge (2013)
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Thomas Pynchon – No Return on the V-Mail – Book Week 1964

February 17, 2024 by TPmaster Leave a Comment

I first came across a mention of Dick Schaap‘s 1964 article about Thomas Pynchon’s efforts to remain out of the public eye via a New York Times article “Pynchon’s Letters Nudge His Mask” (4 March 1998), which included a passage about to Pynchon’s success in avoiding the press after the publication of his first novel, V. (1963):

Although Mr. Pynchon apparently eluded those magazine reporters, he had a more difficult time with Dick Schaap, who in 1964 was the city editor of The New York Herald Tribune. Mr. Schaap was writing an article about Mr. Pynchon for Book Week, The Tribune‘s literary supplement. Mr. Pynchon was furious, assuming that the piece ‘will be riddled with the same lies, calumnies and all-around knavish disregard for my privacy’ as previous articles.

When the Herald Tribune article is printed, Mr. Pynchon buys the newspaper in Mexico. It makes him ‘sick, almost homicidal,’ especially the comments about a former girlfriend.

In response to Mr. Pynchon’s remarks, Mr. Schaap, an author and television commentator, said recently, ‘Nothing in my article was intended to be damaging to his life or his work, for which I have total respect.’

Although Mr. Schaap’s reputation rested firmly on his sports writing, here he was digging around to locate the whereabouts of a recently minted literary star. His article, which appeared in the New York Herald Tribune‘s “Book Week” magazine, provides an interesting glimpse into Pynchon’s early efforts to remain out of the public eye. A colleague of mine believes that what might have most annoyed Pynchon was the article’s “chatty knowingness.”
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Pynchon History, Pynchon in the Media

Lifting the Veil on Life of a Literary Recluse – Helen Dudar

September 3, 2021 by TPmaster 2 Comments

Lifting the Veil on Life of a Literary Recluse

By Helen Dudar, a freelance writer living in New York who writes about publishing

[Dudar, Helen. “Lifting the Veil on Life of a Literary Recluse.” Chicago Tribune Bookworld 8 Apr. 1984: 35-36. Reprinted as “A Pynchon for Privacy.” Newsday 9 Apr. 1984, sec. II: 3.]

Picture this: Your dinner guest is Thomas Pynchon, the writer much of scholarly America considers our best living novelist. He is also a tantalizingly shadowy figure; a generation of fervent readers has fantasized meeting him, and legions of journalists yearn to interview him. So what will he talk about? He may talk about movies, about which, as any attentive student would know, he has a lifetime hoard of memories. He may talk, knowledgeably, about baseball. He will talk about himself, wittily and artfully, without allowing intimacy to seep into the conversation. If he is camping in your house for a spell, he may quarrel with your preschool child about the television shows they will watch; his tastes run to the sort of junk embraced by any addict committed to pop culture.

Here we have, if not a 3-D portrait, a slightly fuzzy outline of Pynchon, author of V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity’s Rainbow, a man widely thought to rival J.D. Salinger in reclusiveness. The fact is that any prominent person who will not confront the media is apt to suffer the label of recluse. Pynchon has never delivered himself into the hands of the working press, has not been photographed for publication since his yearbook days and lets his friends know that talking about him publicly amounts to betrayal.

But if Howard Hughes, squirreled away in a hotel with a 10-year growth of toenails, is the modern avatar of invisibility, Pynchon hardly qualifies. He has been seen; he gets around; he enjoys the company of women; he has phone pals, better than pen pals, distanced as they are by long lines.

I’m telling you all this because your neighborhood bookstore should have on hand the first Pynchon since Gravity’s Rainbow, that immense, dense, apocalyptic vision of the world at war, which was published in 1973, and because this new book is certain to result in a fresh set of ruminations about his so-called solitary life.

The book, Slow Learner (Little, Brown, $14.95), is not a new work, but a collection of five early stories, four written while he was still at Cornell University, all viewed with disarming deprecation by their author. For years, the stories have been turning up in unauthorized pamphlet editions, and, apparently weary of the piracy, Pynchon agreed to their publication. When the book was offered around the trade last year, it carried a Rolls-Royce price tag. Pynchon does not customarily nest on best-seller lists, but he is a campus perennial in paperback and a quality lit ornament in any publishing house. Even so, there were scattered gasps of surprise at the report that Little, Brown had paid a lavish $150,000 for it.

The collection is no Dubliners (the reference that comes to mind because Rainbow was widely greeted as an event akin to the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses), but it is a fascinating display of the feeling for style and imagined event this greatly talented, intelligent man had by the time he was 21. The stories are flabby and only marginally interesting. Maybe Pynchon’s obsessions were not fully focused; the fiction reads like the work of a man who has yet to learn how to express what is flickering dangerously at the edge of his consciousness.

For the Pynchon cultist, the real treat is his introduction, the first autobiographical notes ever to flow from his hand into print. It is relaxed and charming and sometimes alarmingly cute, an excess to be found in his fiction on occasion. Nearing his 47th birthday, Pynchon talks of the fumbling writer he was, of the sources for the stories, of the music and writings that influenced him.
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Pynchon General News, Pynchon History, Pynchon in the Media

The Liner Notes for “Barefoot in the Head” (1990) – NOT written by Thomas Pynchon

March 9, 2018 by TPmaster 2 Comments

Liner notes by Thomas Pynchon Thomas Pynchon has written liner notes, as of this date, for two albums: Spiked! The Music of Spike Jones (1994) and Nobody’s Cool (1996) by Lotion.

Another LP — Barefoot in the Head (1990) — has liner notes that are ascribed to Thomas Pynchon but are DEFINITELY not written by Pynchon (confirmed in no uncertain terms by the author’s agent). The LP, by Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich (from Borbetomagus) and Thurston Moore (of Sonic Youth), borrows not only Pynchon’s name, but also its title — from Barefoot in the Head (1969), Brian Aldiss’ hallucinogenic sci-fi novel — as well as its cover art — La Femme 100 Têtes (1929) — by the German artist Max Ernst.

What follows are the faux-Pynchon liner notes which are a passable pastiche but lacking that certain je ne sais quoi…

□ □ □ □ □ □ □

One night Johnson, Coley and I were sitting in the back yard with a bucket of fresh sangria and a few bongloads of some very righteous boo. I’d brought out a box of my live Sonic Youth tapes and we were arguing about Lee Ranaldo’s tongue vectors in the third quadrant of ‘Society is a Hole’ (Folk City, NYC 12/1/82) when one of T. Moore’s downstrokes caught our attention. We ran the tape back and listened to the passage a few times. The subtly monstrous and mindless GUSH with which T. Moore hit the ‘E’ chord made it obvious that his playing was not coming out of a complete spiritual void. This was a real revelation. It meant that he was capable of actually unclenching his brain and loosing demons of soul creativity.

Because we hate to see anyone lackeyed to jive-ass, pop-structure, white-man a-motionalism, a plan was immediately spun for freeing T. Moore from the shackles of Peggy Lee-descended dogshit that were obviously choking off his TRUE HUMAN FORCE. Deciding which hominid cudgels might be best wielded against these procedural chains was a lead pipe cinch. Who but Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich? These two men are the freest, loudest, swingin’est white motherfuckers to ever jaw-cleave an industrial strength reed. Their work with Borbetomagus has long been a raucous fountain of tonal explosion and aesthetic purity, as well as a black-gloved fist up the diz of all conservative musical architects. If anyone could blow the lock off of T. Moore’s creational emo-safe, Jim and Don were it.

The rest was a snap. I had my agent get in touch with all the parties. She explained the points of our proposal in no uncertain terms. The results are presented here. Two free men meet a slave. Everyone goes home barefoot. Right-fuckin’-on.

Thomas Pynchon, Somerville, MA
January 1990

So who wrote these liner notes?

The most likely suspect is the aforementioned Byron Coley, an American music critic who wrote for Forced Exposure magazine in the 1980s. He’s also written liner notes for many albums including for the 2007 deluxe edition of Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation. According to this interview, on the online magazine Perfect Sound Forever, Coley admits to making stuff up when answering written interview questions for Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon.

So Byron Coley is Prime Suspect here.

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Filed Under: Pynchon General News, Pynchon in the Media

Pynchon Dodges the Press After the Publication of V.

February 16, 2018 by TPmaster 1 Comment

This short article published on the heels of the publication of V., Pynchon’s first novel, describes and clarifies his so-called “reclusiveness.”

New York Post – 29 April 1963

Success is elusive and so is Thomas Pynchon now that he’s found success.

Pynchon won wide critical acclaim with this month’s publication of his bizarre first novel, “V.” He is now living in Mexico, but no one is quite sure where.

Pynchon’s publisher, J. B. Lippincott, says, “We used to give out his Mexico address, but he wrote and asked us not to. Now we don’t really know where he is.”

His mother, wife of Oyster Bay Town Supervisor Thomas Pynchon, denied that her son had become a recluse. She said: “He is still a member of the family. We haven’t seen him for three years, but he still calls and writes.”

A college friend said: “He isn’t anti-social. It’s just that he loathes personal publicity. He feels the book is the thing.”

No Lion in College

Pynchon is not alone in his belief that the book and not the author should be publicized. J. D. Salinger’s unavailability has itself attracted wide publicity. Nor is John Updike fond of being a public figure.

Actually, Pynchon’s reticence is not recent. While in college, a friend remembers, he was “not the kind of person who stays in the classroom.

“He would just go home and write amazing papers.”

“He was always a kind of an individualist,” his mother said. “When he decided to do something he just went off and did it.”

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Filed Under: Pynchon General News, Pynchon History, Pynchon in the Media

Pynchon on Record, Vol. 4

September 28, 2017 by Christian Hänggi 28 Comments

The British literature scholar Cedric Watts once wrote: “One test of literary merit is fecundity, the ability to generate offspring” (xix). More than many other novelists, Pynchon’s work has generated not only literary but also musical offspring: songs, bands, entire albums inspired by Pynchon’s themes and novels. In 1982, Steven Moore made a first attempt to collect such songs and inspirations in Pynchon Notes under the title “Pynchon on Record,” to which Laurence Daw added “More on Pynchon on Record” in 1983 (and later expanded the list on The Modern Word). Sixteen years later, Juan García Iborra and Oscar de Jódar Bonilla published an article that added more names to the previous lists. Since then, the search algorithms on the internet have vastly improved—and so has the amount of available information and the possibilities to upload one’s own material.

Laurie Anderson’s “Gravity’s Angel” from Mr. Heartbreak.

I wrote a dissertation on music in Pynchon’s work (which I hope to publish soon), and since I believe that no large-scale study on this topic would be complete without acknowledging his musical offspring, I spent many days researching his impact on the music scene. I ended up with a list of more than eighty songs, artists, albums, and record labels who make their nods to the novelist (by the latest update on 14 July 2020, the list has grown to about 120 entries), and I am happy to present it here, replete with links and comments.

The Crying of Lot 49 initially proved to be the most fruitful novel for musical adaptations, likely because its length made it more accessible to readers and because it has been around longer than any other Pynchon novel except for V. However, publishing this blog post and finding more references, Gravity’s Rainbow overtook The Crying of Lot 49. Gravity’s Rainbow’s opening sentence has been used for band names, album and track titles (it’s certainly easier to remember than the opening sentence of The Crying of Lot 49). V. also has a good number of entries but the more recent novels have not received the same kind of attention from musicians. The range of genres covered by these recordings spans jazz (remarkably little), experimental music of all kinds, new classical music, world music, and all sorts of pop/rock subgenres such as rock’n’roll, indie, punk, new wave, or metal. The references range from homages to quotations and from inspirations to adaptations.

Some were recorded by well-known or influential bands and musicians such as Laurie Anderson, Radiohead, Devo, Mark Knopfler, Bill Laswell, or Soft Machine, others by college bands and in bedroom studios. The fact that many of the works of music cataloged are from recent years can likely be explained by the better visibility lesser-known bands enjoy on the internet nowadays, particularly with websites such as Myspace (anyone still remember that?), Bandcamp, Soundcloud, and Youtube. I doubt that it took about fifty years after a novel was released to catch on in the music world. Most artists mentioned are based in Western Europe or North America. Although this may have to do with Pynchon’s popularity in these regions, it is more sensible to assume that I simply did not find artists whose references are in languages other than English. The reason that the adaptations of songs penned by Pynchon are predominantly recorded by lesser known artists may have to do with legal considerations. If little or no money is involved and the visibility of the artist is not so great, the author or the legal departments of the publishing houses may not care to intervene.

On the occasion of some of my New York and Philadelphia talks on the subject in 2015 and 2016 (and the Pynchon birthday party I organized at Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich), musician and poet Tyler Burba interpreted songs from different novels. When I presented my work on Pynchon’s saxophone and kazoo in Atlanta, local musicians Reese Burgan and Caleb Herron accompanied the talk on the respective instruments. There is no telling how many other artists have referenced Pynchon or recorded songs from his books or were simply inspired by his work, but if progeny is a mark of literary accomplishment, these albums, songs, and bands are testament to Pynchon’s wide-ranging appeal as a writer of sonic fiction.

The following list is ordered chronologically, first by novel, then by the work of music. My personal favorites are marked with a magenta heart, thus: ♥. I am certain that I overlooked a great many other examples, so please contribute in the comments section! I will periodically update this post (last update: Jan 16th, 2022).

Contents

1 Introduction (this page)
2 “Entropy” and V.
3 The Crying of Lot 49
4 Gravity’s Rainbow
5 Vineland, Mason & Dixon, Against the Day, and miscellaneous homages
6 Bibliography and Biography

Image credit (top of page): spread-open cover of Land of Kush’s 2009 album Against the Day.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6

Filed Under: Pynchon Analysis, Pynchon General News, Pynchon in the Media, Pynchon Inspired Tagged With: Pynchon Inspired, thomas pynchon

Cook’s Tour – Richard Poirier’s 1963 Review of Thomas Pynchon’s V.

September 22, 2017 by TPmaster Leave a Comment

Cook’s Tour

The New York Review of Books, June 1, 1963
by Thomas Pynchon
Lippincott, $5.95

Richard Poirier

Nothing more intricately conceived than Thomas Pynchon’s first novel has appeared in American fiction since the work in the thirties by Faulkner, Nathaniel West and Djuna Barnes, the last two being among the writers who have given him the courage of his artifices and of the assumptions that go with them. V. is full of self-mystified people consistently avoiding direct relations with one another through disguise or evasion, people living the disrupted existences either of the Cook’s Tour, in one plot or in the other, of a kind of contemporary tourism called “yo-yoing,” the pointless repetitive passage and return on any convenient ferry or subway. Neither of the two interwoven plots is presented in sequence. One involves a self-styled schlemihl named Benny Profane, his naval buddies, and a gang in New (sometimes “Nueva”) York who call themselves the Whole Sick Crew. The other is an international melodrama of spying that covers the years since 1898. It is reconstructed by Herbert Stencil – the name meaning that he is a copy of his father in the effort to keep track of the elusive V. He cannot be sure what V. is, whether she (or it) is not wholly a fantasy.

Even the title of the novel is thus cryptographic, V. comes to stand for anything to which, in the absence of love, one devotes his passion and curiosity. It can refer to a bar called V-note, where Benny and the Crew listen to a jazz player named McClintic Sphere; to Valetta on Malta; to a sewer rat, Veronica, so named by a Father Fairing who wants, in his efforts to convert the rats of New York to Roman Catholicism, to make Veronica his first saint and his mistress; to Venus, the goddess, the planet, the mons Veneris – to Venezuela and Queen Victoria, to Vesuvius and other volcanoes, to the mythical land of Vheissu with its iridescent spider monkeys. So far as Stencil is concerned, however, V. is a lady internationally renowned as spy, lover, transvestite and impersonator. She has been on the scene of various international crises since her first appearance in Cairo during the Fashoda incident in 1898. There, in her nineteenth year, and under the name Virginia Wren, she is deflowered by a British agent. The next year she is in Florence coincident with a manufactured crisis over Vheissu (and, of course, Venezuela), during which she seduces Stencil’s father at the British consulate, thereby becoming Stencil’s mother. In subsequent impersonations, she is identified in Paris in 1913 as the Lesbian fetishist lover of a dancer named Melanie l’Heuremaudit. Still later, she is placed in German Southwest Africa during a native rebellion in 1922, and in this instance is given two simultaneous identities by Stencil: as a child of sixteen with white-blond, hip-length hair and the information that “I am Hedwig Vogelsang, and my purpose on earth is to tantalize and send raving the race of man”; and as the older, more subtle Vera Meroving who sports a glass eye, the face of which is also a watch, and a star sapphire sewn into her navel on Malta in 1919 – she was known then as Veronica Manganese. She makes her last appearance, in Stencil’s increasingly weird dehumanization of the figure, again on Malta in 1939 when, disguised as a priest with a detachable gold foot, she is knocked unconscious in a bombing raid and disassembled by a group of children who are less mean than inquisitive.
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Pynchon Analysis, Pynchon in the Media, Pynchon Reviews Tagged With: Richard Poirier, thomas pynchon, V.

Rocket Power – Gravity’s Rainbow Reviewed by Richard Poirier – 1973

August 28, 2017 by TPmaster 3 Comments

Illus. – Charles Shields

GRAVITY’S RAINBOW.
By Thomas Pynchon.
896 pages.
Viking. $15; paperback, $4.95.

This review, by American literary critic Richard Poirier (1925 – 2009), which first appeared in The Saturday Review (1924 – 1986) on March 3, 1973, is one of the first reviews of Thomas Pynchon’s third novel. It is detailed and insightful and is, in fact, a great read before tackling Gravity’s Rainbow for the first time. What I find truly amazing is Poirier’s depth of understanding of Pynchon’s 760-page novel which he’d probably had for maybe a month or so, as it was published on February 28, 1973.

From The New York Times Obituary: “Mr. Poirier (pronounced to rhyme with “warrior”) was an old-fashioned man of letters — a writer, an editor, a publisher, a teacher — with a wide range of knowledge and interests. He was a busy reviewer for publications from The New York Review of Books to The London Review of Books, and his reviews could sting.”

Poirier also wrote excellent reviews of V. (The New York Review of Books), The Crying of Lot 49 (New York Times), and Slow Learner (The London Review of Books).

□ □ □ □ □ □ □

The fantastically variegated and multi­-structured V., which made Thomas Pynchon famous in 1963 and the wonder ever since of anyone who has tried to meet or photograph or interview him, is the most masterful first novel in the history of literature, the only one of its decade with the proportions and stylistic resources of a classic. Three years later came The Crying of Lot 49, more accessible only because very much shorter than the first, and like some particularly dazzling section left over from it. And now Gravity’s Rainbow. More ambitious than V., more topical (in that its central mystery is not a cryptogram but a supersonic rocket), and more nuanced, Gravity’s Rainbow is even less easy to assimilate into those interpretive schematizations of “apocalypse” and “entropy” by which Pynchon’s work has, up to now, been rigidified by his admirers.

At thirty-six, Pynchon has established himself as a novelist of major historical importance. More than any other living writer, including Norman Mailer, he has caught the inward movements of our time in outward manifestations of art and technology so that in being historical he must also be marvelously exorbitant. It is probable that he would not like being called “historical.” In Gravity’s Rainbow, even more than in his previous work, history — as Norman 0. Brown proposed in Life Against Death — seen as a form of neurosis, a record of the progressive attempt to impose the human will upon the movements of time. Even the very recording of history is such an effort. History-making man is Faustian man. But while this book offers such Faustian types as a rocket genius named Captain Blicero and a Pavlovian behaviorist named Edward Pointsman, it is evident that they are slaves to the systems they think they master.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Pynchon General News, Pynchon in the Media, Pynchon Reviews Tagged With: book reviews, gravitys rainbow, Richard Poirier, thomas pynchon

The Daily Show – Thomas Pynchon’s Foreword for the 10th Anniversary Concert Program

June 4, 2016 by TPmaster 1 Comment

Daily Show 10-year Anniversary ProgramIn 2006, Thomas Pynchon wrote the foreword to the program for The Daily Show’s Ten-Year Anniversary Concert, held November 16, 2006 at Irving Plaza in New York City.

When Scott Jacobson, a comedy writer who put together the concert, was asked about working Pynchon, he replied:

I knew it would be difficult to get the writers to submit pieces for the program – they’re a busy bunch of folks – so I thought I’d improve my odds by getting a foreword from someone so unlikely that it’d capture the staff’s interest. I dug up the email of Thomas Pynchon’s wife, who’s a literary agent, and pitched her the idea. To my surprise and delight, it all worked out. Pynchon actually faxed in that piece. He came into the office one day, too, and stayed for a taping. I had a brief conversation with him about Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers.

And now… Here it is in all its glory!

The Evolution of the Daily Show — by Thomas Pynchon*

Actually, it all began with Death to Smoochy. The green light had been given to proceed with Death to Smoochy 2 on the strength of the first weekend grosses, as well as some unexpected merchandising feedback. It seemed that “Smoochy the Rhino” items weren’t selling nearly as well as those based on the evil network executive “Marion Frank Stokes,” played by Jon Stewart. This applied across the spectrum — mouse pads, lunchboxes, T-shirts, McDonald’s tie-ins (the Happy Meal being briefly eclipsed by the Anxious Meal, served in a takeout bag bearing Mr. Stewart’s likeness) — you name it. Kids started showing up at school in business suits and wearing the same peculiar fringe haircut as the Stokes character, provoking peer commentary and vice-principalistic perplexity.

In the course of reviewing star availability for DTS2, however, one of the producers suddenly recalled that toward the end of the first picture it was strongly implied that “Frank Stokes” had been done away with in a violent manner, rendering perhaps problematic his appearance in Part Two. Options such as resurrection, identical twins, and the extensive use of flashbacks were entertained and discarded. Meanwhile the Frank Stokes Armani Edition action figure was outselling G.I Joe, Darth Vader, and eventually even Barbie herself. Focus groups began to hint at the possibility of a class action suit if “M.F.S.”, as he had come to be known, did not appear in Death to Smoochy 2.

Well. Talk about dilemmas! Script development sessions became notable for long and gloomy silences, until one day, down at the far end of some all-but-forgotten conference table, a screenwriter, just back from a weekend seminar in Canoga Park entitled “Disrespect — Make It Work For You,” tentatively raised his hand.

“Yes, I forget your name, you had your hand up?”

“Let’s say that in life, in his career as a network slimebag, Frank Stokes accumulated a huge pile of truly horrible karma. So next time around, to work off this karmic debt, he gets to expose, mock, ridicule and otherwise invite contempt for the very behavior he was once guilty of in his former life. Lying, corruption, the abuse of power, so forth.”

“Hmm. If we could pitch that in shorter sentences…”

So it came about that, though the studio still owned the character of Frank Stokes, the premise of Jon Stewart as a reincarnated evildoer persisted somehow as a negotiable script element, passing from one corporate entity to another, undergoing mutation at each step, till it finally ended up at Comedy Central, Where it was welcomed with a scream of recognition.

And one thing led to another…

*Seriously, Thomas Pynchon actually wrote this.

NOTE: You can download a PDF of the entire program here.

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Filed Under: Pynchon General News, Pynchon in the Media Tagged With: the daily show, thomas pynchon

Thomas Pynchon Did NOT write Cow Country

September 14, 2015 by TPmaster 2 Comments

Cow Country - Adrian Jones PearsonAfter a friend suggested that I check out a recent article in Harper’s by Art Winslow, which speculates that Thomas Pynchon might be the author of Cow Country, a novel published in April 2015, I decided to check it out.

Cow Country was published by Cow Eye Press and written by “Adrian Jones Pearson,” the nom de plume of Anthony Perry, who as A.J. Perry previously wrote Twelve Stories of Russia: A Novel, I Guess (2001); at least, that’s the identity for the Cow Country author that the Associated Press came up with when they looked into this.

I was further encouraged to look into this when New York Times reporter Alexandra Alter contacted me via this website to get my opinion about the whole deal for an article published on September 11, 2015.

So I downloaded a sample from Amazon and read the first chapter of the book which was pleasant enough, but really I was just reading it for the hallmarks of Pynchon’s style.

So NYT Alexandra and I never connected, but I did email her to explain why I didn’t believe that Pynchon was the author of Cow Country:

  • Although there’s always a first time, Pynchon has never written in the first person, and Cow Country is in the first person.
  • Right out of the gate, Cow Country sounds nothing like Pynchon… none of his style, grace, wit, voice, subtlety.
  • Pynchon has his own work agenda, with a pipeline of novels in various states of completion. That he would take the time to write a “spoof” on the publishing business and exagerated importance given to author biographies — a work of 540 pages, no less — is silly. Let’s just say he has bigger fish to fry…
  • The Harpers writer seems to think that the presence of same weird names, science, and high-school humor links “Adrian Jones Pearson” to Pynchon, but it takes a heck of a lot more than that to be equated or compared to Pynchon.
  • Heck, the Wanda Tinasky letters sound a lot more like Pynchon than does Cow Country. But for anyone with more than a passing familiarity with Pynchon’s work, it’s immediately obvious that he’s not the author of Cow Country. It’s also likely that Pynchon would cringe at the notion.

Every Pynchon expert who was asked to opine stated unambiguously that Pynchon did not write the book. And Pynchon’s publisher, Penguin Press, as well as his agent Melanie Jackson, also stated the same.

Cow Country written by Thomas Pynchon? Bullshit!

I find the whole affair pretty silly and I’m surprised that any professional critic or any Pynchon fan would give this any credence at all. Thus is the 24-hour news cycle… everyone rushing to get a story out to get eyeballs regardless of its viability.

Now let’s see what next comes down the pike from Thomas Pynchon. Whatever it is, it’ll likely be better than Cow Country.

Filed Under: Pynchon General News, Pynchon in the Media Tagged With: cow country, pynchon, thomas pynchon

Inherent Vice Posters Riff on the Last Supper

December 3, 2014 by TPmaster 1 Comment

And those Inherent Vice movie posters just keep on coming…

Here’s one, a scene from the Paul Thomas Anderson film. A rendering of this photo was the centerspread in the programs that were given out at the New York Film Festival screening of Inherent Vice in November 2014:

Inherent Vice - Last Supper

And then there’s this supergroovy Last Supper — with pizza — poster promoting the film, featuring Owen Wilson, who plays Doc Sportello. Apparently, this was created over at the Little White Lies website in the UK:

Inherent Vice - Last Supper Art Poster

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Inherent Vice Film, Pynchon General News, Pynchon in the Media

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ThomasPynchon.com (formerly the HyperArts Pynchon Pages) came online in 1997. With the publication of Against the Day in 2007, the alphabetical guides to Pynchon's novels were migrated to the Pynchon Wikis.

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ThomasPynchon.com was designed and developed, and is maintained, by Tim Ware, a musician and composer, fan of great literature, owner of HyperArts, lover of all things tiki, and an Oakland, California, resident. You can reach him via the contact form on this website.

Credits

Many have contributed to the content of ThomasPynchon.com and, ultimately, it's a team effort. Special thanks go to the folks at Pynchon-l at Waste.org, the long-standing list-serve dedicated to the ongoing discussion of Pynchon's works, with a shoutout to Allen "the Quail" Ruch and his seminal but, alas, departed theModernWord.com website

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