THOMAS PYNCHON

American Novelist

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    • Pynchon Early Stories Pirate Editions
    • V. (1963)
    • The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
    • Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)
    • Slow Learner (1984)
    • Vineland (1990)
    • Mason & Dixon (1997)
    • Against the Day (2006)
    • Inherent Vice (2009)
    • Bleeding Edge (2013)
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Inherent Vice Diagrammed: the making of a new Pynchon resource

August 1, 2019 by Paul Razzell 2 Comments

A new Pynchon resource helps you keep track of Inherent Vice’s 130 characters, 37 entities, 6 gangs, 4 bands, and 1 dog. The website features color-coded diagrams, plot summaries and other resources so you can get the most out of reading Pynchon’s complex detective novel. Inherent Vice Diagrammed creator Paul Razzell explains the origins and development of this innovative resource.

THERE’S A TELLING IMAGE in the film adaptation of Inherent Vice where private eye Doc Sportello attempts to diagram the connections among 16 people involved in his intersecting cases. Using crayons, he writes characters’ names on his living room wall then draws lines between the names to show relationship, connection … or something. Why is this a telling image? 

For starters, it reminds you that Doc is trying to do exactly what you’re trying to do: see the relationships among so many characters and what those relationships can tell us about their motivations, loyalties, hostilities, and power dynamics. 

Second, the scene is the filmmaker’s acknowledgement to viewers that keeping track of all these characters and their relationships is hard work. Even a seasoned private eye like Doc, who’s had personal contact with most characters, needs a visual aid. (Doc’s diagram shows 16 characters only. There are over 50 in the film. His wall is nowhere near big enough to accommodate so many names at once nor, you are led to believe, is his mind.) 

Third, the image reveals a cognitive flaw in Doc’s diagrammatic approach: all of his lines are unlabeled. How is Glen related to Clancy? How is Coy related to El Drano? Doc’s highly generalized crazy wall doesn’t answer such questions. It carries no precise or informative meaning that would lead him—or us—from confusion to revelation. 

Inherent Vice Diagrammed brings you much closer to that revelation. This free resource helps you see through Doc’s marijuana haze with

  • elegant diagrams showing character-relationships 
  • concise chapter summaries
  • plot summaries
  • an index revealing each character’s relationships. 

Reading Inherent Vice is, after all, detective work. It’s about finding connections between many people, organizations, and entities with a view to solving crimes and, perhaps, seeing where America is headed.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Inherent Vice Film, Pynchon Analysis, Pynchon General News, Pynchon Inspired Tagged With: American fiction, Bigfoot, Coy Harlingen, crime, crime fiction, David Foster Wallace, design, diagram, Doc Sportello, fiction, Golden Fang, Harry Potter, index, Infinite Jest, information design, Inherent Vice, Inherent Vice Diagrammed, J.K. Rowling, Kurt Vonnegut, Lord of the Rings, Mark Lombardi, Mickey Wolfmann, news, Paul Razzell, plot summary, postmodern fiction, postmodernism, pynchon, Razzell, Shasta Hepworth, stories, story, thomas pynchon, Tolkien, visual explanations, visualizing data

Collecting Thomas Pynchon

January 9, 2017 by Robert Nelson 1 Comment

Collection
By Robert Nelson

If only measured by his influence on our culture, Thomas Pynchon is an iconic writer. His name is known to many who have never read a word of serious literature, and “Pynchonesque” seems to have as many interpretations as the identity of the mysterious V. in his first novel, V. Pynchon’s earliest writings leapt onto the scene to accolades rarely given to a new author, and he was hailed as one of the bright stars of a new literary generation. His first novel was a winner of major national awards and his magnum opus, Gravity’s Rainbow, nearly won a Pulitzer Prize (more on this later). His subsequent efforts have not failed that early promise.

Pynchon’s novels feature dense, convoluted plots, with wide-ranging allusions to history, science, technology, mathematics, and popular culture. One does not just “crank out” works that offer such challenges and rewards to their readers. Indeed, Pynchon has produced just eight novels over the past fifty years. Fortunately for the collector, the existence of variant forms of his novels and of many associated publications can make collecting Pynchon a challenge worthy of that found in reading his books.

Clifford Mead’s Extensive Pynchon Bibliography

Clifford Mead: Pynchon BibliographyAn essential reference for the Pynchon collector is Clifford Mead’s 1989 book, Thomas Pynchon: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources.[1] Although written 27 years ago, it remains the best description of the author’s early works. In addition, it includes the first appearance in book form of Pynchon’s juvenile writings. The presence of these contributions from young “Tom” to his high school newspaper makes Mead’s work a collectable Pynchon text as well as a bibliography.

 

Technical Writings for Boeing – Aerospace Safety and BOMARC Service News

Pynchon - Boeing Bomarc NewsNotorious for keeping his personal information private, Pynchon can make Salinger look like a publicity hound. It is known that he studied at Cornell, and that Vladimir Nabokov was one of his professors. Prior to pursuing his career in literature, Pynchon served in the U.S. Navy and then worked at the aircraft company Boeing as a technical writer. The abundance of military and technical references in his books indicates how much these experiences informed his writing. Pynchon’s articles in Aerospace Safety and BOMARC Service News are not only informative, but fun to read, even given their highly technical content.[2] BOMARC Service News poses an interesting challenge for both the academic and the collector, since none of its articles are credited. Textual analysis has identified articles that can be credited to Pynchon with varying degrees of certainty and the magazine issues containing these are rare and quite collectable.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Collecting Pynchon Tagged With: book collecting, pynchon, 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

Visit the Pynchon Wikis…

Highly detailed guides to each of Pynchon's novels, including page-by-page annotations, alphabetical indexes, reviews, and a whole lot more ...

PynchonWiki.com
Inherent ViceBleeding Edge
Mason & DixonAgainst the Day
Gravity's RainbowVineland
V.The Crying of Lot 49

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