THOMAS PYNCHON

American Novelist

Interview with Andrew Boese, Creator of The “C” Section — The Collected Unpublished Works of Thomas Pynchon

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Andrew Boese at WorkAndrew Boese is Pynchon fan and collector who in 2016 gained some notoriety by publishing, via his Optics Press, The “C” Section, a lovely hand-bound edition of the collected unpublished works of Thomas Pynchon. As Andrew writes on the website, he created Optics Press to produce high-end, extremely low-run prints of rare, unpublished, and unique works of art. Each volume is designed using only the highest quality materials, with one or two titles released annually, cased and numbered.

Tell me a bit about yourself, what your life journey looks like, and the Optics Press.

Andrew: I grew up in a printing family. Combine that with my love of reading and it was a natural progression into bookbinding. My favorite books to collect have always been limited and fine press editions. Stuff like George Macy’s Limited Editions Club really opened my eyes to how much book design, printing, and binding can go into enhancing the reading experience. Even though there’s a bunch of presses out there doing incredible work, I noticed that there was a niche of work that I’d like to see in a fine press edition that wasn’t being explored. There’s always been a healthy availability of classic works of literature and there’s some incredible work being done currently in the Sci-Fi/horror genres but there’s still so much out there that’s at risk of being lost to time, dust, and decay. I started The Optics Press as an excuse to make books that for whatever reason don’t exist that I want in my own collection. I make a handful of copies to sell at cost on the chance that there’s other collectors out there that feel the same way I do.

Are you a collector of Pynchon, a fan of his work, or both? If so, when did you get interested Pynchon and how do you interact with the community of Pynchon fans?
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Inherent Vice Diagrammed: the making of a new Pynchon resource

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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

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.

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Pynchon on Record, Vol. 4

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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.

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

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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.
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Can I Sue Thomas Pynchon?

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Julian Benfield is the owner of Julian’s Books, a rare and used book dealer in New York since 1997. Prior to that he worked for Xerox in engineering and marketing management, and as a computer consultant. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from The Cooper Union, and MBA from Rochester Institute of Technology. His coolest offering is currently a signed copy of Mason & Dixon.

Charity Auction booklet, 1999

In 1999 I was able to outbid other New York dealers and collectors to obtain a signed first edition of Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon. This was offered by The Cathedral School of St. John the Divine, where his son was in attendance. The following year, I was able to repeat the feat to obtain a signed Crying of Lot 49, again at Cathedral School’s annual fundraiser. While the books were just signed on the title page, I was told, after the auction, that Pynchon would be happy to personally inscribe the books if I so desired. Since I was buying for resale, I thought that it might be best to not request that. Some may disagree, but that was my choice.

Fast track to a few years ago, when I was negotiating with a potential buyer for Crying Of Lot 49, and mentioned that I never took Pynchon up on his offer to personalize the book. My customer, who subsequently paid $23,500 for the signed Lot 49, immediately asked if Pynchon would inscribe it to him. That’s where my saga started.
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Playing Bridge with Thomas Pynchon

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Tom Schaub has taught at University of California Berkeley and University of Wisconsin Madison. He has been Executive Editor of Contemporary Literature since 1989, and has published widely on Thomas Pynchon, including Thomas Pynchon: The Voice of Ambiguity, and an MLA teaching volume, Approaches to Teaching Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Other Works. He now spends as much time as possible in Maine, and tries to recollect what it felt like back then in the post-sixties lull, when the opportunities society had to offer seemed like threats to his well-being.

“This time, as a matter of fact, she has a confirmed Omar Sharif sighting, inside a tent, playing bridge and flashing that killer smile.”
Bleeding Edge, p. 406

My Initiation into The Quest

US First Edition, 1966

I read my first Thomas Pynchon novel after a day of hiking around Berkeley in 1967. Walking up Grove Street — events would soon change its name to Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd — I saw what looked like a muted trumpet spray-painted on the cement support of an overpass, and a bit further a garbage receptacle stenciled with the word “WASTE.” Someone had added periods after each letter so it looked like this: “W.A.S.T.E.” That evening when I crashed on a friend’s floor I pulled a slim book off nearby shelves titled The Crying of Lot 49 by someone named “Thomas Pynchon.” Very soon I discovered the novel’s plot revolved around the very same graffiti I had seen that day outside. Here they were again inside a novel: the once-knotted posthorn with a mute in its bell, and the acronym “W.A.S.T.E.” I fell into sleep that night wondering how much of the story inside the novel — like the graffiti — was also outside the novel, in my world.

Desperately Seeking Pynchon

My own stint as a private eye took place at the peak of the mania to find Thomas Pynchon. His first two novels won major awards, but he himself remained stubbornly absent from public gaze or interview. When Pynchon published Gravity’s Rainbow in 1973, a bombshell of a novel that may have been the most unread bestseller ever, it was postmodernism’s answer to James Joyce’s Ulysses, and drew nominations for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. His novels V. and The Crying of Lot 49 had produced a cult following of devoted readers and the literati, but now he was national news. Emissaries from Time Magazine and LIFE went to California but came back empty-handed. In his place, Pynchon sent a comic, Professor Irwin Corey, to receive the National Book Award at the New York ceremony. There are dozens of essays, articles, and websites about the search for Pynchon, but after fifty years, all we have of him are a few pictures. At Pynchon Conferences, movies about him have been shown in which he never appears, the footage mostly clips of places Pynchon may have been. One movie ends with film of an older bearded man looking angrily at the camera. Is that Pynchon?
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Rocket Power – Gravity’s Rainbow Reviewed by Richard Poirier – 1973

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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.

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Collecting Thomas Pynchon

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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.

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Thomas Pynchon & Kirkpatrick Sale – Their Unfinished Science Fiction Musical “Minstrel Island”

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NOTE: Inside parenthetical citations: [P] = material from Pynchon’s draft; [S] = passage from Kirkpatrick Sale’s draft

“Minstrel Island” by Thomas Pynchon & Kirkpatrick Sale

“Minstrel Island” is an unpublished, unfinished musical (it’s also been referred to as a “science fiction musical” and “operetta”) written by Thomas Pynchon and his friend John Kirkpatrick Sale while they were attending Cornell University. The materials — one folder of handwritten and typed notes, outlines, and draft fragments from sometime in the spring of 1958 — are in the collection of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin.

Pynchon handwritten notes for Minstrel Island

The incomplete state of “Minstrel Island” allows us to observe something about the process that Thomas Pynchon and Kirkpatrick Sale followed as they tried to turn an idea into a piece of writing.  The following note sets out to demonstrate, as much as possible, the order in which the material was completed, something that allows us to discern at least one of the differences between Pynchon’s and Sale’s artistic sensibility.

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

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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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About ThomasPynchon.com

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.

This website is affiliated with neither Mr Pynchon nor his representatives; rather, it's aligned with the community of folks who enjoy reading Pynchon's work — and digging deeper.

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