>I was so fucked up while I was writing it [Gravity's Rainbow], that now I go back over some of those sequences and I can’t figure out what I could have meant.
Why does /lit/ worship this Emperor without clothes again?
>>7979478
>books need to mean something to be good
where da source on that quote bitch
>>7979478
He says, not knowing that that only contributes to the theme of the book.
>>7979478
>Gravity's Rainbow
>original title: Mindless Pleasures
Good ol' Tommy boy. Always gotta keep 'em off the scent.
>>7979478
And lit will then pretend to understand the exact meaning of those sentences
>>7979553
>"It seems that Pynchon's sister Judith once taught at Suffolk Community College and a colleague of [John Krafft, editor of Pynchon Notes]'s actually dated her, and actually asked her, one time, 'What's your brother likely to be doing right now?' and she said 'Watching The Brady Bunch.' This, I learn, is a wholesome family sitcom which was run and rerun throughout the Seventies, and it's Pynchon's favourite show. So, Tom is just like you and me! He watches cruddy TV!"
death of the author, babe
>"Did you guys really drink Red Cap Ale at a local bar to study for a final exam?" I remembered that anecdote from Pynchonâs introduction to Farinaâs Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. Pynchon and Farina were fellow students at Cornell.
>A glance of unpleasant surprise he gave me, but with continued eye contact came a wary smile. I grinned back and added, "You donât need to answer that. I support and quietly cheer your privacy. Thanks for the book."
>I closed the songbook, shook his hand, and walked away.
>A few days later I was doing soup, sandwich and Olympia at a local tavern when the bartender sat a full cold one in front of me with, "That's on the gentleman at the end of the bar." It was Pynchon again. I smiled and nodded, and when finished eating I walked over to his end of the bar and bought him a beer. We talked.
>Upon learning that I was a college English prof, he beamed and asked how I thought the multiculturalism/canon debate would turn out; in other words, who would win the curriculum wars? I said I'd give him the multiculturalists and a touchdown and still take the canonites, that somewhere during the first decade of the next century the canon crabs should have Shakespeare and such back in the requirements column for most English majors, exception being the mindless, deathless radicals at Stanford, Princeton, and maybe Georgetown.
>"So, are you a racist," he asked frowning, "one of those arch WASPs who reads and teaches mostly dead, white European males and their followers?"
>"Good one," I laughed, and sipped the remainder of my third beer. "I read and teach mostly what I like and understand, and what I anticipate might throttle my students; for it is they who constitute the raison de etre we call the bottom line. I don't think the multiculturalists or the old canon faithfuls read them, the students, very carefully or accurately. Sometimes they go for Shakespeare, Melville, Jane Austen, maybe Frederick Douglas, or Ursula Leguin, or maybe you."
>"Me! You've taught my work? In what class, which stories?" He was suddenly uncomfortable, perhaps annoyed or embarrassed, but he kept smiling. I notice that he seemed to have had a lot of dental work done since those rare college and Navy photographs.
>"I know Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow, and most of the standard scholarship on them. They're excellent and difficult, but fabulous satires, among other things. A lot of students love them, some canât finish the longer one, just like their educations."
>He frowned, then confessed, "I think I know what you mean by 'standard scholarship,' but Iâve never been too happy with the spectacle of my writing, erudite as the critics say it is, appearing on a reading list for a contemporary lit class. I couldn't sit calmly and watch a story of mine being diagramed on a chalk board, dissected, graphed, via transparencies and the more advanced lines of overhead projectors, TV cameras in those computers, you've seen it, haven't you? And what the hell are those deconstructionists trying to accomplish? Thereâs still a few of them out there, arenât there?"
>The questions, I took rhetorically. He shook his head, sipped his brew, then changed the focus and asked, "Do you teach writing too?"
>Now I was being interviewed by Pynchon, it seemed. Damned if I could mount any inquiries as to what he was up to in California. He was a charming and witty fellow (not at all to my surprise) and when he got up to leave for a dinner date I said, "Good luck with whatever the hell you are working on now. So what the hell are you working on now?"
>He was walking away, and as he reached for the door of the tavern he shouted back, "A book!" I was left with the bar tab.
>On a cool March afternoon in 1991, I was on my way to Charlotte to judge a St. Patrick's Day poetry reading. I was sucking up to a water fountain at a southbound rest area along Interstate 77 in Virginia when a tall fellow in a half-zipped bomber jacket and pilot sunglasses tapped me on the shoulder and asked, "Well, professor, have you worked Vineland into one of your modern novel courses yet?" I knew the voice, tried to hide my shock and surprise, wiped my lips on the sleeve of my nylon windbreaker. He shook my hand, and before I could answer said, "Come join me for a short while in my rented RV. You look like you could use a beverage."
>Immediately I told him how chagrined I was over not being indirectly ridiculed or caricatured in Vineland, that three hours of Olympia--on me--should have been worth a cameo at any rate, or at least a minor Thanatoid part. I vowed never to teach the book anywhere, in spite of its cosmic verities, wonderful characters, and generally epic complaints raised to the level of allegory.
>He roared and shot back, "Good! Really, or rilly, good, professor. Youâll get your uppercuts some day, but meanwhile, let us retire to my shiny, rented Airstream to drain my last four specimens of Rolling Rock, the infamous green death from the beautiful Laurel Highlands. You may claim two of them."
>"Youâre in quite the bubbling frame of mind, it seems, for such a typical and dreary March day. What brings you to the Interstate, southbound, and in a frigging recreational abomination?"
>Oh, he spoke the truth. We strolled to the big parking lot where a long, silver trailer sat in tow behind a Chevy pickup truck. We went inside.
>"Why, Iâm embarked on an adventure, to pick up my fair love and agent, who to you shall remain anonymous, along with the details of my destinations, and so on. I trust you understand."
>"Indeed, indeed," I replied, as we sat down at a pull-down table, one that seemed to drop out of the wall, like a hobbit's Murphy bed. Pynchon opened the small refrigerator and lifted out a cardboard six-pack carrier with four Rolling Rock longnecks in it, poised like green rockets ready to launch some desperate environmental campaign. Aggressive was I this time as to the writer's work in progress, Mason & Dixon, an imaginative picaresque biography and historical novel starring those two British astronomers turned surveyors who contributed geographical definition to the American Civil War with their famous line. He allowed me to read a few pages of the manuscript, specifics of which I now do not recall, although I did laugh out loud twice.
>"Delighted that you approve, doctor." He said it with a thick southern drawl, while verily lilting from the FM radio on the counter next to the tiny sink--truly it must have been FM, for the sound, as Steely Dan once noted and sang, had "no static at all!"--yes, meandering through the damp air of the Airstream came the words and music to "Come Back to Us Barbara Lewis Hare Krishna Beauregard," by John Prine.
>After about twenty more minutes of trash talk about the weather and the demise of the English major he explained, "Schrap, my man, I must get this gleaming, obscene contraption back on the highway. Melanie is just going to croak when she sees me in this. Meanwhile, it was truly good to see you again. Give me your card, and maybe Iâll be in touch. Appreciate the cooperation." The beers were consumed. We shook hands.
>As I left, I tripped down the flimsy, aluminum steps of the motor home, stumbling into the parking lot but breaking my fall with a gloved right hand. Laughter oozed from behind the slamming door. I let it go.
>Honestly, I never expected to see Thomas Pynchon again after two strokes of luck like that; something like two lightning strikes on the same beach umbrella on the same afternoon, which, mere hours apart, kill different people from the same town who do not know the other is vacationing in the same place and staying on the same floor of the same hotel. Rilly. Alanis Morrisette would sing it's ironic.
>As for the Airstream adventure in particular, well, it compares to the stories of those unlucky souls captured by aliens and taken aboard an extraterrestrial spacecraft, subjected to beers and questioning, like so many Homer Simpsons. So, like so many of that fate and faith, I assured myself, "Damned if Iâll tell. Whoâd believe me anyway."
>Now it is 1997. And as you read this, Mason & Dixon may be on its way to bookstores, about to mount a major attack on bestseller lists. Holt plans a first run of 200,000 copies. I am, as the vernacular goes, pissed at not receiving a review copy. So I cannot offer much on the book except that a few pages of a draft, a few years ago, made me laugh. But miraculously, or as fate sometimes snarls and grins, or pricks you, I can tell you a few things about Thomas Pynchonâs latest work in progress; for much to my aghast and sometime delight, we literally ran into each other just last month in __________ .
>I was strolling out of a watchtower, not watching where I was going, when, BAM . . . shoulders collided, or rather my chin bounced off of his shoulder, he being about four inches taller than I.
>"Damn! Sorry . . . I . . . ."
>"Oh . . . itâs . . . not you?"
>We stared at each other, removing simultaneously our respective sunglasses.
>"Iâll be ______. Iâll be just ____ing ______."
>"Thatâs real ____ing articulate, doctor. How the hell have you been, presently and otherwise?"
>I laughed softly and wiped some saliva and blood from my lip. "Well, Iâm doing, doing just groovy, I guess you might say." I resisted calling him by name, aware of the many buzzing tourists on the battlement.
>"Not I, but I get your meaning. Come now, let's go across the boulevard and wash the salt air and such out of our mouths. I think it's your turn to buy."
>So, in a second floor tavern and restaurant overlooking ________ Bay and the gloriously bustling intracoastal waterway, Thomas Pynchon and I caught up. After three bottles of Calusa Wheat (a golden tropical ale) Pynchon said, "I have to confess, I thought I might bump into you here. In other words, I sought out this slightly chance meeting. It seems I've learned from one of my what you might call double agents that you are an acquaintance, shall I say, of one notable ecoterrorist, Mr. Forrest Jones, true?"
>I must have frowned, for he did not wait for me to answer. "I know. I know. He cherishes his secrecy as much as I do mine. But I donât intend to compromise or threaten that. Iâm doing research for my next book, and so far it has a bright green theme, or tint, you might say."
>It disappointed me to tell him, "I have to be honest, Tom. I've not heard from Forrest Jones in over a year now. You probably know of his last caper, then, from my columns, the one I called the great Sasquatch coverup. And I've heard absolutely nothing one way or another as to whether he and his people really did find the remains of a number of slain Bigfoots in a remote Washington forest. In addition, he's had major cosmetic surgery, I'm told, and I don't believe I'd recognize him if he walked over here and bought me a beer, or a Freddy Burger."
>That quizzical grin rose in his face. I anticipated and said, "Donât ask. You really donât want to know about Freddy Burgers. Anyway, it's like I'm in Sergeant Schultz's shoes: 'I know NOTHing, NOTHing,' or very little of helpful substance. Nor do I think I really want to know, rilly."
>Pynchon just stared. After a few seconds we sipped our beers simultaneously and I noticed seeping through the house sound system "Ladies Love Outlaws," by Tom Rush. We both aahed, then Pynchon said, "Iâm shattered, like, uh, Mick Jagger."
>"You see, unlike you, Jones must remain anonymous, underground, on the run, otherwise he's going to jail forever, at the very least. I fear that he's slain a few pro-development pigs, as he calls them. Who knows? And I suspect he has a very sophisticated network of fellow radicals, one that, as I once described in jest but now wonder if it is genuine hyperbole, one that will make Earth First! look like the Campfire Girls."
>He seemed to force his grin. "I thought so," he replied, after another sip of beer. "But that's why I'm interested in him, and not, say, the archetypal monkeywrencher--Dave Foreman--or his buddies, or any old Ed Abbey follower. Guess Iâm getting into a darker phase in my late middle ages."
>"Believe me," I said with a smile, "I can understand that dislocation." I drank the remainder, about three ounces, of my beer, then added, "If I learn anything that could help, I'll pass it along. But you'd better be damn well aware that there's certain and fantastic danger involved if you're thinking about going underground with Forrest Jones. Don't screw up and get him nailed, or yourself killed. It could happen, assuming you ever even get the chance to do so. I really don't think that you'll get a chance. Jones is just too intense and focused. That's my read."
>"Just looking for an opportunity," he explained, looking out the window toward the waterway. "Maybe I don't really have to meet him. Hell, it's only a novel I'm writing, not a biography. I can invent."
>I believe that the gravity of my words on Forrest Jones turned Pynchon on another course. He stopped a waiter and ordered two doubles of Barbancourt five-star Haitian rhum. They came quickly in brandy snifters. Distracted now, he asked no more about Forrest Jones. We drank and talked for another half hour, though, ate an order of chips and salsa, and he added that his next novel will be, well, "neo-gothic." Set in an American subtropical region that is over run by retirees from the Midwest and New York, the book's themes are greed, solipsism, and anti-environmentalism, with a dash of Armageddon. Destruction, death and gore abound. The heroes are aliens from a distant galaxy. These extraterrestrials are more plant than animal, and therefore appalled at how life has evolved on earth. You may guess the rest. I'm sure the novel will take four or five years to draft and polish; and I'm hopeful it will acquire some alteration of motifs and themes.
>Before Thomas Pynchon departed this time, "I have two questions," I announced, "neither of which should threaten your clandestine livelihood. So I expect answers, Your Recluseness. OK?"
>"Okey Dokey."
>"First, I was in London in 1979, after Gravityâs Rainbow of course, so I wonder, did you get the idea for the giant Adenoid monster from those spinach scones at Crudelyâs Pub & Breakfast?"
>"Yes! Yes! They are the guilty pastries. No one has ever asked me that, not that I give anyone much of a chance to ask me anything. Weren't they horrid? The place burned down, you know." He chortled, and so did I.
>"And finally, though less interesting, what the hell did you do with the card I gave you that afternoon in your rented Airstream? Donât lie. You could have had someone mail me a prepub copy of Mason & Dixon. You wouldnât have had to employ your double agents to find me. The information on the card is current. Whatâs the scoop, man?"
>Pynchon frowned and went pensive for a few seconds. "I'm sorry," he finally said. "My agent/wife found your card, and she's read your etymology columns. She tossed your card in the citronella candle one night while we were camping at _________, and, well, I donât know what else to say."
>"That's enough," I snapped back, raising my hand and giving him the Vulcan live-long-and-prosper sign.
>This time we split the bill, dropping a 20% tip, which made the raven-haired, willowy waitress who majored in theater at the Liberal Arts college a few blocks away, well, I hope she didnât have to pay for the glassware. I gave Pynchon another of my cards. He put it in his wallet; I watched him do it. When we left the tavern that day he said, again, that maybe he would be in touch. I told him, with a guffaw, that I didn't believe it.
HES TRYING TO MAKE HATING PINECONE INTO A MEME GUYZ XD!! WHAT A CLEVER FELLOW
>>7979488
I looooooooove dicks
~pynchon
Whoah guys, you like reading faggots?
