Editions of TP's short stories

[Dkipen at aol.com]

Dear John,

Sounds like a nice Mortality and Mercy bootleg you've got there. I'll trade
you my Oscar Mayer baloney sandwich for it. No? How about if I sweeten the
pot with a copy of page 31 of Clifford Mead's Pynchon bibliography, on which
he enumerates the various bootlegs in circulation, yours among them? Still no
dice? How about a peek at the April, 1994 issue of Firsts magazine, a most
useful publication even when it's not publishing articles with such
appetizing titles as "Pynchon and the Pirates"? According to article author
Charles Michaud, identified as Director of the Turner Free Library in
Randolph, Massachusetts, "Aloes printed pirated editions of four Pynchon
stories." No indication, though, whether Jim Pennington is a Pynchon intimate
who risked his intimacy by selling Aloes a picture of TRP with his face
obscured, or merely some photog who dragooned his brother-in-law into posing
with a dossier over his mug. By far the most interesting item in the Michaud
article is something called Of a Fond Ghoul: Being a Correspondence Between
Corlies M. Smith and Thomas Pynchon. It was pirated by an entity referred to
on the cover as "the blown litter press" in "new york" circa "1990." "It
consists of letters that passed between Pynchon and his Lippincott editor
during the writing of V.," Michaud writes, before going on to scold us
preemptively for any curiosity we might be feeling, even guiltily, about WHAT
THE HELL IS IN THEM! In my timorously advanced opinion, the sensitivity of
any personal letters is a matter best left to the dictates of the reader's
conscience, which conscience can only be informatively consulted when such
materials are handy. In other words, it's a moral dilemma wherewith I would
love to have a nice wrassle, if only the damn opportunity would show itself.
 But, as Tom Lehrer used to say, I digress. Hope this helps, Mascaro. Say hi
to our demi-novelist pal David Ulin if you see him. And Prof. Krafft, sorry
but I never wrote up the Pynchon pizza party. I count myself lucky I
successfully pitched my LA Daily News editors a Norman Mailer interview. (By
the way, Mailer denies both the Ovaltine and fire escape anecdotes, but sez
Pynchon called him to decline an invite to a PEN fundraiser in the mid-80s.
Said he considered preserving the telephone receiver in glassine, but decided
agin it.) Good night for now, as I feel my wakefulness, good Prof. Krafft,
ebbing.
 And forgive me, everybody, for including person-to-person asides in a public
letter, but I can't very well lust after other people's private
correspondence if I won't pony up some of my own.
 Fondly,
David

PS. I'm on the program committee of the 8th Annual California Studies (I
heard that!) Conference, to be held early next February at Cal State Long
Beach. Anybody out there got suggestions for a panel on Pynchon's California?
(He IS one of not many people who've written well about both ends of the
state.) And who's got a forwarding address for the committee's hands-down
choice as keynote speaker, one W. Tinasky....