web page additions

[Brian Stonehill Media Studies Pomona College]

Hi friends,

The news:

New this week on the Uncollected page of the Pynchon home pages  are two essays
that Pynchon published in the Sunday literary supplement of a well-known
metropolitan daily:

"Is It O.K. to be a Luddite?" (NYTBR,  28 October 1984) and "Nearer, My Couch,
to Thee" (6/6/93), Pynchon's essay on Sloth that kicked off a summer series on
the seven deadly sins.

http://www.pomona.edu/pynchon/

Discussion:

They stand up rilly well, no surprise there.

Strangely enough, my Optical Character Recognition software would not recognize
the Luddite piece, and I had to key it in by hand.  It contains a fairly
unabashed bit of lit-crit in praise of the Gothic novel (Mary Shelley and
Horace Walpole), and stronger praise still of postwar science fiction.  Essay's
main thrust concerns the falsely excluded middle between C.P. Snow's "two
cultures" -- the "Snovian Disjunction," as Pynchon impishly & typically dubs
it.  What made my jaw drop was that after a throwaway topic line, "It has taken
no major gift of prophecy to see...,"  he goes on to wax euphoric while
predicting the great utopian changes that interconnected desktop computers will
bring.  A-and that was in 1984.

The sloth piece is fascinating from Slothrop's author too, and I'll bet you
anything that the article's title wasn't Pynchon's idea.

Keep suggestin' stuff for the web page, y'all.  Don't forget, it's alive.

Cheers,  Brian