tangential reference to one Hoffman

[Joseph Conte]

On Sat, 20 Jan 1996, Maria Ticinovic wrote:

> risking the annoyance of some and the boredom of many, I've decided to 
> abandon lurker status for a minute with this sortof moronic post 
> regarding one heavily decorated Dr. Hoffman of Pynchon's alma mater 
> Cornell (that is so, ain't it?).  Anyway , I was sitting in my 
> cosmology/lit seminar, carving a relief of King Kong ripping the top off a 
> Weinerschnitzel franchise (No, All!) on the 800 year-old table in our 
> meeting room, when i was jolted from my malaise with the mention of a 
> free upcoming lecture series, in fact, one lecture in particular.  It's 
> called "One Culture", to be given by this guy Hoffman in a (belated?) 
> (rip-off?) response to Snow's "Two Cultures" deal.  Now, some of you all 
> tipped me off about that Luddite one-culture tract by, uh, our hero 
> (haha), and it seems to me that this Hoffman guy may have known about it 
> and all.  My question is, anybody know this guy's story? I mean, was he 
> at Cornell when Pynchon was? Then again, maybe I should be directing 
> this waste of bandwidth to Mr. H. himself.  It should be interesting 
> anyway.  In the brochure, the biographer gives this pretentious list of 
> the man's many accolades, including something like 20 honorary degrees 
> (or maybe it was ten--anyway, it beats Prince Charles, so it should be 
> good...).  I wonder if TP will form part of the subject.
> 
> 
> 

Roald Hoffman is a Noble-prize winning chemist at Cornell who, like Carl 
Djerassi (the inventor of The Pill) at Stanford, has some aspirations to 
publishing poetry and fiction.  Hoffman's literary aspirations don't seem 
to get much serious attention beyond Ithaca, NY.  I strongly doubt that he 
was in town at the same time as TRP.  Djerassi's recent fiction and 
autobiography, however, have had a wider audience, with reviews in 
NYTBR.  Both make a case for closing the "two cultures" gap, and so would 
be distantly akin to TRP; but both are primarily known for their 
scientific research and aren't writing anything like the fiction for 
which we look to P.  Having read a little of Hoffman's work in the CU 
Alumni News, I can't imagine that TRP has had much influence on him.  The 
style mundane, the form conservative.

Joseph Conte