a lurker awakes

[grip at netcom.com]

On Thu, 25 Jan 1996, Arie Altena wrote:

> what might interest you all is that Pynchon's books are really everywhere 
> & then I mean everywhere. A friend of mine went off to Papua New Guinea, 
> to the jungle,to a tiny village in the mountains that you can only reach 
> by plane. Of course there's a catholic priest living there. He meets this 
> priest & takes a look at his bookshelf (you starve for new books in the 
> jungle) -of course it's filled with catholic stuff and bibles. And, yes, 
> really: there it is: Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon surrounded by 
> all the catholic stuff. 

I got my copy of "V" in Kutta Beach, Bali; a beat up, much read (looked 
at?) paperback. Returning to Dubai on the plane, I took it out to 
continue reading. A woman saw it and exclaimed, "Pynchon!". She was 
German and ran a bookstore in Hamburg. Her travel companion ran a 
literary journal. She confessed to publishing a picture with herself as a 
model, of a dark side view of a man in a leather coat, and captioned it 
PYNCHON?.

Yes. All over the world, indeed.

grip