A biography

[Tom Stanton]

Tom was born in 1953 and grew up in middle America. He was devoted to
the Mercury 7 and to Captain Nemo. As he grew older, he became fascinated
with chemistry, then physics. Boldly, at 14, he tried to build an atom
smasher with almost no money. He learned a great deal. The main lesson was
that while he liked the cool props in the lab, he just wasn't a "player."
Meanwhile the VietNam war raged and Tom noticed he could be drafted, and
started paying attention to the war on TV, and became as much of an activist
as a 16 yr old can who was attending an all-male Catholic high school that 
forbade long hair, beards, mustaches, and sunglasses, and made you wear a 
dress shirt to school.

In college Tom found books to be cheaper props than Van de Graaff atom
smashers, so he took up L I T U R A T U R E (Litter-a-tour) and carefully
read Great Works including the Big Book in big books, "Ulysses," and Tom
pronounced it great in bars and at parties. Tom also wrote lots of dark
short fiction, which made him an artist as well as an English major, and
sometimes this helped at parties but never in bars.

Tom was not well-to-do, and to pay for college and bars he worked as a
construction laborer one year, went to school the next, and so on. It was
in one of these hard labor periods that he read a review by Richard
Poirer (sp?) in the "Saturday Review" with the bold claim that Pynchon's
"Gravity's Rainbow" was on a par with "Ulysses." Hogwash, thinks Tom, and
reads the review then buys the book. Having just turned 20 and having to
work very hard all day, the book at first is frustrating. There is a lot of
comic book talk and slapstick, but then things would poke through. Well into
the Zone, Tom realized he was reading his book, a book he really would've
liked to have written, a book that thought like him, wisecracked like him,
was sad like him, and as perverse as he thought he could be, with plenty
to spare.

Tom went on to read all the books over and over, drafting serious
articles that he might send as a graduate student to the serious journals.
But the recession and a new force worked there way on Tom and within 6 years
he was married and working on a newspaper when a call came from a friend
to come to New Hampshire and work on a little computer magazine. 

16 years later Tom does Serious Work developing CD-ROM products but has
not forgotton Pynchon. Tom was on one of the early Pynchon lists, has
read "Pynchon Notes" in libraries when possible, collects various editions
of Pynchon (nothing rare) and will admit to once having written a fan
letter during a period of "What the HELL Life Is Too Short" moments in
his mid-Thirties. Otherwise Tom remains a devoted husband and father, and
has purchased but not started "Infinite Jest" only because the last time
he read a Big Book like that it turned him upside down, and Tom is pretty
comfortable with his groove so far...