Daffy Duck and the New Yorker

[MASCARO at humnet.ucla.edu]

On this Godzilla/NEW YORKER/pop thing, Richard Romeo responds:
>

>Despite your misgivings I don't see how this will affect Pynchon, the 
>artist.  
Iagree, don't think it will.

>So he likes a cute little rock band and his name is bandied 
>about. Will this make him trendy, I don't think so.  

Don't you think he already is trendy?  Most--educated--people I know respond in a 
certain characteristic way to his mention.  You know, like: 
--Oh yeah he's that weird cool guy who wrote that huge, heh-heh book.  Isn't David 
Foster Wallace like him?  I should read that some day.

 >Do we all expect 
>every word that we read of his (outside of his novels) to be relevatory 
>like Oliver Stone's annoying Jim Morrison portrait? 
God, let's hope not.

 
>shows the guy wants to enjoy himself once in a while.  He must feel like 
>Brian in The Life of Brian, all those people following him around, 
>expecting miracles, etc.  I ask this with all sincerity:  what do you 
>want from the guy besides that next offering whatever it may be?

I respond sincerely, I want nothing of him except what he wants to give.  I expect 
no miracles except the ones I find when I read him.  My beef isn't w/ Pynchon, it's 
with the way he's being boxed.  His writing is the type that fries your eyeballs, 
makes you want to change your life, opens up whole worlds (yes, spilled and 
broken as all of these worlds are).  He's not a safe cute little old chubby eccentric 
whose wearing of a Godzilla T-shirt allows us to define him as such.  I dunno, I'm 
not being real clear.  It all started w/ that John Laroquette nonsense, I guess.  He's 
being made into a consumable, though perhaps a little on the rich side.  On this 
line, here's how the NEW YORKER piece ends:
" 'Every time we have lunch and he picks up the tab, he pays in cash,' Tony says. 
'I'm dying to see the Amex card.  You know--Thomas Pynchon, card member since 
1978.' "

And while I am sure Tony is laughing up his sleeve, I doubt that many readers of 
this august publication (whose ads love to say it's "probably the best magazine that 
ever was," though they are talking about a different magazine which no longer 
exists), will ponder the ironies; they'll just code for Amex.  Consumer is as 
consumer does.

john m