Fourth-class Wallace

[Paul Mackin]

As I opened today's New Yorker magazine, what should fly out
of it (and land on the floor where I had to pick it up and look
at it) but a four-page spread containing advertizements for Gap jeans and 
Saab convertibles plus a glowing review of _The Birdcage_. It _could_ be 
chalked up of course to a silly binding error. The stapler bypassed what
should have been pp. 7, 8, 109  and 110. Fat chance, mes paranoid 
lecteurs, confreres et consoeurs, not to say semblables.

If that were _really_ the explanation, why then does p. 108 just 
happen to contain a "Briefly Noted" mention (favorable) of IJ?
Are The New Yorker people conspiring with "their" author to protect
his Pynchoneon reputation for encyclopaedic exactitude?

And, while we're at it, how can you explain the glowing review for
Mike Nichols' new movie. Yesterday's Times hated it.

				P.




On Sat, 9 Mar 1996 Jhildt at aol.com wrote: 

> 
> Something just jumped out at me from page 418 of INFINITE JEST, and while I
> hate to raise any kind of flag, red or otherwise, about a book I am (mostly,
> except for those damn footnotes - it either belongs in the book or it
> doesn't) enjoying, I have to point out a bit of factual underpinning that Mr.
> Wallace gets wrong in hopes that others won't add to this chart of accounts
> similar examples and, in the process, cast further doubt on the
> knowledge-base upon which many of the details of this quite incredible book
> rest, like, for instance, all that drug stuff.  (And by the way, I've never
> found an unsupported purported fact in Pynchon that didn't rely on a
> construct of his own invention.  I'm overdue posting some tantalizing, to me,
> info I've found on the Kurghiz Light.  Somebody kick me on that one.  Still
> not a complete answer, but it leads, as always, to the comforting conclusion
> that Pynchon knows a lot more than most of his readers.)
> 
> In describing (on p. 418) the shift in advertising expenditures to other
> media in the wake of the demise of ad-supported network and cable TV at the
> hands of ad-free Interlace Entertainment, the author says:
> 
> "Magazines . . . got so full of those infuriating little fall-out ad cards
> that Fourth-Class postal rates ballooned,"
> 
> Well, I don't mean to be picky, but I've been in the magazine business for
> going on 30 years and I can tell you that those little cards, called "blow-in
> cards," are restricted by postal regulation to advertising for the
> publisher's own publications, i.e. they are always for subscriptions and
> always either for the magazine they're falling out of, or another title
> published by the same company.  You've never seen a blow-in card in a
> second-class (all periodicals) publication advertising anything else.  Bound
> in yes; blown-in (loose) no.  So if ad dollars migrated from TV to other
> media it wouldn't cause the number of those "infuriating little fall-out ad
> cards" to increase.  And even if it did (which it couldn't) it wouldn't have
> any effect on Fourth-Class postal rates.  Magazines, as stated above, mail
> second-class and blow-in cards, should they find their way back into the mail
> stream, would come back to the publisher third-class.  Fourth-Class is book
> rate and doesn't, as I can see, have any implication here at all.
> 
> Forgive me for poking a hole, albeit tiny, in Mr. Wallace's intellectual
> armor (this is hardly the stuff of intellect, actually, just mundane fact),
> but if our TP can stand the scrutiny, well . . .  
> 
> Let's just say that I'm still enjoying hefting INFINITE JEST enormously.  And
> as a former tennis junkie I can attest that he's got that scene nailed.
> 
> Jeff Hildt
> 
> 
> 
>