Williams Reading

[WillL at fieldschool.com]

Date	4/7/97
Subject	Williams Reading
>From	WillL
To	Pynchon List

Williams Reading

I can't resist responding to Peter G's mention of a public reading of GR at a
book store in Williamstown.  I read GR for the first time for a class ("Nabakov
and Pynchon" taught by Steve Fix and Michael Bell) at Williams in the fall of
1981.  At that time, sleepy lil Billsville still seemed a bastion of
undergraduate conservatism Ñ crew teams and prep school kids a kind of "what's
that?" attitude toward even as accepted a counter-culture figure as the late
Allen Ginsberg.  I remember that the Prof's Fix and Bell were teaching this
class for the first time, and they admitted to us that Pynchon's status in the
canon is yet to be decided but, heck, they were going to be bold and teach the
class anyway.

Perhaps it was just a little fiction to make us feel cool, but it worked.  I
walked around campus with my GR (dutifully read over the summer in advance while
I lifeguarded in NE DC), proud to be part of what seemed almost to be an
"experimental" class.  That's how square Williams seemed to me back then.

And now the bookstore (back then a kind of monopolistic book supplier owned by
the one businessman who seemed to own everything in that town) is doing public
GR as a crowd-pleaser?  The times they are . . . and all that stuff.

-- Will Layman