Why Pynchon Moved East

[Steelhead]

For several years Annie Dillard lived and taught college at Western
Washington University in Bellingham, on Puget Sound north of Seattle. A few
months ago, Dillard was speaking at a gathering for intellectuals and
literary crit types in the Midwest. She answered a question on why she
moved back East in this manner:

"The Northwest is no place for an intellectual woman. The men there were
just wonderful, but the women out there had a kind of culture I couldn't
share. They used chainsaws, they canned things, and they breast-fed.

"Out there I was suddenly a bluestocking. And all of these men were
following me around everywhere I went. And the husbands and everybody, just
this huge train of men behind me, and every once in a while I'd turn around
and say: 'You guys...I'm an eastern woman; we're all this way.' But their
women were so dull, you know, that the men would give up anything just to
hear me for five minutes."

There it is. Tom Pynchon was an Annie Dillard groupie. Followed her back
East, where all the women are INTELLECTUALS.

Steely