Why Pynchon Moved East

[Ted Samsel]

> 
> 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.

Right. And belong to the Junior League. And would never dream of
cleaning their own fish or working on a car.


tejas at infi.net
          "I only use my gun whenever kindness fails"
                                 Robert Earl Keen