Why Pynchon Moved East

[the Robot Vegetable]

On Wed, 12 Feb 1997, Steelhead wrote:

> 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."

	later on in that very same article:

  'On Monday I [Margie Boule] got a letter and a photograph (with 
   Band-Aids) from Aniie Dillard.  It's a lovely letter, filled with
   conciliation and humor.  It might make Northwest women feel better
   about Annie Dilliard.
  '"Boy, I'd hate me too," Annie wrote. "Who can bear people who call
   themselves intellectuals?  How did I get into this terrible mess
   with the people I like best? There's no other place I love so deeply
   as the Pacific Northwest ...
   "The things to which I have devoted my life -- family, nature, 
   Christianity, books and pinocle -- preclude my running around with
   politically correct and sophisticated people here in the East."

        from Margie Boule's column in the 11 Feb 97 Portland Oregonian
> 
> There it is. Tom Pynchon was an Annie Dillard groupie. Followed her back
> East, where all the women are INTELLECTUALS.

	hmm, maybe he's coming back...

	veg