On reviewers, Crowley, and stuff.

[Shirley Lim]

What really bothers me is that an author like Stephen King or Sue Grafton
can have a dedicated following, and no-one says a damn thing. People can
even review a new Star Trek movie without mentioning trekkies. But when a
good author like pynchon gets some fans, everyone suddenly feels like they
have to take them down a notch. Seems in some ways to be jealousy. We
Pynchon fans, they must feel, are just pseudo-intellectuals who want to be
seen as smarter than everyone else. They're trying to be properly american
and anti-snobbish, but it just comes off as populism of the worst sort.
And that publicity article goes the same way. I doubt any of those
functions really inspired anyone to go out and buy M+D that wouldn't have
otherwise done so. (side note, could the plus sign, esp. the one with the
semicircle joining the bottom and left poles, be derived from 'et' as
well?) The whole thing seems to be one konspiracy of meatheads who are
just mad cause they can't write as well as Pynchon. A-and why don't we
hear complaints when people publish books with far too much obsessiveness
on Hemmingway or (hell, I'll go for it) Shakespeare. We give old Bill S.
far too much credit as is. Isn't it just a bit obsessive to make every
high school student read 4+ of his plays before graduation? And entire
courses devoted to every play and sonnet Shakespeare has ever written!?
Why do we let those go unpunished? The notion that the western cannon
might be under attack not just by other cultures and traditions
(multiculturalism, etc.) but by new authors in the cannon itself might
just be a tad too much for some establishment stuffed shirts.
<\RANT>

In other news, Crowely's hunchback lecture is covered quite nicely in
Robert Anton Wilson's entertaining book _The_Masks_of_the_illuminati_ It's
an enjoyable read and contains some of the best Joyce pastiche this side
of the twentieth century.

There once was a Londonite critic
who hated Pynchon with a ferocity acidic
because try as he might
with Tom's skill he just couldn't write
even if his stories were just as turgidic.

Gershom Bazerman (from the wrong address and feeling very Tox)