CNN? No. House of Pynchon, plus Star Trek fan-tasy

[Eric Alan Weinstein]

I don't want to know what Pynchon looks like if he does not
want to be known. He deserves to be treated as he wishes
to be treated. Why do I feel this desire to give the man what
he wants, denying natural curiosity? Wouldst thou hear what
a fan can say in a little more than a little? Reader, stay. 

Well, I spend a very great part of my intellectual and 
a fair part of my emotional  life pondering,
working out, imagining, questioning, living with, 
the rich, sobering, and marvellous fictional (factional)
labyrinth Pynch has so carefully, so miraculously created;
it is very near the centre of my personal and professional
being. It is a world I am privileged to share with many of 
the scholars I have the most respect for--and also some
of the people whom I love best, indeed very best of all.
In a world minus the works of TRP, lil ol' me
would be a different, and certainly a poorer, 
bloke.

  So I owe TRP a debt of gratitude for giving me
a real if immaterial place to stay a fair bit of the time, 
the time of my life in the life of the mind.

Three, four years from now, when the seminars have been
run, the abstracts read, commented on and returned, 
the conferences have flown their funky arcs, the 
books of essays edited, published and duly 
noted in the quick-fading records of fleeting librarian light, 
perhaps I shall then say---this year, No. 

For a time I might be found exclusively among my secondary 
but not less lovely passions--- lolling with  Proust along the
Guermantes way, drinking Stout with Joyce in Paris, spotting 
angels in Southwark tree-tops with Blake, commiserating bad
luck with Melville, bickering with Stevens, walking the streets
of my not-always-fair metropolis with Dickens, sharing a long
thin ciggie with bad Bill Gaddis,  visiting zoos with Rilke or 
leaving a Passover plate for Celan---

there may be a time when, for a while, I reside elsewhere than 
the gracious and dangerous and goofy luxuries
of the brilliant house of Pynchon, which is both the house on
the hill and the hand-built Adobe hut--leaving for a time, to 
visit again with fresh eyes. 

   But friends, as to the life of the mind in the world of literature
at the close of the millennium---
the House of Pynchon is as close to Camelot as we will get,
or deserve to have. And the House of Pynchon is not to be
found in any graven image, but 'tis only built in the mind and
spirit,  'pon reading of the books. 

If it be Sunday, let em preach---And as knights of the oddly
shaped table of Pynchon, I take it, our responsibilities are
perhaps only least of all "purely  academic", whatever that may be,
most of all to the world and to our selves, whatever they may 
be, the unfolding discovery of each Situation leaving only
moments to bring all our resources to bear, and to Act wisely
in the interests of fragile human possibility, fragile earthly
ecology.
 
     Having made the metaphor, which is both utterly true and
a crock of shit, as the heartfelt often is---

what if Pat Stewart was to convince TRP to appear dressed
as a leader of the Romulan underground in the next Star Trek
flick? Wouldn't some part of me really get a kick out of that?
Okay, it is not going to happen. But can you just imagine those
two nutty dudes going out for Indian food on 6th street, and
Patrick says "C'mon Tom, under the make up, who would know?"

Now, do we think Pat would do a vocal imitation of Pynch,
somewhere along that enormously long M&D tape?
Stop me, I don't want to know.

Yrs,

Eric




Eric Alan Weinstein
Centre For English Studies
University Of London
E.A.Weinstein at qmw.ac.uk