how trashy can you get?

[Sherwood, Harrison]

>From: 	MantaRay at aol.com

>>Why this belief that he might be averse to making money *and*
>>making sure he gets all the publicity he can? 
>
>No one said he wasn't after cash. The plot was: CNN supposedly invaded his
>space by filming him and he had to call them up to ask them not to show it.
>If he REALLY wanted publicity, he wouldn't have called. We are debating the
>publicity machine, one which now requires that authors are personalities, as
>well as writers, and must be unearthed. If Pynchon is no longer into this,
>why the fuss? If he is, then he was smoked out and that the problem we're
>after.

As Nancy Jo Sales pointed out in the CNN piece, TRP leads a rather
ordinary existence, lunching with other writers (_which_ other writers,
I keep wondering: Dave Barry?), shopping, weekends in the country, etc.
He _can_ be found and photographed, apparently with minimal effort. He's
not an ascetic hermit; talk of "smoking him out" seems to be overstating
it. If Pynchon had agreed to be _interviewed_ at any length by an actual
professional journalist, then I think the floodgates would be open and
Katy would be frantically Barring the Door.

I think we're talking at cross-purposes here. There's a difference
between personal, cover-of-People, gossip-column publicity and the kind
of publicity it takes to sell books. (Somebody help me out with the
terminology, here: Where the hell are the marketing pukes when you
actually need them for once in their miserable lives?) Sometimes the two
kinds of publicity overlap. Frequently they don't. Pynchon is a special
case: He's so aggressively _lacking_ in the personal-publicity area that
it actually _gooses_ his ability to sell books. With me?

Could you imagine the horror of seeing him squeezed between Pamela Lee
and Quentin Tarantino on Leno's couch? "So, Tom--can I call you
Tom?--what's all this crap about entropy?"

On a more cynical note, I also get the impression that the Pynchon Myth
is a whole lot easier to maintain when there is nothing to maintain, if
you see my meaning. Lots less work, being invisible. Not a surprising
thing coming from one who praises Sloth, and who goes 17, 18 years
between novels.

Harrison