GRGR Pynchon on Pynchon (was Slothrop & Sloth)

[MalignD at aol.com]

Millison writes:

<<I love this picture of TRP ... hustling a newspaper assignment for 
"probably much needed bucks."  Read TRP as a jaded newspaper hack who cranks 
out a few hundred words on any topic at hand if that's how you see him, but I 
choose not to, I read him as a serious writer. His Sloth essay is of a piece 
with his essay on Love in the Time of Cholera, Watts, Luddites, intro to 
Richard Farina's novel, and other essays:  it's obvious that he chooses to 
write, when he writes non-fiction, about the things that concern him deeply 
enough to spend years, decades, articulating and elaborating in his 
fiction.>> 

His "essay" on Love in the Time of Cholera was, in fact, a review of the 
novel written for that same NY Times Book Review.  I.e., a newspaper 
assignment.  Millison might have mentioned interviews with rock bands and 
readily supplied blurbs for the back covers of good, mediocre, and egregious 
novels (e.g., Even Cowgirls Get the Blues).  These too apparently things that 
concern him deeply.  (And all of which make him only more interesting to me 
than the deified version Millison prefers, but none of which has any bearing 
on GR.)