URL: Remedios Varo & TRP

Derek C. Maus dmaus at email.unc.edu
Tue Apr 11 12:11:13 CDT 2000


On Tue, 11 Apr 2000, s~Z wrote:

> Let me be the *first* to alert the group to an article on the painter
> Remedios Varo (and its pynchon mention) in todays New York Times
> April 11, page F5. I anticipate a storm of posts on this one...

The opening paragraph of the article reads:

"Remedios Varo, considered one of the greatest surrealist painters of the
20th century, is so obscure to most Americans that when Dr. Alan J.
Friedman, a physicist and director of the New York Hall of Science, first
came across mention of her in a Thomas Pynchon novel years ago, a
colleague assured him that Mr. Pynchon had made her up."

I was reading Tony Tanner's CITY OF WORDS recently and noticed that he,
too, seems to think that Varo was a creation of Pynchon's, necessary for
the symbolic overtones contained within "Borando del Manto Terrestre." Of
course, he also seems to think that Kilgore Trout was simply a
science-fiction writer to whom Vonnegut was alluding rather than a
nom-de-plume and fictional invention...

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Derek C. Maus               | "My fondest hope is to die at the hands
dmaus at email.unc.edu         |   of a murderer. In America, the truly 
UNC-CH, Dept. of English    |       famous are always murdered."
http://www.unc.edu/~dmaus/  |                   --Quentin Crisp
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