kyd judas?

[Doug Millison]

Wood Jim points to a good reminder of the complicated and often tortured
lives that some great writers live. The notion that Pynchon may be paranoid
himself, or might have been at some time in his writing career, strikes me
as plausible, although I have no personal knowledge of the man nor of any
specific reason he might personally have for paranoia; maybe he wasn't, I
don't know. But, quite a few people were paranoid, and with good reason, in
the 60s-- we had a President and a FBI director and a CIA that, we now know,
were involved in all manner of dirty tricks, surreptitious actions, and
atrocities that targeted specific individuals, and we know that the
intelligence services infiltrated all sorts of academic and artistic
communities, besides their work inside political activist organizations.
Recall the way Pynchon focuses Vineland around snitches and agents
provocateurs. Nor is it inconceiveable that Pynchon may be writing, as
Hollander suggests, at least in part with an eye to the vacillating fortunes
of the Pynchon family.  Does it insult Pynchon, or somehow slight his
artistic accomplishment, to consider these things?  I don't think so.
Writers write for all sorts of reasons.