Pynchon on the road

[Doug Millison]

http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?20010719013R

  REVIEW

  July 19, 2001

  Liaisons Dangereuses
  JOHN LEONARD

  Positively 4th Street:The Life and Times of Joan
  Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina,and Richard
  Farina
  by David Hajdu
  328 pages, $25.00 (hardcover)
  published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux


  Down the Highway:The Life of Bob Dylan
  by Howard Sounes
  527 pages, $27.50 (hardcover)
  published by Grove


excerpt:

"Assistant
  professors of Gravity's Rainbow will be
  delighted to hear from Tom Pynchon, who
  was a buddy of Richard's at Cornell, and
  best man at his wedding to Mimi in Carmel,
  to which he hitchhiked from Mexico because
  he didn't have a driver's license, and
  agreed to be interviewed for Hajdu's book
  by fax, and is quoted not only in a blurb for
  Been Down So Long ("This book comes on
  like the Hallelujah Chorus done by 200
  kazoo players with perfect pitch"), but also
  in a personal note to the needy author:

            But to you, wild colonial
            maniac, about all I can say is
            holy shitŠ. This thing man
            picked me up, sucked me in,
            cycled, spun and centrifuged
            my ass to where it was a
            major effort of will to go get
            up and take a leak even,
            and by the time it was over
            with I know where I had
            been.

  If you want comparisons, which you don't, I
  think most of Rilke.  "


...No driver's license -- that's a fairly radical statement to make 
in the U.S. even today (unless you live in NYC, I guess), even more 
so in the 60s.

Leonard's article is worth reading.  He likes Joan Baez and doesn't 
much like the way Dylan treated her.
-- 
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