German Radio 2000 - quick translation

[KXX4493553 at aol.com]

Okay, I didn't see the German part, sorry. Here is the translation, without 
any guarantee, for mistakes I'm not responsible. I wish you mindless 
pleasures.
Kurt-Werner Poertner

All are playing themselves, completed by a moderator and a chorus.
Moderator: Michael Naumann, you were Pynchon's editor. How did he react as 
you said to him you would become a minister for culture?
Naumann: He laughed.
Chorus laughs.
Moderator: What makes TP to cult writer?
Naumann: The outrage about the senselessness of life. This is interesting for 
young people.
Kittler: P. knew what a rocket was.
Naumann: One time P. told me how he made investigations for GR. He borrowed 
all books in a library of the University of California which were illustrated 
with fotos of Germany. 
Zischer: Nobody works in Germany in such a way.
All: Nobody any more!
Some individuals: Uwe Johnson! Thomas Mann!
Naumann: P. told me once that he couldn't remember that he studied at Nabokov.
Chorus writes some notes.
Kittler: In Pynchon it's about data reply direction finding (sorry, the word 
"Datenrueckpeilung" also doesn't make any sense in German). America is not 
destroyed, it strikes back.
Naumann: P. is a patriot.
Ickstadt: But, what all is lost! The miracles. Speaking dogs, mechanical 
ducks. The dogs are only waiting for their food, the forests are rooted out. 
Chorus is silent.
Moderator: Does he love America for its lost possibilities, too?
Naumann: P. told me that he classifies actual events in a mythological 
pattern. Light and darkness. The first it's the author, the latter all the 
others. 
Moderator: Is he a historian of the present?
Naumann: The prophetic power of "Vineland" is tremendous Those are all IM's 
("inoffizielle Mitarbeiter", the informers/spies of the East German Stasi).
Kittler: The clever thing of Pynchon is paranoia.
Naumann: P. told me once he has no credit card.
Ickstadt: For Pynchon the technical world is the evil. Good life looks 
different. Pynchon is Adorno if he had understood jazz. 
Naumann: Once i gave P. a sextant as a present that I bought in an antique 
shop. He knew immediately which workshop produced it at what time. London 
1810. I turn the instrument and there was engraved: London, 1810. 
Chorus is astonished.
Kittler: P. is working on media.
Naumann: Once I gave P. an old Leica out of the Thirties as a present. He 
said he knows nothing about photography. He never used such an apparatus.
Ickstadt: The jokes are getting better from book to book.
Naumann: P  is talking with himself. This depends on his existence as an 
islander (no exact translation: it means "isolated existence").
Moderator: And the newest in the end: TP is writing a new novel.
Naumann: As I met Pynchon at christmas, he said to me that he is working on a 
novel about a Russian mathematician who studied at the German mathematician 
David Hilbert at the beginning of this century in Goettingen.
TOBIAS RAPP