re Re: Pynchon & journalists

[barbara100 at jps.net]

Hadju:
"[...] Hajdu conducted hundreds of interviews for each of his books, but
his favorite source is someone he's never met. The reclusive Thomas
Pynchon....

Jbor:
> Actually Doug, if you read the _Publisher's Weekly_ quote you posted a
> little more carefully you'll notice that they don't call Hajdu's exchange
> with Pynchon an "interview" at all. Rather, they refer to it as
> "correspondence", and Pynchon as a "source", not an "interviewee" or
> "subject".

"Interview" can most certainly be implied. Come on, you know sentence
structure! Who was the reclusive Thomas Pynchon? Hadju's favorite source.
Favorite source for what? Favorite source for one of a hundred of
"interviews."
I don't know who the hell Hadju is, but from the looks of that sentence, he
interviewed Thomas Pynchon. Seems he was his favorite too.





----- Original Message -----
From: jbor <jbor at bigpond.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Friday, January 11, 2002 8:23 PM
Subject: Re: re Re: Pynchon & journalists


> on 12/1/02 1:15 PM, Doug Millison at millison at online-journalist.com wrote:
>
> > I find myself wondering
>
> Actually Doug, if you read the _Publisher's Weekly_ quote you posted a
> little more carefully you'll notice that they don't call Hajdu's exchange
> with Pynchon an "interview" at all. Rather, they refer to it as
> "correspondence", and Pynchon as a "source", not an "interviewee" or
> "subject". I'm not a media expert, but I suspect that quite a valid
> distinction can be made between the types of communication, and the
> relationships, or tenor, in the communicative interactions, designated by
> those terms.
>
> But, whatever, it's not really the issue. Ruth expressed what is the gist
of
> my opinion on this topic, much more clearly and sensibly than I have.
> Pynchon has declined to grant a press interview to a journalist - *his*
> letter or call (the article did say that it was a phone call) to CNN, and
> the correspondence by fax with David Hajdu notwithstanding - up until this
> _Playboy_ piece. If legit, it represents "a significant departure from
> Pynchon's previous dealings with the press." This is what I had in mind
when
> I originally wrote that the _Playboy_ interview would mark Pynchon
breaking
> "a deliberate forty year silence by speaking out [ ... ] in this, his
first
> official press interview .... " It seems a little precious of you to have
> laboured so, for close on 15 posts now, over the wording of this
statement,
> don't you think?
>
> I fully comprehend that _Playboy_ Japan and Eisner's book are different.
My
> point on that topic, however, was that the status of the quotes attributed
> to Pynchon in either publication is (currently) *exactly the same*.
>
> best
>
>
>