Thomas Pynchon - a Journey into the Mind of [P.]

[Mike Weaver]

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,942894,00.html

>·At the launch of Thomas Pynchon's latest novel, Mason &
>Dixon (1997), his publisher staged an unlikely Thomas Pynchon
>look-alike contest in New York. Unlikely because nobody knows
>what the reclusive novelist looks like (he was last photographed
>about 40 years ago). Was he the mysterious, white-suited man
>who watched the contest from the back of the room and spoke
>in an unconvincing French accent? Or is he the ageing hipster
>caught on camera by a CNN reporter? These questions and
>more are mulled over by an assortment of Pynchon's fans,
>critics and acquaintances in Thomas Pynchon - a Journey into
>the Mind of [P.], a German documentary that opens at the ICA
>in London on Friday.
>
>Directed by Fosco and Donatello Dubini, it's a thoughtful and
>disturbing portrait of America at its most paranoid: the
>assassination of JFK (did Pynchon meet Lee Harvey Oswald on
>a train and was Oswald part of a government mind-control
>experiment?), Timothy "turn-on, tune-in, drop-out" Leary (was he
>a CIA stooge?), Operation Paperclip (when the US military
>rounded up Nazi scientists and brought them to America), the
>Vietnam war, the Cuban missile crisis, and so on. There is even
>some unpleasant footage of a ginger cat on LSD.
>
>Pynchon's counter-culture credentials are at odds with his past.
>He served in the US Navy and worked at Boeing during the era
>of the Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile programme. Is
>Gravity's Rainbow (1973) a confession, an attempt to expiate
>some past sin? What exactly are his reasons for staying out of
>the public eye? Is he just exceptionally shy or does he have
>something to hide? (When Gravity's Rainbow won the National
>Book Award, his publisher sent an actor to accept the prize.)
>
>In the course of the documentary (which has an excellent
>soundtrack by The Residents) we discover that Thomas Ruggles
>Pynchon (born May 8, 1937) is 6'2" tall, has blue or maybe
>green eyes and unusually pale skin that never tans; he
>occasionally goes shopping in drag to evade detection and wrote
>Gravity's Rainbow late at night, in long hand. At one point an
>ex-girlfriend even hunts down his old flat on Manhattan Beach,
>California. "Do you realise how important this is?" she says as
>they squeeze inside the cramped interior. "This is a historical
>moment."IP

Someone on the Guardian's M&D discussion list (nothing to write home about 
unfortunately) says its terrible.

Cheers
Mike
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