Pynchon's "Knewspeak"

jbor jbor at bigpond.com
Sat Feb 15 04:04:21 CST 2003


on 14/2/03 9:57 PM, Terrance at lycidas2 at earthlink.net wrote:

> So why is Pynchon penning a Forward to 1984?

Mm. Is he?

    Too good to be true
    February 15 2003

    In this information age, it's easier than ever for a hoaxer to play
    with our heads, says Alex Boese.

    Our culture describes many different activities as hoaxes. When
    a newspaper knowingly prints a fake story, we call it a hoax. We
    also describe misleading publicity stunts, false bomb threats,
    scientific frauds, business scams and bogus political claims as
    hoaxes.

    What is the common thread that runs through all of these?

    First of all, they are all deceptive acts, or lies. But not just
    any deceptive act qualifies as a hoax. A small white lie, such as
    when an employee falsely calls in sick to take a day off work,
    doesn't qualify as a hoax. Nor do most forms of criminal deception,
    such as identity theft, counterfeiting, perjury or plagiarism.

    To become a hoax, a lie must have something extra. It must be somehow
    outrageous, ingenious, dramatic or sensational. Most of all, it
    must command the attention of the public. A hoax, then, is a
    deliberately deceptive act that has succeeded in capturing the
    attention (and, ideally, the imagination) of the public.

    [...]

    When an email began circulating in 2001, claiming that George W.
    Bush had the lowest IQ of any US president, most might have
    dismissed this as partisan politicking, except that the claim
    was backed up by the prestigious-sounding Lovenstein Institute.
    It turned out that the email had started as a joke on a website,
    where the original report said, among other things, that Dr
    Lovenstein was "living in a mobile home in Scranton, Pennsylvania".
    The Guardian newspaper and Garry Trudeau, creator of the Doonesbury
    cartoon strip, were taken in by this.

    [...]

OK article, continues at:

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/02/14/1044927791710.html

So, I'd say apply the "Gullibility Test" advocated therein. Consider the
source of the "scoop" (Dickie Montague); consider the precedents (that Japan
Playboy "interview", the swapping around of Pynchon's message of support for
Salman Rushdie with another writer's at the NYTimes archives, the "Pynchon
is Wanda Tinasky" falderal etc). And whatever you do, don't hold your
breath. There's a good chance it's just another attempted hoax pulled by a
sad little Internet troll with nothing better to do.

best






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