Farina Novel

[Dave Monroe]

Cowart, David. Thomas Pynchon: The Art of the
Allusion. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1982.

Identifies Fariña as a "kindred spirit" to Pynchon. He
suggests Slothrup's dream of The White Rabbit in
Gravity's Rainbow (page 468) may symbolize Fariña, who
played the voice of The White Rabbit in the Tale
Spinners for Children recording of Alice in
Wonderland. He also suggests that Fariña's Heffalump
may represent Pynchon, as Gnossos and Heffalump engage
in a trivia contest involving Fariña's and Pynchon's
common pop-culture interests in Hop Harrigan and Tank
Tinker (who are also mentioned in Pynchon's novels).
Some other similarities: 

There were obviously many shared enthusiasms and
paranoias, and much intellectual cross-fertilization.
Sometimes they even wrote the same way. Though Pynchon
has the wider stylisitic repertoire, both tend to
favor fast-moving prose that often defies conventional
grammar, depending on participial phrases that ought
to "dangle," but somehow propel instead. Their works
are equally studded with catalogues, equations (both
had abandoned engineering programs), and parodies of
the Mass, not to mention references to movies, the
harmonica, the color magenta, aqua regia, black and
Latin culture, comics, radio serials, and Vivaldi....
In jazz, they shared a contempt for Dave Brubeck, and
a liking for Ornette Coleman.... Both delight in comic
voices. The Nazi officers, pachucos, Transylvanians,
blacks, comic Englishmen, and radio characters like
Lamont Cranston who stalk through Pynchon's fiction
may have been inspired by Fariña's repertoire of such
voices, which his sister-in-law, Joan Baez, describes
in her introduction to the Long Time Coming
collection. Both loved comedy, and both were
fascinated by death. Though Fariña was often, in his
wife's term, very "deathy," he did not live long
enough for his youthful, Hamlet-like brooding on
mortality to mature into real nihilism. Perhaps in
time, like his friend, he would have tempered nihilism
with something like mysticism and discovered in
fantasy and in the heartening vistas of the
imagination that physics is metaphor, not law.

http://www.richardandmimi.com/litcrit.html

--- Richard Romeo <romeocheeseburger at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> in Farina's novel, ...Looks up to Me, are any of the
> characters based on Pynchon when he was at Cornell?

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