Pynchon Japan Playboy

[jbor]

on 1/2/04 1:28 AM, Terrance wrote:

>In any event, from what I've read of it, I
> think it reads like phony-baloney.

I agree that the printed comments are barely coherent and dumb for the most
part, and that their attribution makes Pynchon out to be an imbecile. Like
the way the Wanda Tinasky letters made him out to be an arrogant and deluded
crank. I don't think the fact that Pynchon hasn't disclaimed the Japan
Playboy "interview" proves anything. For a start, he has no legal recourse
to something published in Japan anyway, and no-one of any note has taken it
seriously, unlike that Tinasky crap, which ended up in a book on the
strength of the (false) Pynchon attribution and a couple of well-respected
people (Steve Moore, John Krafft) being willing to take it seriously.

I also agree with you that there's no intentional reference to 9/11 in the
Orwell 'Intro', cryptic or otherwise.

And I don't consider a phone call to CNN asking them not to broadcast film
footage, or a letter to the editor saying that the name Genghis Cohen in
_Lot 49_ derives from the Mongol ruler and wasn't plagiarised (NYT July 17,
1966) or one to the _Soho Weekly News_ replying to an article claiming that
he is J.D. Salinger ("Not bad, keep trying."), as "interviews". The letter
to Thomas F. Hirsch and the faxes to David Hajdu aren't "interviews" either,
and anyone who claims they are in the same category as, say, the actual
interviews which William Gaddis gave to Malcolm Bradbury (1986) or _Paris
Review_ (1987) has rocks in their head. As Pynchon reportedly said, he
believes that "recluse is a code word generated by journalists ... meaning,
'doesn't like to talk to reporters'". In other words, Pynchon doesn't like
to talk to reporters, and that's why they've labelled him a "recluse".

http://www.cnn.com/US/9706/05/pynchon/

best

> "America always looks for an enemy. The country cannot feel O.K.
> without it. It has labeled Bin Laden as the bad guy who commanded the
> terrorist attacks from behind the scenes, only because we couldn't feel
> O.K. unless we made him. But I think Bin Laden is just somebody's rodeo
> clown."