Pynchon's reclusiveness: Life Magazine article?

[kent mueller]

I was also wondering where I'd heard this, and something about him climbing
out of a hotel window in Mexico to evade paparazzi...It was the Farina piece
read years ago. Obviously Life Magazine most likely didn't run a story since
they couldn't get the scoop photo...with Life and it's competitor Look, if
there was no photo, then there wasn't a story.

Kent Mueller


> From: "Victoria Harding" <vgiannini at si.rr.com>
> Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 10:09:10 -0400
> To: "'Otto'" <ottosell at yahoo.de>, "'Pynchon Liste'" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Subject: RE: Pynchon's reclusiveness:  Life Magazine article?
> 
> 
> Hmmm . . . here
> http://web.archive.org/web/20011006141820/user.fundy.net/leemale/spielde
> x.html
> we find
> 
> "And Farina himself (in a 1963 article "The Monterey Fair," collected in
> A Long Time Coming and a Long Time Gone) also described Pynchon as an
> observer, who skulked on the periphery of the action in dark glasses
> while evading reporters from Life magazine who were already trying to
> get a story on the elusive author of V."
> 
> But this site
> http://www.oldlifemagazines.com/
> has a table of contents search for Life Magazines, and Pynchon brings up
> nothing there.  
> 
> I'll have to think on it:  at that time I was a huge Pynchon fan (only
> V. and The Crying had been published, plus some stories, notably
> "Entropy" which I thought magnificent and, on rereading a few years ago
> when the group was reading Slow Learner, radically revised my opinion
> of) and remember thinking it was a bit cheesy, not to mention
> contradictory, for him to be participating so blatantly in the
> propagation of his elusive reputation.
> 
> At several points I read, or at least looked over, lots of magazines as
> part of my job, so have to work on recovering my memory better, which so
> far says:  black and white pix, large format slick magazine, not my
> subscription.  Before postal rates went up, several magazines, including
> Esquire, Look, and the Saturday Evening Post, were large format. Life
> seemed to have a lot of author photo stories, so that may be why I
> thought it was there, like the very similar, but really not, Salinger
> story.  Anyway, sorry for the inconclusiveness of all this --  Victoria
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Otto [mailto:ottosell at yahoo.de]
> Sent: Thursday, June 23, 2005 5:05 AM
> To: Pynchon Liste
> Cc: Victoria Harding
> Subject: Re: Pynchon's reclusiveness: Life Magazine article?
> 
> 
> Of course there's still much of this:
> http://web.archive.org/web/20011006140222/user.fundy.net/leemale/photode
> x.htm
> 
> Otto
> 
> Dave Monroe schrieb:
> 
>> I think this'd be news to ALL of us here ...
>> 
>> --- Victoria Harding <vgiannini at si.rr.com> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> Dear Pynchonians,
>>> 
>>> Otto's message about Pynchon's appearance on The
>>> Simpsons and his pixyish way of being a recluse
>>> reminds me to ask the assembled aficionados here
>>> about a Life Magazine feature I think I remember
>>> from the 60s or even late 50s? maybe not so early,
>>> with Pynchon's reclusiveness/elusiveness turned
>>> into a photo-tease in which he participated, views
>>> of him from the back, in silhouette, blurred as he
>>> crossed the image, and in other indiscernible ways,
>>> with a few childhood pix mixed in.
>>> 
>>> Is this a real memory? ...
>>> 
>>> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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