PYNCHONS LI DAYS

Ya Sam takoitov at hotmail.com
Wed Dec 20 08:48:43 CST 2006


BY SCOTT MCLEMEE

SPECIAL TO NEWSDAY

When Thomas Pynchon's sixth (and longest) novel, "Against the Day," appeared 
last month, it was one of the major events of the publishing season. But for 
Long Islanders, it also counts as another kind of news story: "Local Boy 
Makes Good."

Pynchon was born in Glen Cove in 1937. His family later moved to East 
Norwich, and he graduated, as salutatorian, from Oyster Bay High School in 
1953. One of the few available photographs of the famously 
publicity-avoiding novelist comes from the school yearbook.

Let the Manhattan literati take note: Long Island readers were the very 
first audience to get a taste of the distinctively Pynchonian imaginative 
style - with its blend of erudition, goofy names and hints of conspiracy. 
All those qualities were already present in his contributions to Purple and 
Gold, the Oyster Bay school newspaper.

His column, usually called "Voice of the Hamster," ran between November 1952 
and March 1953. The pieces were reprinted as an appendix to Clifford Mead's 
"Thomas Pynchon: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources" (1989).

Most are satirical stories about life at Oyster Bay High, disguised as 
letters from a student attending Hamster High - a school "located on a rock 
about a half mile off the South Shore, and not a very big rock at that." One 
of the characters is a math teacher, Mr. "Coolcat" Faggiaducci, who plays 
bebop jazz and is rumored to take heroin. He is on the verge of a nervous 
breakdown, "imagining that there is a conspiracy against him."

And, in fact, he's right. At the back of his trigonometry class sits a group 
called simply "The Boys," who hatch "a fascinating experiment in psychology 
entailing the instilling of paranoid hallucinations into the logical mind by 
psychoanalytic deletion of the super-ego." In other words, they want to see 
"how much Faggiaducci can take before he flips his lid."

Silly stuff, to be sure. But also a foreshadowing - at age 15 - of the 
anarchists and mad scientists in Pynchon's later books. (In "Against the 
Day," the Boys are reborn as a group of 19th century balloonists called the 
Chums of Chance.)

But, at the time, it was just a case of what young Pynchon called, in his 
last article, "the natural psychological manic phase prevalent in most 
seniors, coupled with a compulsive-obsessive complex concerning schoolwork; 
in other words, goofing off and fooling around."

http://www.newsday.com/features/printedition/ny-2know5021386dec20,0,6823960.story?coll=ny-features-print

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