Did the master make an appearance on his Amazon page?

[pynchonoid]

http://www.slate.com/id/2146152/

The Pynchon Post
Did the master make an appearance on his Amazon page?
By Troy Patterson
Posted Wednesday, July 19, 2006, at 3:32 PM ET

The Trystero muted post horn. Click image to
expand.Things did not delay in turning curious when
the first beats of the drumroll began for Thomas
Pynchon's forthcoming book. Last month, lit-bloggers
and news-writers reported that Penguin Press would
issue the author's sixth novel in December. This
whetted the palates of those hard-core fans who have
spent the years since 1997's Mason & Dixon speculating
that Pynchon was at work on a doozy about lady
mathematicians of the old school and also, uhm,
Mothra. Last week, Amazon.com put up a page that
listed Untitled Thomas Pynchon at a svelte 992 pages
and bore a description purportedly written by the
master himself. In fact, it purported quite well
indeed and also rather charmingly, promising an
archetypal Pynchonian buffet of settings, characters,
and old tricks ("Characters stop what they're doing to
sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange
sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are
spoken, not always idiomatically.") Then the
description just vanished from the page.

Was this a hoax? A jump-the-gun glitch? A hype? In any
event, one Amazon customer must have gone through his
Web browser's cache and reposted the thing on the
customer discussion board, touching off an instant
classic of that kind of chatter where M.F.A. meets
LSD. The following comments are fairly typical: "I am
saying that the blurb is Pynchon parroting Pynchon 

viral-marketing or, more hopefully, a Swiftian
self-parody and critique of Internet subcultures (a
sort of new, updated Tale of a Tub.)" Whee!

(For the record, Penguin Press's publicity chief
disavows all knowledge of the blurb, and Amazon hadn't
sorted its story out by press time. Pynchon did not
immediately return an answering-machine message left
at what I reasonably assume to be his Manhattan
apartment.)

To be sure, when Mason & Dixon came out nine years
ago, the scholars and nuts who compulsively post to
the pynchon-l mailing list were on the case in
cyberspace. But the new book with the rather coyly
withheld title will enter an Internet Age in bloom,
which is just too perfect. Labyrinthine structures,
shifting identities, abstruse interconnections, funky
mail systems—in its delirious maximalism, Pynchon's
work has more than a few affinities with all this fine
new technology, and the technology enables Pynchon
fans to interact in a wholly Pynchonian way. Ladies
and germs, start your master's theses, your conspiracy
theories, and your attributions of prophecy: Here's
where hypertext meets literature.

http://pynchonoid.org
"everything connects"

http://OnlineJournalist.org

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