Slate-d

[jbor at bigpond.com]

On 20/07/2006, at 11:11 PM, jbor wrote:

> N.B. also -- "(For the record, Penguin Press's publicity chief 
> disavows all knowledge of the blurb .... )"

In light of this, to persist in maintaining (or insinuating, as the 
Slate article does) that it's something written by Pynchon necessarily 
implies that Pynchon went out of his way to produce a waffling list of 
names and places interspersed with some self-indulgent twaddle with no 
sense of protagonist, theme, or plot, passed it off as a blurb for his 
new novel, then went around his publisher, agent, and any sensible 
advice he might have been given in order to upload this trivialising 
spoiler onto evil corporate behemoth Amazon.com's site five months 
early, somehow hacking into their publisher's area to do this, and 
thereby effectively and deliberately destroyed the usual aura of 
mystery and expectation surrounding the release of a new (major) work 
by him. In sum, it casts him as a loon.

best

> I'm not buying that "parody" argument either. As a blurb, it's 
> ordinary. Bad, in fact. The comparison with the M&D flap blurb nailed 
> it.
>
> But at least now it looks like it's a fake bad blurb -- to go into the 
> Hoaxers' Scrapbook alongside the fake bad MySpace log, the fake bad 
> photo, the fake bad interview, the fake bad Unabomber rumour, and the 
> fake bad crop of letters to the editor (if only we could write 
> Vineland off as a fake bad book, eh? ... just joking, retract your 
> claws). So the issue becomes whether it's an accurate bad blurb. 
> That's still a very real possibility, but it will also raise a whole 
> bunch of other questions.
>
> Does it occur to anyone else that someone out there really has it in 
> for TRP, and is intent on doing as much damage to his reputation as 
> possible with all this crap?
>
> best
>
> On 20/07/2006, at 2:53 PM, Erik T. Burns wrote:
>
>> http://www.slate.com/id/2146152/?nav=ais
>>
>> "...the scholars and nuts who compulsively post to the pynchon-l
>> mailing list..."
>>
>> etb
>>
>