Slate-d

[jd]

I think it was just a gift to the cult of Pynchon.  And he probably
gave it to Amazon, and they were the ones who made the mistake.  It
does sound like it was, indeed, Pynchon who wrote the blurb, but
anyways, a loon?  The man used to carry around an oversized pink pig.
Just sayin'.

On 7/20/06, jbor at bigpond.com <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> 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
> >>
> >
>
>