Playboy Japan interview

[jd]

I don't think I could possibly see how someone could think Pynchon
would be pro-Bush's actions.  He might be the type of person to shrug
and say "I've seen worse", but I don't think he'd ever be into that
shit.  Not, personally, being Pynchon, I can't state that with any
real authority, but I think his writing points to that at least.

Using that as a jumping-off point...  Pynchon is, at heart, a human
being, and that was a pretty incredible time for us all I think.  I
can understand why he might have the desire to speak out, and I'd say
that the fact that "his" comments appeared in Playboy Japan as opposed
to the New York Times, or even Playboy America, is definitely, on my
scale, Pynchon-esque.  And frankly, I don't expect every word to come
out of his mouth to be a nugget of genius.  Perhaps the book blurb and
the interview are indicators of why he might choose to communicate
with the world primarily through his fiction.

But beyond that, it is, at heart, just a guy making a point.  It
doesn't really matter if it's Pynchon or Albert Wong the Third.  I
just don't think that what is shown in this "interview" adds anything
to the Pynchon legacy necessarily, it certainly doesn't rank on the
level of jumping out of a window to escape Norman Mailer or carrying
around an oversized pink pig, not in my book.  It's just a guy,
sharing his opinion, an opinion that many people in the country also
had (it's certainly similar to what I felt), and really, the man lives
in NYC (right?).  I imagine that should that have happened down the
street from me I'd be wanting to talk to just about anyone as well,
and I don't think it really has to bear the mark of "exposing himself
to the media" - though even if it was I would not begrudge him that.

On 7/26/06, pynchonoid <pynchonoid at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> --- Malign:
> >
> > i think Rob's skepticism-- and I'm not about to go
> > ploughing back through two
> > years of posts, but it was mine as well -- is that
> > the interview makes
> > Pynchon sound like an idiot.
>
> Only in the caricatures of the interview that Malign
> has exaggerated in his posts. Most of the p-listers
> I've talked with understand it was a rough translation
> done in a hurry to provide the gist of its content to
> pynchon-l, that it was never intended as a document on
> which to base a serious critique.  According to
> Japanese speakers I've heard describe the article, it
> doesn't make Pynchon sound like an idiot at all, but
> since I don't read Japanese I can't testify to that
> personally, although I pass along what they say. It's
> true that in the interview Pynchon does not present
> himself as the pistol-packing let's bomb Osama back to
> the Stone Age advocate of President Bush's "War on
> Terror" that jbor was making Pynchon out to be at the
> time.
>  (Yes, newbies, you could look it up.  jbor was
> actually claiming  Pynchon as a supporter of Bush's
> foreign policy post 9-11, which explains jbor's need
> to deny the Playboy Japan interview where Pynchon
> effectively trashes Bush, which explains jbor's
> tortured effort to rewrite Pynchon's highly political
> intro to 1984, and so on.)
>
> Malign is much better at writing about Prince than
> anything else -- keep it up, fascinating stuff, a
> timeless artist certain to endure through the
> centuries, and the writer of some darned catchy tunes,
> too.
>
> And it's great to know I continue to have such a
> devoted fan in Malign - regular as clockwork, evidence
> that he or she has read my post, thought about it,
> forumlated a response, perhaps scribbled it out on an
> envelope and crossed out a few different versions, all
> the while A Grown Man (?) Who Calls Himself Malign is
> thinking about A Grown Man Who Calls Himself
> Pynchonoid, giving me all that mental real estate, day
> after day, hour after hour, focusing yet another
> p-list post on something I've written.
>
> What would you be without me, my misaligned amigo?
> Nowhere.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> http://pynchonoid.org
> "everything connects"
>
> http://OnlineJournalist.org
>
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