El Comandante Pynchon

[Erik T. Burns]

That's a nice cartoon. FYI, the article is Gerry Howard's piece from
Bookforum in  summer 2005. etb

http://www.bookforum.com/archive/sum_05/pynchon.html

"And then, enter Commandant Pynchon, a one-man government-in-exile,
rumbling down from the mountains into the capital city of American
consciousness with something like the ultimate weapon: Gravity's
Rainbow. Peter and I had both read V. and The Crying of Lot 49 with
fanatic attention, reverence, and awe, and plenty of criticism to go
with them as well. We could cite the second law of thermodynamics
accurately; we knew that Herbert Stencil's third-person prose had been
modeled on The Education of Henry Adams; phrases such as "the dynamo
and the Virgin" sprang from our lips with practiced ease. Like a
number of other '60s classics, these novels weren't mere reading
experiences; they seemed to demand a radical change of attitude on the
part of the reader. We tried to embody McClintic Sphere's dictum to
"keep cool, but care"; like Oedipa Maas, we strove to find the
resources to master our vertigo and panic over a world turned
illegible. Among American novelists, only Pynchon seemed to have the
resources to master the intricacies and inner dynamics of this strange
new post-Enlightenment era."