Well I just reread Vineland and the news is still bad...

[mikebailey]

On Wed, 13 Jun 2007, Henry Winkler wrote:
>
> Note the famous or notorious 17 year gap between GR and Vineland. WTF
> happened during those years people?

mentioned on this list awhile back was the book "From Asininity
to Assassination" by "Pyro Atomic Bomb" as a possible pseudonymous
Pynchon offering.

I bought the book, it's interesting, it doesn't scream "Pynchon" at
least to me...but, I dunno, maybe it could be...

My used copy ($9) from Abebooks has an
inscription from the "author", so I hope it is by him.
But I haven't even dug on any search engines -- when I get a
minute (work's been crazy lately, so much so that I've even noticed
more typos than usual in my p-list nattering) I plan to download
the newest WordsEx from Glenn's site and test drive it to
 look for some details on that book.

>We may never know, but one thing we do
> know is that the quality of Pynchon's books declined after that time.
>

it's so hard for me to understand that attitude.  Perhaps I really
am a knee-jerk fanboy, but I've enjoyed each one more than the last.
With the exception of Vineland, which rocketed to the top of my chart
immediately and has stayed there.  But I lack the chops to definitively
tell you why.  I'm even getting bored with my own lame advocacy,
but not with the book (it's f**king great, i tell you!) - so I'll
shut up about that for now.

What might be of interest is the thought that there was indeed
some kind of
a) unpleasant drug reaction/dependency whatever that he had to
deal with  (long term drug use has affected, um, some people that
I know, and they, um, emerged with clipped wings feeling lucky to
be alive)
or (paranoiacally)
b) that Men in Black threatened him compellingly enough to
convince him to mute his post-horn

ttfn