A Reviewer's Hunch about Pynchon's Fans

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

Dan Hansong:
Hi, here is  Howard Schneider's shitty prophecy. 
Please share with us your reading spectrum and 
make a testimony against or for this iconoclastic 
judgment on the Pynchonites.
 
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I have a hunch that Pynchon's zealous fans don't read
many novels, so they're not bothered by his flaws. They
cherish their idol because he presents the world as they
know it: science, technology, history, politics, high and low
culture all mashed together to make a garish gallimaufry.
The results might be messy but so is the society the
Pynchonites inhabit.
 
----Review by Howard Schneider
May-June 2007  THE HUMANIST


Wow!!! What a delicious piece of bait, and what a nasty looking hook. He must
be talking about that well known Kabbalist, Crazy Person and Pynchon Fan, 
Harold Bloom. 

Let's see now, got into Sherlock Holmes when I was about 7, Voltaire, Swift
and Shakespeare around 8, Ralph Nader and Ralph Ginsburg when I was 9,
Thurber when I was 10, Dorthory Parker, Robert Benchley and Pauline Kael
when I was 11. . . . 

Joseph Heller kicked in at 14, along with Tolkien, and then, after the 
adolescent joys of Asimov and Clarke and Heinlein, started to get into 
Hesse and Huxley. . . .

Had to wait till I was a ripe, mature 18 before I could get into Thomas 
Mann. . . .

If my tastes in writing (in general) were to have some sort of compass reading, 
with northern readings for tragedy and southern for comedy, my taste has 
always run deep south, thus my fondness for William S. Burroughs' monologues,
Chuck Jones' Double-Takes and Nicholas Slonimsky's pro-noun-c-a-tion's.
If there's any linking pattern, it probably has to do with a sense of Humor, and 
Schneider's pissy little kiss-off is a proper demonstration of the antithesis 
and/or total absence of the aforementioned sense.

. . . .started up "In Search of Lost Time" when I was 51, got as far as 
"Sodom & Gomorrah" before "Against the Day" showed up in the warehouse. . . .