The 'Waste' Law | Pynchon's genealogical influences

[Mark Kohut]

Maybe he jsut wanted to live a "normal' life
and he *knows* hunger for personal celebrity
is not normal?

>From the beginning, before GR set him up,
he never wanted to 'promote' his work with personal
appearances......I've been told.

People know and have known him...and still do. 
I know people he has had lunch with. 

We have all heard of friends such as ian McEwan, others.

I think Monte is right about what comes first for him and 
what he does not want to even come last. 



----- Original Message ----
From: Monte Davis <monte.davis at verizon.net>
To: Daniel Harper <daniel.e.harper at gmail.com>
Cc: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Wednesday, November 21, 2007 1:40:59 PM
Subject: RE: The 'Waste' Law | Pynchon's genealogical influences

> I think you're misreading me slightly...

No, just indulging my habitual vice of using your post as a starting point
for my own tangent. :-) See, I've never thought of Pynchon as reclusive, no
matter how many times people engaged in the *business* of book promotion
tell me that he is, because (they say) hunger for personal celebrity is
normal.... 

And no matter how many times his fans tell me that he is, because they think
their devotion entitles them to more information.

I think he simply 

1) works very hard at research and writing, and enjoys doing that more than
talking about it

2) did well enough early on (published AFAIK every story he wanted to, then
with his frist novel got a Faulkner Foundation award, reviews to die for,
and very respectable sales) that he quite reasonably felt he didn't *need*
to do interviews and book tours

3) came to get sardonic pleasure from watching all the frenzied,
self-reinforcing bookchat speculation (i.e., what may well have started as a
mild preference was positively reinforced and became a way of life)  

So... since I don't think of him as hiding in the first place...

And don't agree with the repeated implication lately in these parts that the
P. family history has been suppressed, or is any more a Deep Dark Secret of
American Capitalism than a thousand other family histories one notch below
the Adams-Rockefeller-Roosevelt-Bush level of prominence...

I question the whole premise of a whole nother layer of "coded" revelation
"beneath" or "behind" what are already extremely layered works of art. Your
furniture analogy makes perfectly good sense to me.


      ____________________________________________________________________________________
Never miss a thing.  Make Yahoo your home page. 
http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20071121/b08f67c9/attachment-0001.html>