Vick's Rub?

[Dave Monroe]

On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 3:02 AM, kevin cummiskey
<kevincummiskey at yahoo.com> wrote:

> When Pynchon sneezes, do we all catch cold? This article is only a
> chronology in name-dropping.
>
> --- On Tue, 8/19/08, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
> Subject: In which a Signed Copy of a Pynchon novel makes an appearance
> To: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Cc: "Brad Andrews" <braden.andrews at gmail.com>, "mark levine"
> <leevyne at aol.com>, "Pete Cleland" <pmcleland2003 at yahoo.com>
> Date: Tuesday, August 19, 2008, 8:06 PM
>
> http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=j5vjg6gygvtjxs4pgtc9y8qbykr8dfty

Abrams Remembers Pynchon
Charles Hollander
Pynchon Notes 36-39, 1995-1996, pp. 179-180 About:

When I talked with John Freccero recently about parallels between
Pynchon and Dante, he suggested I phone M. H. Abrams to see what he
remembered about Pynchon. I did. Abrams recalled receiving a term
paper from Pynchon when Pynchon was a junior at Cornell. Abrams
thought it was too good to have been written by an undergraduate, and
he suspected it had been plagiarized. He suggested discreetly that
Pynchon make an appointment to discuss the paper (a pretext for an
oral exam). Within the first minutes of their meeting, Abrams
recognized that Pynchon was the paper's author. (Funny how little
things stick in the mind: forty years later, Abrams recalled Pynchon
as tall and slim and sporting a pencil-line moustache.) That was their
most memorable meeting. The ending of Pynchon's paper made such an
impression on Abrams that he read it to his classes for years, even
before Pynchon became PYNCHON. I asked him if he could find it. He
said he would look and leave word on my answering machine if he did.
When I came back from walking my dog, Diz, this message awaited me:

Charles Hollander, this is Mike Abrams at Cornell. I found that
quotation from Pynchon's term paper, which was in English 313, on
eighteenth-century English literature. It was a paper discussing
Samuel Johnson's Rasselas in conjunction with Voltaire's Candide. And
the paper ended with these sentences:
"Like Candide, Rasselas ends on an imperative note: again, to submit;
but above that, to endure. It leaves us with less hope than Voltaire,
but with more determination."
I hope that can be of use to you. It seems to be an interesting
quotation. Good luck.

This is also the message at the end of Vineland: "fuck it, play to the
end. . . . Zoyd . . . found himself listening to the Eagles' Greatest
Hits, in particular 'Take It to the Limit,' basically his whole story
these days, singing mournfully along" (373-74). Maybe submit, but for
sure endure. In his student days, Pynchon viewed Voltaire as a farceur
and Johnson as a stern moralist. Exactly this dichotomy runs through
all Pynchon's work: the comedy of fools against the episodes of high
seriousness. The term paper suggests he may have been trying to teach
himself to write like Voltaire and like Johnson in alternation in one
work. As a mere lad, Pynchon was working out his own philosophical
stance and inventing a way to express it. Within a year, he had
developed the literary equivalent of the musical fugue, in "Entropy,"
and he was off and running. He has been using that zany/portentous
formula ever since. You can't teach an old writer new tricks.

—Baltimore, Maryland

http://www.vheissu.info/art/art_eng_abrams.htm