Pynchon's back catalogue

[Robin Landseadel]

On Jul 29, 2009, at 6:26 AM, John Bailey wrote:

> I think Pynchon's later work makes an amazing attempt to resolve the
> personal experience vs research thing - AtD is a world historical
> novel in which the personal experience of research is foregrounded -
> it's clearly written by someone who has only read about the places,
> events, lives in question and whose experience of reading is conveyed
> by stylistically referring to the way these histories were
> represented... especially in the non-'historical' forms of writing
> that reveal so much more than official histories. Pynchon must love
> the Boys Own Adventure, the noir, the spy romance etc. These
> 'secondary sources' exist have as much affective weight as other kinds
> of personal encounter.

While all wrapped up in the group read of Against the Day, I was  
struck by how much the language of the Chums of Chance material  
resembled the New York Times reporting of George M. Pynchon's Yacht  
races, how fictional that "news" sounded. I must have looked at a  
hundred pdfs of old New York Times entries for George M. Pynchon, many  
longer and sillier than the provided link. I found it so strange, so  
surreal that these yacht races always appeared above the baseball  
scores:

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?_r=1&res=9503E4DC113AE633A25754C0A9619C946396D6CF