The Writer As Social Butterfly

[Joe Allonby]

What he's missing is that ananymity aas a writer ALLOWS the writer to
observe humanity as if from a blind. People might act differently when
the famous writer walks in the room. Pynchon lives in New York City,
leads a social life, and functions like a normal human being. He just
doesn't do interviews and get his picture taken at galas with an
aspiring starlet on his arm.

On Sat, Jan 16, 2010 at 10:13 AM, Otto <ottosell at googlemail.com> wrote:
> I’m not going to bash a real classic like "On the Road", but from a
> literary point of view I would not compare it to "Gravity’s Rainbow".
> And I don't think that Pynchon's characters and themes are
> unnecessarily complex.
>
> I loved "The Town and the City", "On The Road", "The Subterraneans",
> "The Dharma Bums", "Maggie Cassidy", "Lonesome Traveller", "Desolation
> Angels" and "Vanity of Duluoz" when I read them, but at a certain
> point I came to the conclusion that for me (as a reader) it's not
> enough to write (more or less) along your own biography forever. When
> I got "Book of Dreams" later I tried to read it, but never finished
> it.
>
> 2010/1/16 Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>:
>> The Writer As Social Butterfly
>> By Andrew Boryga on Friday, January 15, 2010
>>
>> (...)
>> If you need a more convincing reason to be a social writer, just look
>> at On the Road, Jack Kerouac’s masterpiece: it was entirely based on
>> real-life characters Kerouac encountered throughout his life, such as
>> Neal Cassady­­, the basis for Dean Moriarty. It is a captivating book
>> because it’s relevant, and more importantly, it’s relatable, and that
>> is what good writing is all about.
>>
>> Contrast this with, say, Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. Pynchon,
>> one of the most secluded authors in history, has not been photographed
>> in years and rumors about his identity and location have been swirling
>> since the ’60s.
>>
>> Gravity’s Rainbow—Pynchon’s magnum opus­­­­­ and National Book Award
>> winner in 1974—drew acclaim for its transgressive nature. However, it
>> was also criticized for its obscurity and deemed “unreadable, turgid,
>> overwritten and obscene”. Pynchon himself admitted to his obscurity in
>> a rare interview, saying, “I was so fucked up while I was writing
>> it…that now I go back over some of those sequences and I can’t figure
>> out what I could have meant.”
>>
>> I’m not going to bash a classic like Gravity’s Rainbow, but maybe if
>> Pynchon got out a little more often and tried to better connect with
>> other people, his characters and themes wouldn’t be so unnecessarily
>> complex.
>>
>> http://www.litdrift.com/2010/01/15/writer-as-social-butterfly/
>>
>