Pynchon feature for new online mag?

[Joe Allonby]

The Fung Wah and Lucky Dragon buses are a rather recent development.
Hard to establish a time line on this.


On Sun, Mar 7, 2010 at 2:18 AM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> I didn't get into to MIT and I got expelled from Harvard for doing
> something that MIT students do and are worshipped for. It was a major
> prank and I still can't believe I did it. A campus cop lost his job
> over it and I feel bad about that part still, it was only a dead body
> and . . . I ended up working in a peep show parlor near Madison
> Square. A night job. It wasn't a security guard exactly, but I sat at
> a security desk and I had to wear a uniform. Some guys got turned on
> when I stepped out from behind the desk, my tight blue trousers
> stuffed into my leather boots, my long wooden club, my radio, my big
> belt, my romance novel...but I never took a nickle from them then. Not
> for sex. I made enough to pay my rent on Avenue A and I never got
> messed up with junk so I managed to save up some cash; I took a
> Chinese bus to Cambridge for the weekend. It was April or May. I was
> not supposed to go anywhere near Harvard, but who would know me now
> after two years, my hair was long and blond now and besides, I was
> meeting a bunch of MIT boys. Harvard was pretty and romantic. MIT was
> ugly and romance was not in the cards or in the air. At least that's
> how I saw it. But I loved MIT boys. So weird and so smart and so
> stupid. You wouldn't think they knew tits from ass to look at them,
> with their dry toothpaste lips and their bad skin and their ties and
> sneakers, but them boys could love. So crazy was their love. I fell
> out of bed and Pynchon's V. was standing there with her legs spread
> and her pages thick with passion. A romance novel for MIT boys. That's
> what I thought anyway. I did, eventually, get into MIT. I majored in
> theater arts. Sounds like a lie but its true. I was nearly thirty. I
> took a course in physics. Why? I needed a credit in science and
> Physics was the only science class I got high grades in back in high
> school. I fell in love with entropy. Somehow I read Pynchon's Entropy,
> then Gravity's Rainbow. It took me about two years to read it. I never
> really gave up; I just kept dropped it and picked it up again and
> dropped it. It's not a romance novel. Now, I own three peep show
> parlors and I can read all day long. I read and read, but Pynchon is
> still one of my all time favorites. Not the greatest writer and
> certainly not for everyone, but there is little peep show and MIT in
> P. At least that's how it is with me.
>
> Alice (now appearing in a popular film about a song about Alice).
>