Syllabus

[Charles J. Shields]

Oh, this is gold, thank you.

Vonnegut, incidentally, sent Norbert Wiener, who's mentioned on the site, an
advanced reading copy of Player Piano. The august Wiener went into high
dudgeon. When he recognized his colleague, mathematician John Von Neuman
portrayed in the novel by a character also named von Neumann, who leads an
anti-technological conspiracy, Wiener wrote angrily to Vonnegut's editor
warning him that his brash young author ³cannot with impunityŠ play fast and
loose with the names of living people.²[1] In his view, the ³new cult² of
post-war science fiction was refusing to confront the misuse of computers,
as Wiener had in his bestselling The Human Use of Human Beings, opting
instead to pen pointless sci-fi fairytales about the world of tomorrow.

[1] Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In
Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics (New York: Basic Books,
2005), 288. Siegelman was later a creative writing student of Vonnegut¹s at
Harvard.



on 3/20/11 3:47 PM, Dave Monroe at against.the.dave at gmail.com wrote:

> On Sat, Mar 19, 2011 at 2:56 PM, Charles J. Shields
> <cjs1994 at earthlink.net> wrote:
> 
>> I'm thinking about going at Pynchon's novels in reverse: that is, reading
>> what he might have read, or at least becoming familiar with key concepts,
>> ideas, themes, and so on, before I pick up my first Pynchon work.
> 
> http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/bio/influences.html