A Q&A with Jim Knipfel

[rich]

I liked the Buzzing and his NY Press articles.  always saw him on the F
train back in the day


On Mon, Apr 1, 2013 at 5:26 PM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>wrote:

> Who do you read these days?
>
> In terms of reading, everything is on audio for me now. Right now I’m
> listening to an audio version of Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon.
> That sounds all hoity-toity… But it’s such a glorious book. I had
> forgotten how astonishing it is. Other things I have read recently
> that I really liked: I listened to two very, very different works by
> Nick Baker: Human Smoke, which is his WWII book, and then The
> Anthologist, a novel, which is really good. There are still so many
> things that are not available on audio. It’s hard to find James
> Thurber. There is some Beckett — not all the Beckett I would like.
> Henry Miller is hard, and the recordings that are out there are
> miserable. These things are so damned expensive, too. Most of the
> writers I really love can’t be found on audio. You aren’t going to
> find Céline on audio… You can find him in French, but it’s
> unbelievably expensive, and I don’t know French. Gravity’s Rainbow is
> taking me a very long time — I have it on 55 discs.
>
> Thomas Pynchon has been lauding your work since Slackjaw the book
> first came out. How did the Knipfel-Pynchon connection begin?
>
> When a book nearing the final stages of production, you sit down with
> your editor and make up a wish list of people you want to get blurbs
> from. We sent out 20 or 25 copies of Slackjaw to various people. We
> didn’t hear a peep. Not a whisper, from any of them. So we had one
> left. And my editor at the time called and said, “We have one left.
> Who should we send it to?” And I said, why don’t you send one to
> Pynchon. And he said, “Well, it’s throwing one away. Nothing’s gonna
> happen.” And I said, “Then throw one away and mail it to him anyway.
> We aren’t getting anything else from anybody.” We mailed it to his
> agent, and we pretty much forgot about it. The day before
> Thanksgiving, 1997, I was at the Press. My editor called me, and he
> could barely speak. I’m trying to find out what the deal is, and all
> he could say was, “We just got a fax. I’m going to send it over to
> you.” And he faxed it over. And then I couldn’t speak for days after
> that. The blurb that Pynchon wrote was astonishing. And then he did
> another one for me for The Buzzing. He’s been extraordinarily kind for
> reasons I cannot fathom. I don’t get it, but I’m deeply, deeply
> grateful.
>
> http://archive.mensjournal.com/jimknipfel
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20130402/e192d36c/attachment.html>