Well, what socks is Pynchon wearing today?

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

" ... What exactly, Kittler asked, did Jim Morrison mean with “lost in a 
Roman wilderness of
pain”? No idea. He gazed at me with enthused pity: Well, isn’t it 
obvious? The reference to
Rome is preceded by a repeated invocation of “everything that stands.” 
So? Once again, I
felt like a Japanese radio operator listening in on Navajo windtalkers. 
Look, he insisted, it is
Plato read through Martin Heidegger: Being stands, and precisely that is 
lost in the switch
from Greek being to the inferior Roman wilderness. The song records a 
change in the
History of Being. He flipped into vintage Kittlerese: “Jim Morrison 
dionysiert sich zurück
nach Griechenland” (Jim Morrison is dionysizing himself back to Greece)."

" ...The most important topics by far were LSD and Thomas Pynchon, 
though to this day I
do not know where Kittler drew the line between the two, if indeed he 
drew any. He liked
to compare our meetings to the question and answer sessions in Gravity's 
Rainbow when
German doper Säure Bummer quizzes Seaman Bodine on esoteric American 
phrases like
ass backwards and shit‘n’ shinola. But the truth is that Kittler—one of 
the most tenacious
readers I have ever come across—needed no help; he just wanted somebody 
who knew
Pynchon well enough to appreciate his readings. Pynchon was a special 
case in the densely
populated Kittler pantheon: he was the only living writer whom Kittler 
accorded the
veneration he usually reserved for dead engineers. And Pynchon was to 
blame for the only
time I saw Kittler lose his cool.
To shore up my finances I had started freelancing for the Südwestfunk, 
the Southwest
German Broadcasting Network. Having reviewed the German translation of 
Slow Learner, I
proposed a longer feature on Pynchon and submitted an outline describing 
his well-known
invisibility. My boss turned it down and accused me of amateurish 
gullibility: all this talk about
Pynchon’s inaccessibility, he scoffed,was nonsense. He had been told by 
colleagues that
Pynchon wasn’t withdrawn at all; on the contrary, he was openly living 
with his girlfriend in a
villa in southern France and happy to talk to anybody who dropped by. In 
fact, he had just
attended the Frankfurt Book Fair wearing his “customary yellow socks.”
The socks got to me, and I suspected they would get to Kittler too. I 
looked him up in his office
the next day. He was in an exceptionally bad mood and quickly worked 
himself into a state of
nicotine-fueled indignation. Long before folks in the Freiburg English 
department ever heard of Pynchon, he had already read and studied him in 
English and German. He had deciphered
much in Gravity's Rainbow that US scholars had yet to discover. He had 
planned to organize a
conference in, of all places, Peenemünde but had been shot down by the 
East German
authorities because the Russians appeared to be stationing SS-20s where 
there once had been
V-2s. He had done all this, and now some broadcast stooge had access to 
Pynchon? He was
familiar with his socks? Realizing that he had crossed over into 
possessive petulance, he
calmed down and pointed a cigarette at me. Find out whether there’s 
anything to it.
Of course there wasn’t. At our next meeting my boss mentioned in passing 
that the whole
story down to the socks had been a case of mistaken identity. I left a 
note in Kittler’s mailbox: Pynchon’s feet unsullied by culture industry.
A few weeks later I ran into him outside the German department, 
surrounded by the usual
praetorian throng. His mood had visibly improved. “Na, was für Socken 
trägt Pynchon heute?”
—“Well, what socks is Pynchon wearing today?”—he cried, his face lit up 
by a beatific canine
smile. “It was a nice touch though. Pynchon himself could have come up 
with it.” Pause for
effect. “In love as in literature, footwear has an undeniable reality 
effect.” Still grinning and
trailed by a puzzled entourage, he disappeared into a lecture hall. It 
was the last time I ever
saw him."

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Memory_of_Friedrich_Kittler.pdf