misc. thematic asides re BE

[Tom Beshear]

I read that same piece yesterday. Easy to speculate, but in the many interviews of V. I've read, he has never mentioned knowing or corresponding, etc., with Pynchon. I think he's on record saying he hadn't read P. until AFTER writing You Bright and Risen Angels, his first and most P.-like novel.

V. was excoriating about US policy after Sept. 11. In 2000 he wrote a piece for The New Yorker about Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. I was head of a newspaper's copy desk operation in those days, and after the attack I gave the article to all my copy editors for background reading.


----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Mark Kohut 
  To: pynchon -l 
  Sent: Tuesday, December 10, 2013 1:52 PM
  Subject: misc. thematic asides re BE


  "It seems to me that America is entering a period of decline, which is starting to become
  apparent. America has never been so rich and it has also never been so empty."
                                                    ----Wm. Vollman, interview [How to Read a Novelist] 2000

  Remark made around the beginning (in historic time) of BLEEDING EDGE......this, as well as
  reader comparisons to Pynchon ["his sprung diction recalls Pynchon's"--J. Freeman] as well
  as being a fellow Cornell grad makes me wonder again if Pynchon and he are any kind of 
  friends, pen pals? 
   

  Shit, Money and the Devil: 
  "the reek of the urine, the shit, and the blood of Luther".....so manifest throughout [Mailer's] THE CASTLE 
  IN THE FOREST. "---J. Freeman in How to Read a Novelist 
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