Published Pynchon photos

[David Payne]

Hey, so this picture, the one that supposedly has Pynchon and Farina dueling in a cemetery, is out in the wild, sitting there on the internet now. Has this been discussed here?

A friend of mine stumbled across it last week. It's in a joke article of the Cornell Sun--October 24, 1958, one of the editions in their online archives.

The picture does have Farina dueling. The person he's dueling isn't Pynchon, but Pynchon may be one of the people in the accompanying photos.

I couldn't find any talk about these pictures here or anywhere else, so we dug into the background and wrote about it: http://lawsofsilence.blogspot.com/2013/02/start-of-duel-buried-in-sun_9.html

As we dug into this, we learned a lot about Pynchon's college days, his circle of brilliant friends, the struggles within the English Department at the time, the riot of 1958 (started as a protest largely by Kirk Sale, one of Pynchon's best friends in college) ... A lot came together at once. We were especially impressed with the group of Cornell graduates from this time period, an astoundingly accomplished group of people.

Maybe this is old hat for many of you, but we did have two exciting finds:

1. The characters in this joke article appeared in other articles in the Sun. It looks like Pynchon's friends, and possibly Pynchon, were sharing characters in articles they published in the Sun under pseudonyms. We laid out what we found, and I'm hoping others might be able to use this find some juvenilia by Pynchon or Farina in the Sun. There is, for example, a Letter to the Editor in 1960 that is ascribed to one of the fake names used in the dueling article. Could it have been written by Pynchon or Farina? I think there's more out there for people with time to poke around.

2. We found mention of another picture of Pynchon from his college days, one that's unknown! I think I found that picture on microfilm today. It might help shed a little light on Pynchon's involvement in the 1958 protest, although it's a pretty blurry shot of a whole lot of people, so it may amount to nothing. More on that soon.

Anyhow, I know that digging into Pynchon's past and finding photos of him are a turn off for many people, and I get that. Personally, I don't care so much about photos of Pynchon, although the mystique is pretty comedic by this point, but I do find this period at Cornell to be fascinating and would love to find stories/articles to the Editor written by Farina and/or Pynchon during this time.




On Fri, 05 Aug 94, Bob Orloswky wrote:

The recent posting from the UK about the Judy Collins Songbook reminded me that I had forgotten to post an update about that.  I forget sometimes what I'm talking about on private mail and what makes its way to the list.

John Krafft and I have both tracked down what *seem* to be first editions of the Judy Collins Songbook and there is no Pynchon photo in either copy.  However, there are several photos of Collins with Farina and some tearful text from Collins about Farina's funeral, which leads me to believe that there may actually be an edition out there which does contain the rumored photo.  Either that or the rumor was an extremely erudite practical joke with the most limited possible audience -- us. If anyone out there stumbles across another copy of the Songbook, please take a look.
 
Regarding other published Pynchon photos, Baxter Hathaway in a 1978 article in the Cornell Daily Sun refers to a photo of Pynchon and Farina in period costume, duelling in a cemetery, that was published in a joke edition of the Sun in the spring of 1959.  Anybody have a copy of this?
 
And to throw in my two cents, I always thought of Lot 49 as Pynchon's Vonnegut novel -- not a compliment.  I'm infinitely more enraptured by V. and GR.
 
Regarding Slow Learner, Pynchon reportedly put it out because he was sick of all the pirate editions of those stories, not because he was enamored of the stories themselves.
 
Bob Orlowsky