Published Pynchon photos

[ludd oafery]

That is almost certainly Pynchon, playing Farina's Second no less!


On Sat, Feb 9, 2013 at 10:28 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> Link to  P & F dueling pic, please.
>
>
> On Saturday, February 9, 2013, David Payne wrote:
>
>>
>> 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
>
>
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