Published Pynchon photos

[David Payne]

We copied the pictures into our write up: http://lawsofsilence.blogspot.com/2013/02/start-of-duel-buried-in-sun_9.html

In there, we linked to the edition of The Cornell Daily Sun that has the joke article and the pictures. See pages 1 and 5: http://cdsun.library.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/cornell?a=d&d=CDS19581024-01.2.4&e=--------20--1-----all---

But I hope you'll read what we wrote, too. It was a lot of work, provides a lot of context, and we linked to other articles worth reading. 

Even if you don't go our write up, please go here: http://www.richardandmimi.com/cornell.html

It has the pictures and lots of good info.

________________________________
> On Sat, 9 Feb 2013, 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