Pynchon mention

[Bekah]

Joseph Anton: A Memoir is by Salman Rushdie.  Anton was his pseudonym while he was in hiding.  In recognition of that the book is written in 3rd person with Anton being the "he/him."   These passages are from Chapter V - about midway in the book.  (Kindle - no page #s.)   This is an excellent read,  but I'm a Rushdie fan.  

** Sorry if this has been posted before - it didn't stick until I read it in a book. ** 


"And there was one great novelist who called him who did not contribute but was perhaps the most exciting of all to hear from.   It was Thomas Pynchon, another famous invisible man, calling to thank him for his review of Vineland in The New York Times Book Review, and asking solicitously how he was doing.   He replied by quoting the title of the cult classic by Pynchon’s friend Richard Fariña, the dedicatee of Gravity’s Rainbow: “Been down so long it looks like up to me.”   Pynchon suggested that whenever next they were both in New York together they might meet for dinner.  'Oh my goodness,' he said, sounding like a spotty schoolboy with a crush, 'ooh, yes, please. '”


"Then Pynchon arrived, looking exactly as Thomas Pynchon should look. He was tall, wore a red-and-white lumberjack shirt and blue jeans, had Albert Einstein white hair and Bugs Bunny front teeth. After an initial half hour of stilted conversation Pynchon seemed to relax and then spoke at length on American labor history and his own membership, dating from his early days working as a technical writer at Boeing, of the trade union of technical writers. It was strange to think of those authors of user’s manuals being addressed by the great American novelist, whom they perhaps thought of as that fellow who used to write the safety newsletter for the supersonic CIM-10 Bomarc missile, without knowing anything about how Pynchon’s knowledge of that missile had inspired his extraordinary descriptions of the World War II V-2 rockets falling on London. The conversation went on long past midnight. At one point Pynchon said, 'You guys are probably tired, huh,' and yes, they were, but they were also thinking It’s Thomas Pynchon, we can’t go to sleep. 

"When Pynchon finally left, he thought: Okay, so now we’re friends. When I visit New York maybe we’ll sometimes meet for a drink or a bite to eat and slowly we’ll get to know each other better. But they never met again." 

***
Bekah