Let the Games Begin!

[Markekohut]

From an old friend, a former Borders' buyer to whom I sent Bekah's Pynchon mention from Rushdie's memoir.

This is the US, let it unfurl.


>> 
>> Very cool story.
>> 
>> According to my old Penguin Press sales rep, there is a new Pynchon coming 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Jan 4, 2013, at 7:22 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> From: Joseph Anton: A Memoir  by Salman Rushdie.  These passages are
>>> from Chapter V - about midway in the 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
>>> 
>>> 
>>> -- 
>>> Mark Kohut (& Associates)
>>> 646-519-1956
>>> 
>>> Redburn Press
>>> P.O. Box 16022
>>> Greentree, Pa. 15222
>>> 412-937-0906
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