It was 50 years ago today ...

[Robin Landseadel]

I'm trying to locate the letter Thomas Pynchon wrote to Charles  
Hollander. TRP said, in essence—"You're barking up the wrong tree, I  
only include enough "research" to cover the plots, my concerns are  
more with moving things along, characters, the usual literary stuff.  
You write too well to be producing this kind of material, you are  
wasting your talents" and so on. I remember something in the letter  
about "vowing not to give any advice" but expressing a need to steer  
"The Dude" in the right direction.

In any case, my take on CoL49 is—yup, it's in the wake of JFK but it's  
really the author jotting down oddities he encounters while looking  
for a job as a math instructor at Cal Berkeley. This includes the  
stuff he read in "Top Secret" level publications at Boeing. As far as  
I can tell, all the conspiracy theories in the world will do you a fat  
lot of good once the shit really hits the fan in Pynchon's world.  
Everybody's, really. Tunguska, 9/11, JFK. There are larger forces at  
work, thermodynamic forces, quantum forces, energies no orthodox form  
of scrying or scientific investigation can reveal. There's no way to  
get to the bottom of it all.
On Nov 22, 2013, at 8:31 AM, Dave Monroe wrote:

> Pynchon, JFK and the CIA: Magic Eye Views of The Crying of Lot 49
> by Charles Hollander
>
> http://www.ottosell.de/pynchon/magiceye.htm
>
> The Zapruder Film
>
> http://www.kansaspress.ku.edu/wrozap.html
>
> What Does the Zapruder Film Really Tell Us?
>
> http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/What-Does-the-Zapruder-Film-Really-Tell-Us-224928822.html
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l

-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l