Tim & Eric videos

[Tyler Wilson]

I’ll admit, too, that the trailer does little for me. But then, why should it? Myself, everyone on this list, is going to pick up a copy. And then, since when has P or his publisher been seriously concerned with marketing his *books*, really?
 
I’ve no idea how quickly this thing was put together, so I may be off here, but: it feels very much like a response to the first ‘graph of Boris Kachka’s 8/25 piece:
 
“Let’s get a few things straight. First of all, it’s pronounced “Pynch-ON.” Second, the great and bewildering and, yes, very private novelist is not exactly a recluse. In select company, he’s intensely social and charismatic, and, in spite of those famously shaming Bugs Bunny teeth, he was rarely without a girlfriend for the 30 years he spent wandering and couch-surfing before getting married in 1990. Today, he’s a yuppie—self-confessed, if you read his new novel, Bleeding Edge, as a key to the present life of a man whose travels led one critic to reflect: “Salinger hides; Pynchon runs.” Now Pynchon hides in plain sight, on the Upper West Side, with a family and a history of contradictions: a child of the postwar Establishment determined to reject it; a postmodernist master who’s called himself a “classicist”; a workaholic stoner; a polymath who revels in dirty puns; a literary outsider who’s married to a literary agent; a scourge of capitalism who sent his son to private school and lives in a $1.7 million prewar classic six.”
 
http://www.vulture.com/2013/08/thomas-pynchon-bleeding-edge.html
 
 
And while the trailer may not be about the *book*--and I haven’t had the honor of reading it yet, so can’t say for sure--it is very much about the internet and what passes for “phenomena” on it. The book too is very much about the internet, I gather. And this is very much the kind of indirect, not-obvious, way P works. And it duz create buzz.
 
Anyway, the more I mull it over, the smarter it seems. Even though my first reaction was “this is embarrassing.” I think the real question is: embarrassing to *who* and *why exactly*? There’s some relevant self-knowledge somewhere down that track..
--
T

> Date: Thu, 5 Sep 2013 23:15:04 +1000
> Subject: Re: Tim & Eric videos
> From: sundayjb at gmail.com
> To: markekohut at yahoo.com
> CC: pynchon-l at waste.org
> 
> But it's completely antithetical to Bleeding Edge, and Pynchon's
> writing in general. Not in a dialectical way...
> 
> The trailer really feels like the work of someone who not only hasn't
> read this book but hasn't read anything by this author. Normally I'd
> champion that original position but I can't figure how this thing came
> about. Is the dude Jackson Pynchon, perhaps? I can honestly say that
> the trailer has almost nothing to do with the novel...
> 
> On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 10:15 PM, Markekohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > O yeah......this way it is REAL! ....so the doers say...
> >
> > Sent from my iPad
> >
> > On Sep 5, 2013, at 8:00 AM, Markekohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Someone who knows (some of) this kind of online stuff told me that the Bleeding Edge trailer is in
> >> An online tradition. Perhaps started by Tim & Eric YouTube and similar: willfully low-production value....point of that is part of the irony....which he describes, as the trailer is, as " irony squared"
> >> This is hardly worth doing better because.....why?....who has time....it is just for fun anyway.....
> >>
> >> Sent from my iPad
 		 	   		  
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