Bleeding Edge book trailer: SPIEGEL says the stooge is Pynchon

[John Bailey]

Completely off. I wouldn't even say it's a hoax, just that someone has
a theory and hasn't bothered to listen to the other stuff. Timbre and
pitch all wrong, even if he was putting on a voice in the BE trailer.

Thinking over this whole trailer bizzo, I remembered that a good
friend was an actor in a similar trailer for a book by a bestselling
and multiply-awarded author. The trailer and the book were TERRIBLE
and the whole thing had been concocted by the marketing department; no
consultation with the author, no urgent need for the makers to have
more than skimmed the book, which is why the character my friend plays
seems the major player in the trailer but is a bit part in the actual
novel. And publishers, no matter their scale or the reputation of
their authors, don't have a huge amount to throw at what is
essentially social media these days.

Which might explain the bloody awful audio of the BE trailer, the
actor who appears not to be at all familiar with either the book or
Pynchon, the script (which seems a response to the blurb, not the
written text) and the dropping of this thing not as a major event or
secretly clever viral phenomenon, but as a book trailer.

I don't even remember if it's explicitly in the novel but Bleeding
Edge's recent-historical consciousness-raising made me acutely recall
that video sharing on the internet didn't exist in 2001/2002. I don't
figure he signed off on this one.

On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 8:50 PM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
<lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
> This week's edition of news magazine 'Der Spiegel' has a note on Pynchon in
> the rubric 'Personalien' (p. 152). With reference to his voice appearances
> at 'The Simpsons', they go for the thesis ("obviously" and "it seems" are
> the words they're using) that the stooge you can hear in the Bleeding Edge
> book trailer (0.49-0.51, 3.35-3.38, 3.43-3.45) is actually Pynchon ... Well,
> I have no idea how they came on it, but having just listened again to one
> Simpsons cameo as well as to the IV book trailer (actually these two voices
> do not resemble each other very much), I don't think that it is correct. Am
> I wrong or has Europe's biggest news magazine fallen victim to a hoax?
>
>
> "Thomas Pynchon, 76, Schriftsteller, ist der große Unbekannte der
> amerikanischen Literatur. (...) Nun ist seine Stimme offenbar erneut
> öffentlich zu hören. (...) Dazwischen stellt eine Frage Stimmen aus dem Off
> --- es scheint die von Pynchon zu sein." ('Der Spiegel', 37/2013, p. 152)
>
>
> Simpsons cameo:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jR0588DtHJA
>
> Inherent Vice book trailer:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2daNrsfwDgY
>
> Bleeding Edge book trailer:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fA0yAcfnuuI
>
>