How Pynchon once mistook a virus for a metaphor

[Erik T. Burns]

the Spanish Flu is relevant also because it didn't start in Spain; it was
called the Spanish Flu because Spain was one of the few countries that was
reporting on it truthfully, the others were hiding the pandemic to maintain
wartime morale. no one really knows where it started; it might have been
Kansas (as per *wikipedia* <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu>)

On Wed, Mar 18, 2020 at 1:06 PM Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
wrote:

>
> The concrete sentence from "Entropy" goes like this:  "Not even the
> clean constant winds of Switzerland could cure the GRIPPE ESPAGNOLE:
> Stravinsky had had it, they all had had it". Oh well ...
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
>
> " ... Though it may not be wrong absolutely to make up, as I still do,
> what I don't know or am too lazy to find out, phony data are more often
> than not deployed in places sensitive enough to make a difference,
> thereby losing what marginal charm they may have possessed outside of
> the story's context. Witness an example from 'Entropy.' In the character
> of Callisto I was trying for a sort of world-weary Middle-European
> effect, and put in the phrase GRIPPE ESPAGNOLE, which I had seen on some
> liner notes to a recording of Stravinsky's L'HISTOIRE DU SOLDAT. I must
> have thought this was some kind of of post-World War I spiritual malaise
> or something. Come to find out it means what it says, Spanish influenza,
> and the reference I lifted was really to the worldwide flu epidemic that
> followed the war.
>     The lesson here, obvious but now and then overlooked, is just to
> corroborate one's data, in particular those acquired casually, such as
> through hearsay or off the backs of record albums ..."
>
> Slow Learner (Introduction)
>
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>