How Pynchon once mistook a virus for a metaphor

[Laura Kelber]

And, on cue, there goes the Orange Pustule referring to coronavirus as the
Chinese Virus.
My favorite name for it so far: the Boomer Remover.

Laura, age 62

On Wed, Mar 18, 2020, 9:14 AM Erik T. Burns <eburns at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
> >
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>