How Pynchon once mistook a virus for a metaphor

[Laura Kelber]

Yikes, Becky. Please take care of yourself. Can you get food/medicine
deliveries where you live?

On Wed, Mar 18, 2020, 12:38 PM Becky Lindroos <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net>
wrote:

> Gag re the Orange Pustule, Laura - yep.  I forget that I’m 72 and not in
> great health and my kids worry as they live half way across the country.  I
> also have friends here who check on me.
>
> Soooo…..   I was in the emergency room last night (8 hours!) and I had a
> mask because I had symptoms (BUT my symptoms were stomach flu and
> dehydration).  Most others - (the non-patients) did not have masks. Generic
> corona-virus testing was somewhere else and the tent for determining that
> was outside the hospital doors. .  ??? -
>
> Fwiw,  I had lung surgery in September (I don’t know if I mentioned that
> prior) and although I’m pretty well recovered I’m still weak - vulnerable.
> It was stage 1 cancer.
>
> Becky  - a Boomer who will not be Removed -
> So be safe - keep me safe!
>
>
> > On Mar 18, 2020, at 8:46 AM, Laura Kelber <laurakelber at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > 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
> >>
> > --
> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>
>