How Pynchon once mistook a virus for a metaphor

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

The New York Times suggested  - & Katherine Anne Porter seems to refer 
to this in "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" - to call it the German Flu ...

"'Es heißt', sagte Towney, 'daß es tatsächlich durch die Bazillen kommt, 
die ein deutsches Schiff in Boston eingeschleppt hat ...' (...) 'Ich 
hab's in einer New Yorker Zeitung gelesen', sagte Towney, 'also muß es 
wahr sein.'/ Hierauf mußten Chuck und Mirinda so lachen, daß Bill 
aufstand und zu ihnen hinübersah. 'Towney liest immer noch Zeitungen!' 
erklärte Chuck. 'Na, und was ist dabei so komisch?' fragte Bill, setzte 
sich wieder und blickte stirnrunzelnd in das Wirrwarr vor ihm." 
(Katherine Anne Porter: Fahles Pferd, fahler Reiter. Drei Novellen. 
Zürich 1963: Diogenes, pp. 262-263)

+ ... Die «New York Times» berichtete davon, dass die Grippe nur die 
Deutschen befallen habe, und forderte kurzerhand, das Phänomen doch 
«Deutsche Grippe» zu nennen ... +

https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/leugnen-beschwichtigen-akzeptieren-wie-wir-mit-seuchen-umgehen-ld.1546878 



Am 18.03.20 um 14:13 schrieb 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 <mailto: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
>