Cute

[J Tracy]

Thanks. I don’t have free access to the NYT  and am gad I got to read this. Good stuff.

> On Oct 18, 2025, at 3:38 PM, j e l <ssnomes at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> text of full article:
> 
> https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/18/books/review/thomas-pynchon-the-simpsons-william-gibson.html?unlocked_article_code=1.uU8.hKVY.uWSOCQShm5fR
> 
> William Gibson, Lisa Simpson and More on Their Favorite Pinch of Pynchon
> 
> With the famously private novelist enjoying a (private) moment in the sun,
> we reached out to die-hard fans who’ve tuned in to the zaniness all along.
> 
> By Tim Teeman
> Oct. 18, 2025, 5:01 a.m. ET
> 
> Call it a Pynchon-palooza!
> 
> “Shadow Ticket,” Thomas Pynchon’s 10th book, hit the New York Times
> best-seller list this month, soon after the release of Paul Thomas
> Anderson’s acclaimed movie, “One Battle After Another,” starring Leonardo
> DiCaprio and inspired by Pynchon’s “Vineland.”
> 
> The Book Review recently reached out to writers and other cultural figures,
> asking them to share a favorite scene or moment from Pynchon’s works. A
> host of them responded, including Homer and Lisa Simpson. After all,
> Pynchon, a dedicated fan of “The Simpsons,” lent his voice to several
> episodes over the years, his animated avatar gently mocking the author’s
> desire for anonymity by wearing a paper bag, imprinted with a question
> mark, over his head.
> 
> Below, Homer and Lisa (courtesy of Matt Selman, the executive producer and
> showrunner of “The Simpsons”) are joined by Rachel Kushner, Don DeLillo and
> a founder of Devo, among others, who explain how Pynchon manages, in the
> words of Pico Iyer, to “expand our sense of possibility and leave us unsure
> of everything we thought we knew.”
> 
> William Gibson
> Novelist
> A moment in Pynchon’s work I’ve found more urgently haunting, over the past
> decade or so, is the sermon given by Father Rapier in “Gravity’s Rainbow,”
> distinguishing between They, humans aligned with extreme wealth and
> technology, and lowercase we, the rest of us. As long as we clearly
> recognize that They can and will kill us, all’s going well for Them. But
> should we resist, and continue to, They begin to lose power, and as the
> number of resisters rises, to lose it exponentially — potentially leading,
> as Rapier suggests, to humanity’s salvation.
> 
> Rachel Kushner
> Novelist
> Probably the environment I come from, a world where the ’60s continued into
> the ’80s, predisposes me to “get” Pynchon’s California novels. The
> rendering of Telegraph Avenue and Berkeley, my alma mater, in “The Crying
> of Lot 49” was absolutely indelible to me when I read the novel in college,
> even if the layers of zaniness were a style I didn’t fully appreciate until
> later, until after I read “Inherent Vice” and then went backward to
> “Vineland,” and reread “Crying of Lot 49.” Pynchon’s humor proves that he
> understands our world so well that he can flex it.
> 
> Homer and Lisa Simpson
> Springfield residents
> LISA: Dad, did you read “Gravity’s Rainbow” yet, the Thomas Pynchon
> masterpiece? He’s what I want to be when I grow up — a famous literary
> recluse. Just imagine being speculated about by the most consequential
> people in the world: English literature grad students.
> 
> HOMER: Sweetie, I really wanted to read it. But you know I don’t like to
> read. My eyes get so tired going right, right, right, then, ugh … left.
> Plus from the title I thought “Gravity’s Rainbow” would be about Skittles.
> It didn’t seem to be, so I took a break about halfway through.
> 
> LISA: You made it halfway through the book?
> 
> HOMER: Halfway through the first line.
> 
> LISA: OK, I thought you might struggle with it, so I got you a pop-up
> version too.
> 
> HOMER: Sorry, pop-up books are way too hard. If something’s going to pop up
> at me it better be from a toaster. Plus you have to figure out how to get
> the pages to lie back down flat again. I’m no engineer.
> 
> LISA: I thought you were a nuclear engineer.
> 
> HOMER: That’s more about pushing buttons. Or not pushing buttons. I can’t
> remember which. So if you had to choose a passage from the book to appear
> in The New York Times, what would it be?
> 
> LISA: It would have to be this quote about power in America: “All the
> animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being
> broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few …”
> 
> HOMER: Interesting. Did you know there’s a green Skittle? Do you think this
> Pynchon guy knows what it tastes like?
> 
> LISA: Another great conversation, Dad.
> 
> Ian Rankin
> Novelist
> If I had my copy of “Gravity’s Rainbow” to hand, I might opt for the
> two-page scene in whose margins the undergraduate student Ian Rankin has
> written four large letters: P-O-R-N. But my copy is several hundred miles
> away, so instead I’ll go for the closing of “The Crying of Lot 49.”
> Throughout I was wondering what the title meant and how it could possibly
> connect to the story I was reading. And then, right at the death, all was
> revealed, with a deftness of touch that still puts a smile on my face when
> I remember it.
> 
> Ishmael Reed
> Novelist
> I don’t know why “Against the Day” hasn’t been banned. In one of the most
> remarkable scenes penned by an American writer, Pynchon cites events that
> the anti-woke crowd would want deleted. Referring to the Blacks and
> Filipinos, Mexicans and hillbillies who are present in that scene, the
> character Lew Basnight “gradually understood that what everybody here had
> in common was having survived some cataclysm none of them spoke about
> directly — a bombing, a massacre perhaps at the behest of the U.S.
> government.” Those with prominent media megaphones today are denying that
> such cataclysms took place.
> 
> Ed Park
> Novelist
> There’s a small moment in “Bleeding Edge” which I think about often — an
> uncanny New York moment. Our heroine, Maxine, is walking down Broadway when
> she sees the lid of a takeout container rolling down the pavement on its
> edge (“thin as a predawn dream”), stop for a traffic light, then keep going
> until it’s finally squashed by a truck. “Real?” she wonders.
> “Computer-animated?” Having been immersed in the Deep Web (this is 2001),
> she attributes this improbable run to either the mysteries of airflow or
> the directives of a “nerd at a keyboard.” This is the title’s bleeding
> edge, and a memorable instance of Pynchonian paranoia: that moment when
> even the reality of waste — the street detritus all of us New Yorkers see
> on a daily basis — can be called into question.
> 
> Aimee Bender
> Novelist
> The scene that arrived in my head immediately is when Oedipa Maas
> encounters the mysterious horn symbol in her bathroom stall in “The Crying
> of Lot 49.” Did I experience it in a bathroom stall? Did I dream it? Is it
> in the book? I can think of few moments in art that better convey the
> slipperiness of meaning and how we can’t quite get our feet on the ground
> of understanding.
> 
> Gerald Casale
> Musician, Devo
> It’s been 45 years since I read “Gravity’s Rainbow.” What I remember is the
> insanely dense and layered descriptions and the sex and drug narratives all
> blending together in a nonlinear way. It was a literary acid trip
> interspersed with intentionally silly poems that satirized the Horatio
> Alger, “You can do it, there’s nobody else like you”-style Americana hokum.
> It was those short, twisted nursery rhyme intrusions that inspired me to
> try to write a Pynchonesque “poem” of my own. That attempt became my lyrics
> for Devo’s hit song, “Whip It.”
> 
> Jo Freer
> Author, “Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture”
> The scenes I most like in Pynchon are those where he lets his sardonic
> cynicism slip a little, revealing a poignant hopefulness. My favorite is in
> “Against the Day” (2006), when we meet the Yz-les-Bains anarchists. This ad
> hoc community offers a fairly thorough and concrete imagining of the
> countercultural ideals present throughout Pynchon’s work; it’s a place
> where people “work for one another” spontaneously. Women’s critical
> thinking is explicitly valued in this community, which stands against
> myopic patriarchy and militant nationalism. Pynchon even goes so far as to
> suggest that the anarchist spa offers “some hope of passing beyond
> political forms to ‘planetary oneness’.” Wouldn’t that be nice?
> 
> Pico Iyer
> Essayist
> Thomas Pynchon is a caretaker of disappearances, an explorer of all those
> lost corners and black holes — in consciousness, in history — that expand
> our sense of possibility and leave us unsure of everything we thought we
> knew. Maybe that’s why I most remember the scene in “Mason & Dixon” in
> which Mason tells of visiting the 11 days that went missing in 1752 after
> England adopted the Gregorian calendar. Suddenly we’re plunged into a kind
> of vortex — time out of time and a displaced Eden where Death has no
> purchase. For me “Mason & Dixon” is Pynchon’s greatest work — the greatest
> novel of recent decades — precisely because it plays its flawless
> 18th-century prose off moments that could emerge from a daydreaming stoner.
> 
> Mariano Falzone and Luna Nemo
> Designers, Orbis Tertius Games
> Luna and I both had the same scene immediately come to mind when it comes
> to the unforgettability factor: the coprophagia scene with Brigadier
> Pudding and the dominatrix Katje Borgesius in “Gravity’s Rainbow.” But our
> favorite scenes are those involving a group of Argentine anarchists who
> stole a Nazi U-boat from Mar del Plata. We are both from the city of Mar
> del Plata, and we were thrilled to see Pynchon not only referencing it but
> also showing a deep understanding of Argentine history, idiosyncrasies and
> literature. The characters’ comments on Borges and on “Martín Fierro,” our
> national epic, are spot-on. And the names he picks for them, like Francisco
> Squalidozzi, Graciela Imago Portales, and their contact, Ibargüengoitia,
> are just wonderful. Those scenes have undoubtedly influenced all our video
> games.
> 
> Paul Grimstad
> Writer and musician
> Since I’ve had the extraordinary privilege of acting in “One Battle After
> Another,” I recently went back to the wonderfully zany “Vineland.” My
> chosen scene comes near the end, where we find the tow truck operators Vato
> and Blood watching a TV movie dramatization of a Celtics-Lakers game.
> “Besides Sidney Poitier as K.C. Jones,” Pynchon writes, “there was Paul
> McCartney, in his first acting role, as Kevin McHale, with Sean Penn as
> Larry Bird.” I laughed out loud upon rereading that, and then thought of
> how brilliantly bonkers Penn is in “One Battle After Another” — as Col.
> Steven J. Lockjaw, not Larry Bird.
> 
> Jordan Ellenberg
> Writer and professor
> I’m a mathematician, and the end of “Crying of Lot 49” feels the way
> getting deep into a mathematical frenzy feels — like everything is
> connected to everything else and singing with almost-guessable import. Like
> if for some reason every orchestra in America started tuning up and you
> could hear them all at once.
> 
> Matthew Specktor
> Writer
> These days, my mind drifts most often to “Vineland,” and to the scene where
> Prairie Wheeler is on the run from marauding federal prosecutor Brock Vond.
> As she roars down the Ventura Freeway with her rescuer DL Chastain and
> Chastain’s friend Ditzah Pisk Feldman, the three discuss “the whole Reagan
> program” to “dismantle the New Deal, reverse the effects of World War II,
> restore fascism at home,” words from the late ’80s that feel, naturally,
> rather pertinent these days.
> 
> But what makes the scene isn’t just Pynchon’s antifascist politics, as
> salient as those are, but his marvelous description of DL’s “Ninjamobile”
> in flight during the 1984 Olympics, the gorgeous densities of his prose as
> he describes not just the freeway’s “flirters, deserters, wimps and pimps,”
> but the city’s “lovers under the overpasses, movies at the mall letting
> out, bright gas-station oases in pure fluorescent spill.”
> 
> David Kipen
> Writer and critic
> Do I really have to choose one? Instead, for spite, I choose this prophetic
> moment from a bottomlessly provocative 1984 essay he wrote for The Times
> called “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?”: “If our world survives, the next
> great challenge to watch out for will come — you heard it here first — when
> the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence,
> molecular biology and robotics all converge.”
> 
> 1984, meet 2025.
> 
> Don DeLillo
> Novelist
> Strong, surprising, long-lasting work.
> 
> The American novelist times ten.
> 
> This is Thomas Pynchon, book after book.
> 
> --30--
> 
> --jel
> 
> On Sat, Oct 18, 2025 at 9:57 AM David Elliott via Pynchon-l <
> pynchon-l at waste.org> wrote:
> 
>> From the article: Ishmael Reed: I don’t know why “Against the Day” hasn’t
>> been banned. In one of the most remarkable scenes penned by an American
>> writer, Pynchon cites events that the anti-woke crowd would want deleted.
>> Referring to the Blacks and Filipinos, Mexicans and hillbillies who are
>> present in that scene, the character Lew Basnight “gradually understood
>> that what everybody here had in common was having survived some cataclysm
>> none of them spoke about directly — a bombing, a massacre perhaps at the
>> behest of the U.S. government.” Those with prominent media megaphones today
>> are denying that such cataclysms took place.
>> From an interview with Ishmael published in 2022:GS [ George Salis]: I
>> wanted to switch gears a little bit. Your work has been influential on
>> Thomas Pynchon and he even mentions you in Gravity’s Rainbow. Have you read
>> Gravity’s Rainbow?
>> IR: Ah, yes.
>> GS: And what did you think?
>> IR: Well, I’m always looking for originality and I found that to be
>> original because most novels read the same way.
>> GS: Exactly.
>> IR: And so I’m always looking for writers who are, uh, you know…I think
>> he’s actually more successful than other white experimental writers. I know
>> a lot of them and they’re not found to be marketable.
>> GS: Yeah, he’s certainly an exception in that case.
>> IR: Yeah.
>> GS: Have you been keeping up with his novels since then?
>> IR: No, I haven’t.
>> I guess he's read "Against the Day" since the interview.
>> Read the interview here:
>> https://thecollidescope.com/2022/05/20/superbowl-insurrection-a-conversation-with-ishmael-reed/
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>    On Saturday, October 18, 2025 at 11:23:59 AM EDT, rich <
>> richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/18/books/review/thomas-pynchon-the-simpsons-william-gibson.html
>> 
>> With the famously private novelist enjoying a (private) moment in the sun,
>> we reached out to die-hard fans who’ve tuned in to the zaniness all along.
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>> 
>> --
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>> 
> --
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