Cute

[Mark Thibodeau]

Thank you, friends, for this text.

If I hadn’t gotten to read it, I never would have discovered how intensely
much I wanted to.

Not really sure how, exactly… but It all makes sense to ME.

Heartbroken at the loss of yet another brilliant best-friend-in-the-world
contender to suicide today;
Yer Old Pal Jerky


On Saturday, October 18, 2025, J Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> 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
> >>
> >> --
> >> 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
>