Pynchon Tidbit

[rich]

watch out for those demon cats, man

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n09/alex-cocotas/diary

He had been my parents’ landlord in New York City in the 1970s. Another of
his tenants was Thomas Pynchon, who wrote some of *Gravity’s Rainbow* at
161 Charles Lane in the West Village. Their association was complicated by
Pynchon’s fear of Harrison’s feral cat Martha, who stalked his rooms and
disrupted his concentration with her demonic stare. Harrison and Tom had
lunch every Tuesday with Donald Barthelme, who was at the height of his
fame after being named ‘the most interesting writer of fiction in America’
in the *New York Times Magazine*. ‘We have a little block association,’
Barthelme told the *Paris Review* in 1981, listing its members as Grace
Paley, Kirk and Faith Sale (she was one of Pynchon’s editors), the
longtime *New
Yorker* fiction editor Roger Angell and Harrison.