Pynchon Tidbit

[Michael Bailey]

Thanks for that. Never heard of the guy.

I was just thinking about Donald Barthelme in conjunction with the Trans-Trianon 2000 being sort of an expansion on the theme of the short story "Assassination of JFK Viewed as a Downhill Motor Race", or at least sharing some headspace with it.
________________________________
From: Pynchon-l <pynchon-l-bounces at waste.org> on behalf of Mike Weaver via Pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2026 6:37 PM
To: rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com>; “pynchon-l at waste.org“ <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Subject: Re: Pynchon Tidbit

Well there's a thing!

Wolfgang Zuckermann, another occupant of 161 Charles Lane, was living in
Devon, England by 1971. I left home at the end of 1970, moved to Exeter
to start my working life as an apprentice lab technician, but by May 71
was living in a squat above a head shop, and supposedly running the shop
for the owner Melanie who was Wolfgang's partner. They lived in a
village in mid Devon though Melanie had a house in town so we saw them
quite regularly. I knew Wolfgang made harpsichords but only found out
rather more recently, doing a 'whatever happened to...' with the aid of
the web, his significance in  the harpsichord world. Back then I just
thought he was another hippie scene craftsman.

Cheers Mike

On 09/06/2026 15:08, rich wrote:
> watch out for those demon cats, man
>
> https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lrb.co.uk%2Fthe-paper%2Fv48%2Fn09%2Falex-cocotas%2Fdiary&data=05%7C02%7Cmi256118%40ucf.edu%7Ce2a40a1646d2470c029208dec677c1a3%7Cbb932f15ef3842ba91fcf3c59d5dd1f1%7C0%7C0%7C639166414829769853%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=D98tlz7uZteE5ShJcOkJugghzpl5UHMf%2BIYDKyAK0Y0%3D&reserved=0<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.
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