pynchonoid

signed copy of ATD

2008-08-20T07:20:00.000-07:00

…from Chronicle of Higher Education:

M.H. Abrams: A Life in Criticism
By JEFFREY J. WILLIAMS

In literary studies, M.H. Abrams is an iconic name. It appeared as "general editor" for 40 years on nearly nine million copies of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, and has also, in a detail that only scholars would know, led the indexes of many a critical book for a half-century. (In fact, one scholar I know cited "Aarlef" just to avoid that custom.) In addition, Abrams, now 95, stamped the study of Romantic literature: His book The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford University Press, 1953) was ranked 25th in the Modern Library's list of the 100 most important nonfiction books of the 20th century, and he was a prime participant in debates over literary theory, especially deconstruction, during the 1970s and 80s.

Last summer I interviewed Abrams — Meyer Howard, but he goes by Mike — at his home in Ithaca, N.Y., up the road from Cornell University, where he has been a professor since 1945 and still goes to his office in Goldwin Smith Hall. Colleagues at Cornell had held a birthday celebration for him, and among the gifts was an inscribed copy of Thomas Pynchon's latest novel. Pynchon had been a student of Abrams's in the 1950s and sent it on. Abrams has the book on the coffee table in his living room.

"ad the Metro’s owners carted off the decorations that had lodged within the imagination of young Pynchon"

2008-06-27T06:24:00.000-07:00

…from today's New York Times:

Then we combed Valletta, marching up and down the hills looking for evidence of the now-sleepy city’s illustrious past and marveling at the cute Victorian-style balconies. On Strait Street in the heart of the Gut, the entertainment district once frequented by visiting sailors, I was hoping to find the Metro Bar, where a key scene of Pynchon’s unsummarizable “V” takes place. We asked old-timers and were directed to a doorway filled with cinderblocks. The Metro Bar was no more.

Like the New Life Music Hall, the Smiling Prince and the Blue Peter — whose faded signs hung over locked and cobwebbed doors — the Metro had shut down sometime after 1979, when the British naval base closed, and I was left to wonder what lay within. Did it still look, as Pynchon wrote, “like a nobleman’s pied-a-terre applied to mean purposes”? Did “statues of Knights, ladies and Turks” still line the “wide curving flight of marble steps” that led to the second-story dance floor? Or had the Metro’s owners carted off the decorations that had lodged within the imagination of young Pynchon (who presumably visited Valletta during his 1955-57 stint in the Navy)?

Today, all that remains of the Gut’s glory days is a 90-year-old tattoo parlor and a few graybeards who remember the noise and chaos and fun. “But now it’s too quiet here, too quiet,” one of them told us. “If you come at Friday night, Saturday, Sunday, you can bring shotgun and you can shoot and nobody, nobody take notice.”
His nostalgia was palpable, and another Pynchon line seemed apt: “Monuments, buildings, plaques were remembrances only; but in Valletta remembrances seemed almost to live.”

call to action!

2007-01-18T10:49:00.000-08:00

Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2007 11:20:26 -0500 (EST)
From: "John M. Krafft"
Subject: Help wanted

I've been stumped--brain dysfunction or something--by a request
for help that runs as follows:

"on the first page of Eleanor Cook's _Enigmas and Riddles in
Literature_, she writes: 'Literary studies of the riddle are
few and far between. There are studies of the remarkable Old
English riddles. There are studies of riddles in specific
authors: Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Donne, Joyce,
Pynchon...' Apparently there is at least one study of
Pynchon's use of the riddle out there. Do you know of it?"

Of course I should, but nothing comes immediately to mind, and
a first, superficial search of my bibliography didn't turn up
anything obvious. Can anyone help?

Thanks.

jmk

- --
John M. Krafft
Miami UniversityHamilton / 1601 University Blvd. / Hamilton,
OH 45011-3399
Tel: 513.785.3031 or 513.868.2330
Fax: 513.785.3145
krafftjm@muohio.edu
http://www.ham.muohio.edu/~krafftjm

Zak Smith's book arrives

2007-01-15T18:31:00.000-08:00

And a fine-looking tome it is, even with the rather substantial title, Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow with an engaging and well-worth reading Introduction by Steve Erickson.

3 novels of interest to Pynchon readers

2006-12-27T13:29:00.000-08:00

pynchonoid received a fine after-Xmas package, three novels from Soft Skull Press:

The Age of Sinatra by David Ohle
Electric Flesh by Claro (French translator of Pynchon)
H2O by Mark Swartz

We'll write more about them after reading them. Based on previous experience with Soft Skull Press novels, we're looking forward to it.

"the color and the music of this English idiom we are blessed to have inherited"

2006-12-06T05:52:00.000-08:00

Note: the "From Thomas Pynchon" at the top of the typewritten letter appears to be hand-written in block capitals and is partially underlined; Atonement is underlined as well in the original:

From Thomas Pynchon

Given the British genius for coded utterance, this could all be about something else entirely, impossible on this side of the ocean to appreciate in any nuanced way-- but assuming that it really is about who owns the right to describe using gentian violet for ringworm, for heaven's sake, allow me a gentle suggestion. Oddly enough, most of us who write historical fiction do feel some obligation to accuracy. It is that Ruskin business about "a capacity responsive to the claims of fact, but unoppressed by them." Unless we were actually there, we must turn to people who were, or to letters, contemporary reporting, the Internet until, with luck, we can begin to make a few things of our own up. To discover in the course of research some engaging detail we know can be put into a story where it will do some good can hardly be classed as a felonious acvt-- it is simply what we do. The worst you can call it is a form of primate behavior. Writers are naturally drawn, chimpanzee-like, to the color and the music of this English idiom we are blessed to have inherited. When given the choice we will usually try to use the more vivid and tuneful among its words. I cannot of course speak for Mr. McEwan's method of proceeding, but should be very surprised indeed if something of the sort, even for brief moments, had not occurred during his research for Atonement- Gentian violet! Come on. Who among us could have resisted that one?

Memoirs of the Blitz have borne indispensable witness, and helped later generations know something of the tragedcy and heroism of those days. For Mr. McEwan to have put details from one of them to further creative use, acknowledging this openly and often, and then explaining it clearly and honorably, surely merits not our scolding, but our gratitude.

from Pynchon-L:

Makes the front page of the Telegraph this morning, along with his own
section, with sailor suit pic, of the McEwan full page.

Front page text:

RECLUSE SPEAKS OUT TO DEFEND MCEWAN

By Nigel Reynolds
Arts Correspondent

Thomas Pynchon, who vies with J D Salinger for the title of the
world's most secretive author, has broken his strict rules on privacy
to join a campaign to clear the British Booker Prize-winning novelist
Ian McEwan of charges of plagiarism.

In a move described by his British publisher as "unknown", Pynchon, an
American who is never seen in public, does not give interviews and
whose whereabouts are a closely guarded secret, sent a typed letter to
his British agent yesterday to say that McEwan "merits not our
scolding but our gratitude" for using details from another author's
book.

McEwan has been under fire for copying several details from the
memoirs of a wartime nurse in London for his Booker-nominated novel,
Atonement.

In an extraordinary campaign launched yesterday, many of the world's
best known authors rallied around McEwan, complaining that the future
of historical novel writing was threatened if they could not copy or
borrow details from eyewitnesses to history.

Other novelists backing the author include John Updike, Martin Amis,
Margaret Atwood, Thomas Keneally and Zadie Smith.

They recite their experiences of taking others' material for their
books exclusively in the Daily Telegraph.

climbing the mountain

2006-12-01T10:47:00.000-08:00

Learning that the strange and mysterious, potentially mystical, foreign writing on the cover "seal" of Against the Day translates as "Tibetan Government Chamber of Commerce" (as reported on Pynchon-l) reminds me of one of those cartoons where the guy exhausts himself climbing up the mountain to get to the guru who then gives him some useless advice.

I recall the street comedian, used to perform at Venice Beach down south and on Sproul Plaza at UC Berkeley, called himself the X-Swami X, "the answer to the perennial question, Why Swami why? No, X-Swami X!"

Savage with hecklers, sometimes he'd have a rocking chair and sit with a big handmade book of jokes and read them, sometimes he was buzzing on something, up and moving around, entertaining the students and others sitting on the steps of the Student Union building, , he was also very adept with hecklers, especially one particular blister-faced psycho who used to stand out there where Telegraph meets Bancroft Way and preach the Gospel, X-Swami X could get that guy wound up pretty tight with his rap about wanting to get "eating pussy on skateboards" adopted as an Olympic sport.

He was already up in his 60s then - at least 20 years since I saw him - so perhaps he's knocking them dead in another dimension by now, out there in the multiverse...

Random House Against the Day web site & contest

2006-11-22T22:06:00.000-08:00

...Attention Pynchon readers:

Random House Against the Day minisite offers a competition to win
a rare advance reading copy proof of Against the Day, one of only 77 produced. Be there or be square!

www.randomhouse.co.uk/thomaspynchon

Moe's on Telegraph Ave. ATD geekfest

2006-11-21T10:09:00.000-08:00

All you really need to know is that pynchonoid, that's right,
won the Pynchon triva contest, just barely edging out
fellow traveler Tim Ware, and the two of us left with
the trivia contest prizes, a copy of Against the Day
each.  Then we fucked their girlfriends and stole
their lunch money and blew that pop stand, into the
Berkeley night.


Favorite attendee:  the woman with the conceptual V.
costume

Silliest sight:  4, count 'em, 4 Pynchon lookalikes
with paper bags on their heads a la TRP's The Simpsons
appearance.

Biggest surprise:  very few people, outside of
Pynchon-l, know that TRP niece, Tristan Taormino is
known for her movie about anal sex.

Most frequent web site mention:  The Modern Word

2d most frequent web site mention:
http://pynchonoid.org

link:
http://www.telegraphbooks.com/monday.htm

Against the Day extract in Spanish

2006-11-14T06:29:00.000-08:00

...from a friend overseas, notice of "an extract of Against the Day as translated in Spanish. This was posted on the website of Christophe Claro, French translator of Pynch, Gaddis, Vollmann, etc.

http://backfromoz.blogspot.com/2006/11/pynchon-fragmento.html

The extract comes from here:

http://mierdadescalzo.blogspot.com/2006/10/lo-prometido.html"

The French translation of Against the Day is expected in 2007.

AP re Pynchon fans

2006-11-08T13:29:00.000-08:00

Fans Still Passionate About Publicity-Shy Thomas Pynchon

Nov. 8 - Zak Smith is a painter, a rebel and an Ivy
Leaguer, a Yale University graduate with a green
mohawk, an apartment of wall-to-wall illustrations and
a passion for comics, classic novels -- and Thomas
Pynchon.

About 10 years ago, Smith had a feeling that he should
try Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow," an instinct
consummated from the very first page. Smith didn't
just read the book, he reread it, marked it up and
went back to it so many times that his paperback copy
is held together by duct tape.

He also began seeing the book in pictures, eventually
drawing hundreds of mostly expressionist sketches --
one for every page of Pynchon's 700-page World War II
novel -- that were exhibited at the Whitney Museum in
2004, now hang in the permanent collection at the
Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and will come out as
a book this fall.

"A lot of the ideas that were in Pynchon were hovering
around in my head -- technology and the future and the
present, true things and science fiction, and making
them into pictures was almost a way to exorcise these
ideas," says the 30-year-old Smith, a resident of
Brooklyn.

Thomas Pynchon doesn't have the readership of Mitch
Albom or Danielle Steel, but he is the rare writer who
inspires such obsession by words alone. For more than
40 years, he has built and sustained a legend through
such encyclopedic novels as "V." and "Gravity's
Rainbow," avoiding all media contact or even publicity
photos. For his new book, the 1,000-page "Against the
Day," publisher Penguin Press didn't even issue a
formal announcement, but assumed, correctly, that
simply including it in the fall catalog would take
care of the job.

"Pynchon fans tend to take his work seriously I think
because, beyond the intrinsically interesting subject
matter and intriguing stories, his books are so rich
and complex, touching on so many topics," says Pynchon
fan Doug Millison, a writer, editor and Web design
consultant based in El Cerrito, Calif.

Pynchon is now 69, but time, and the Internet, have
advanced in his favor. It's been nine years since his
previous novel, "Mason & Dixon," came out, and fans
have fully digitized their passion, building an online
community worthy of an author who as much as anyone
brought a high-tech sensibility to literary fiction.

Numerous Web sites and a "Pynchon News Service" have
been launched, and a team of experts is busy
assembling a Wikipedia-like page for "Against the
Day."

"It will, I predict, quickly become a focus of the
several hundred reader-researchers worldwide who read
Pynchon and write about his works in academic and
popular media," Millison says.

"The Internet has made it easy for Pynchon's academic
critics and lay readers to find each other and sustain
an online discussion that's continued now for over a
decade."

Smith believes that Pynchon readers share a handful of
characteristics, presumably not unlike the author's --
liberal politics, an interest in technology and a
broad and unpredictable range of interests.

Fans, who have gathered to talk Pynchon in London,
Malta and elsewhere, all have their stories of
conversion. Tim Ware, who runs the Web site
www.thomaspynchon.com from Oakland, Calif., recalls
having a hard time getting through "Gravity's
Rainbow," at least the first time around.

"I went back and looked again at the first page and
everything just sort of snapped into view, and I
thought, `This guy is a genius,' like those who walked
the Earth in the 19th century," says Ware.

"And I got rather messianic about it, and I wanted my
wife to read it. I started creating an index of all
the characters, because there were so many and it was
so hard to keep track of them."

Millison also was turned on by "Gravity's Rainbow." He
was an Army private -- a company clerk "just like
Radar O'Reilly" -- in Korea in the summer of 1973,
when he read the novel, which came out that year and
won the National Book Award.

"`Gravity's Rainbow' hit me hard, especially the parts
set in Europe during and just after World War II. I'd
never read a writer whose voice on the page came so
close to echoing the sound and feel of the Cold War
'50s and '60s, hip and angry and complex," he says.

"I've read each of the novels at least twice, studying
the text closely both times. I also collect first
editions of Pynchon's novels, and first editions of
the novels for which Pynchon has written endorsements,
cover blurbs or support quotes that have been used in
advertisements."

Charles Hollander, a Baltimore-based "independent
scholar" of Pynchon, first read him as an
undergraduate at Johns Hopkins University. It was
1963, the year Pynchon debuted with "V." Joseph
Heller's "Catch-22" was becoming a counterculture
classic, but Hollander believes that "Catch-22" was
more about the veterans of World War II.

"Pynchon was the guy who wrote for my generation, so
much so I heard people joke at parties that he had a
receiver by which he could read others' late-night
falling asleep thoughts," he says.

"The reason ... (Pynchon) is important to me and his
`fans' is he seems a bit ahead of the curve in seeing
what is important, and what will become the important
issues we are faced with."

He is as remote from the general public as J.D.
Salinger, but Pynchon experts say they care more about
his work than about the man himself, who reportedly
lives in New York with his wife and agent, Melanie
Jackson. Both Hollander and Ware say they know people
friendly with Pynchon who insist he is not "some guy
squirreling away in his attic," according to
Hollander.

"My sources tell me he is pretty social, in his style.
I think he avoids the media because he sees the media
as an arm of the establishment, a means of social
control that he won't be a party to," Hollander says.

"I've stayed away from the cult of personality. I
don't play in that zone," Ware says.

"His reluctance to speak with the press or have his
photograph taken kind of plays into the style of the
novels. There's a lot of mystery and ambiguity in
them, and a lot of mystery and ambiguity about the
author. When you know things about the author, you
begin to insert those feelings into the books. Not
having any information makes the reading experience a
little purer."

Copyright 2006 Associated Press. All rights reserved.
This material may not be published, broadcast,
rewritten, or redistributed.

http://us.f347.mail.yahoo.com/ym/Compose?YY=28173&y5beta=yes&y5beta=yes

that Book Description

2006-11-04T10:07:00.000-08:00

From: "Mike Beiderbhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifecke"
To: "trp"
Subject: A-and
Date: Sat, 4 Nov 2006 09:09:08 -0600

the blurb on Amazon might have been a tad, just a tad, disengenuous.

Further regards,

Mike

*****************************
Just Browsing?
http://home.comcast.net/~beider19
*****************************

another good report re Against the Day

2006-11-04T07:24:00.000-08:00

From: "Mike Beiderbecke"
To: "trp"
Subject: Re: Non-spoilerish first impression of AtD on Modern Word site
Date: Sat, 4 Nov 2006 09:01:20 -0600

Well,

I have read slightly more than twenty-five pages.

All the hallmarks of what we (or at least I) have come to love
about TRP are there. Weird names, strange songs, frustrating allusions (fact or
fiction?), long paragraphs, ellipsis, long shaggy-doggish things that lead to horrible puns, et cetera.

Closer in style to GR than his other novels, but at the same time incorporating elements that have appeared in his writing both pre- and post-GR.

Perhaps best summed up, IMHO, as a progressive knotting into.....

Regards,

Mike

"the Pynchon we love to read"

2006-11-03T07:16:00.000-08:00

Apparently you don't have to read much of Against the Day - this guy writes after having read 25 pages - to realize it's good:

...sez The Modern Word:

Publisher’s Weekly wrote that the novel “glows,” and I know what they mean: like the cover, the book is just white. Pure writing, pure Pynchon. As Pynchonoid wrote, this is “the Pynchon we love to read.” And it is.

Hope they know I was echoing a Salman Rushdie statement re Mason & Dixon.

2006-10-28T10:51:00.000-07:00

Thanks for Dave Monroe for posting this to Pynchon-l:

Surveillance, by Jonathan Raban
Clueless in Seattle as the age of paranoia dawns
By Pat Kane
Published: 27 October 2006

In an era where we can access any current affair from
a thousand different viewpoints - the blog comment,
backed up by the YouTube clip, discovered in the
e-mail newsletter that makes it to SkyNews - one feels
like cheering wildly for an old-fashioned "social
novel" like Surveillance. To sit with an artful,
humane narrator like Jonathan Raban, and share his
concerned gaze at an America gone nearly mad with
paranoia, is time well spent. This is the second in
his trilogy of Seattle novels, the first being the
dot-boom threnody Waxwings. By now it's clear how
Raban wants to filter the maelstrom of this United
States of Insecurity.

[...]

... Remember all those paranoid postmodern conspiracy
fictions: Pynchon, Ballard, DeLillo? Now, all it takes
is a classical realist in Seattle to walk the streets,
watch the news, listen to the conversations, and you
get the same effect. Surveillance is as useful and
eloquent a meditation on the extremism of the present
as you would wish to curl up with on a long weekend.

http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/reviews/article1930755.ece

the dragon and the eagle

2006-10-27T09:15:00.000-07:00

That's the title of a book just received, of interest perhaps to Mason & Dixon readers, although China is likely to have some place in Against the Day. The author, A.Owen Aldridge, argues that, contrary to previous assumptions that "the image of China did not penetrate North America until after the inauguration of the trade between Canton and the East Coast shortly after the War for Independence came to an end....a lively curiosity about non-Western culture existed in America before the middle of the eighteenth century and that a good deal of accurate information about it was available during the American Revolution aklong with an almost equal amount of myth and legend....The following pages will reveal some extraordinary instances of this relationship: Franklin at the age of thirty-two publishing in his Philadelphia newspaper an analysis of the thought of Confucious, brother-in-law Thomas Paine comparing Confucious and Christ as great moral teachers...."

The Dragon and the Eagle: The Presence of China in the American Enlightenment
by A. Owen Aldridge. Wayne State University Press. Detroit, Michigan. 1993.

under the pynfluence: Nina Marie Martinez

2006-10-26T11:07:00.000-07:00

...sez today's San Francisco Comical, in an article about three SF Bay Area novelists who received the Whiting Writer's Award:

Nina Marie Martinez was born in San Jose, the daughter of a first-generation Mexican American prune-picker-turned-building contractor and a German American stay-at-home mother. A high school dropout, she was a single mom at 20, supporting herself and her daughter by reselling flea-market finds. Soon, she was a vintage-clothing maven and decided to go back to school to study business.

"All I knew was that I needed money, and if you needed money, you studied business," she says. But taking general education classes reminded her of one of her first loves, literature. (The other was the Giants.)

So she went to UC Santa Cruz to study literature. That's when she started hearing voices.

"They weren't trying to make me do bad things or anything," she says, laughing. "These women were having a conversation in my head, and I started writing it down." That conversation was the spark for her debut novel, "Caramba!: A Tale Told in Turns of the Cards," published in 2004 by Knopf.

"When I wrote 'Caramba!' I felt like I was writing the great American novel," she says. "Not too long ago, this was Mexico. My ancestors roamed these lands for hundreds of centuries."

The book takes traditional Mexican Loteria cards as pivot points -- and illustrations -- for the assemblage of a high-energy plot. Publishers Weekly described the novel as "an effervescent, luminous debut."

She cites Thomas Pynchon and Vladimir Nabokov as two of her literary influences, particularly while writing "Caramba!" "The funny thing is, my favorite writers are white males and most of them are dead," she says, noting that Latina authors are too often stereotyped. "They think we're all sitting in the corner reading 'One Hundred Years of Solitude.' "

Martinez lives near the Santa Cruz boardwalk with her 16-year-old daughter and two Chihuahuas and says she will never forget the professor who said that the most interesting fiction is written by people who speak more than one language.

"My girlfriends and I have always switched back and forth from Spanish to English," Martinez says. "When these two languages intermingle, they're both changed. Language is pliant. It can move and shift without breaking."

Her next novel, coming out in 2008 from Knopf, is the story of a girl who survives a difficult childhood and becomes the queen of the flea market. "When you write a book, there are books that you hold close to your heart," she says. Just now, she is reading "Tropic of Cancer" by Henry Miller and "Down and Out in Paris and London" by George Orwell.

"What does it mean to be down and out, but living artistically?" she asks. "My new book is dedicated to the discarded, people who've been thrown away. I am drawn to things and people whose peculiarness or beauty goes unappreciated by the vast majority of society."

Caramba!: A Tale Told in Turns of the Cards

the Pynchon we love to read...

2006-10-26T00:20:00.000-07:00

...is the Pynchon of Against the Day. At a party this evening in the Oakland HIlls, I had a chance to spend some quality time up close and personal with the host's ARC, by the time I was 10 pages in my skull was tingling, another 25 and I had lost all sense of the passage of time, only the intense bouquet of artisanal pizza managed to bring me back. Reluctantly, I tore myself away from Pynchon, glad I only have to wait a few weeks at most to get my own copy and finish reading it. We're in for a treat, my friends.

the white city by alec michod

2006-10-24T21:51:00.000-07:00

One of Against the Day's best prepared advance readers is Alec Michod, author of The White City, a novel set at the 1893 Chicago Fair that Pynchon features in his new book. Michod claims a significant Pynchon influence. First published in 2004, The White City has been reissued in a new paperback version.

Publisher's Weekly reviews Against the Day

2006-10-24T19:14:00.000-07:00

Pynchon’s ‘Against the Day’ Glows

Penguin Press will release Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, his first novel since Mason & Dixon, early next month. Below is PW’s review which calls the work “knotty, paunchy, nutty, raunchy.”

Against the Day
Thomas Pynchon. Penguin Press, $35 (1,120p) ISBN 978-1-59420-120-2

"....that rushing you hear is the sound of the world, every banana peel and dynamite stick of it, trying to crowd its way in, and succeeding."

Knotty, paunchy, nutty, raunchy, Pynchon’s first novel since Mason & Dixon (1997) reads like half a dozen books duking it out for his, and the reader’s, attention. Most of them shine with a surreal incandescence, but even Pynchon fans may find their fealty tested now and again. Yet just when his recurring themes threaten to become tics, this perennial Nobel bridesmaid engineers another never-before-seen phrase, or effect, and all but the most churlish resistance collapses.

It all begins in 1893, with an intrepid crew of young balloonists whose storybook adventures will bookend, interrupt and sometimes even be read by, scores of at least somewhat more realistic characters over the next 30 years. Chief among these figures are Colorado anarchist Webb Traverse and his children: Kit, a Yale- and Göttingen-educated mathematician; Frank, an engineer who joins the Mexican revolution; Reef, a cardsharp turned outlaw bomber who lands in a perversely tender ménage à trois; and daughter Lake, another Pynchon heroine with a weakness for the absolute wrong man.

Psychological truth keeps pace with phantasmagorical invention throughout. In a Belgian interlude recalling Pynchon’s incomparable Gravity’s Rainbow, a refugee from the future conjures a horrific vision of the trench warfare to come: “League on league of filth, corpses by the uncounted thousands.” This, scant pages after Kit nearly drowns in mayonnaise at the Regional Mayonnaise Works in West Flanders. Behind it all, linking these tonally divergent subplots and the book’s cavalcade of characters, is a shared premonition of the blood-drenched doomsday just about to break above their heads.

Ever sympathetic to the weak over the strong, the comradely over the combine (and ever wary of false dichotomies), Pynchon’s own aesthetic sometimes works against him. Despite himself, he’ll reach for the portentous dream sequence, the exquisitely stage-managed weather, some perhaps not entirely digested historical research, the “invisible,” the “unmappable”—when just as often it’s the overlooked detail, the “scrawl of scarlet creeper on a bone-white wall,” a bed partner’s “full rangy nakedness and glow” that leaves a reader gutshot with wonder.

Now pushing 70, Pynchon remains the archpoet of death from above, comedy from below and sex from all sides. His new book will be bought and unread by the easily discouraged, read and reread by the cult of the difficult. True, beneath the book’s jacket lurks the clamor of several novels clawing to get out. But that rushing you hear is the sound of the world, every banana peel and dynamite stick of it, trying to crowd its way in, and succeeding. (Nov.)

This article originally appeared in the October 24, 2006 issue of PW Daily.

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6384205.html?nid=2286

ATD-related: tesla coil fun

2006-10-24T14:18:00.000-07:00

"Take one CD, Microwave at full power for 5 seconds,
and place on top of tesla coil. Enjoy!"
http://www.electricstuff.co.uk/cdzap.html

the glowing reports keep rolling in

2006-10-24T09:59:00.000-07:00

"Best book I've ever read," says one battle-toughened novelist who is half-way into Against the Day.

Yes, Bodine's in there.

http://pynchonwiki.com launches to support Against the Day readers

2006-10-24T07:32:00.000-07:00

At his Hyperarts Pynchon Pages (http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/) Tim Ware has announced his http://pynchonwiki.com project, which sounds very cool - just the sort of Web 2.0, fan-generated content-creation process that will draw hard-core Pynchon readers to build a site that will
support the far larger audience of Against the Day readers as they read the book in the coming months and years. I'll have a chance to find out more about the
project later this week, I expect.

Against the Day details!

2006-10-24T07:24:00.000-07:00

...from: The Literary Saloon :

We didn't get a personalized proof of Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day (as others did), but yesterday -- a month before the 21 November on-sale date -- a beautiful hardcover finished copy was delivered:

Not quite the drop-everything event for us that it is for some others, but certainly something we look forward to spending much of the next month with.
It weighs in at 1085 pages, and around 410,000 words. The opening scene is aboard: "the hydrogen skyship Inconvenience, its gondola draped with patriotic bunting", as some members of the Chums of Chance are on their way to Chicago .....
It's divided into five sections:
The Light Over the Ranges
Iceland Spar
Bilocations
Against the Day
Rue du Départ
The epigraph is from Thelonious Monk.
And the first impression is that the Pynchon book it most resembles is, indeed, Gravity's Rainbow. But that's just a very quick first impression: this is definitely a text it's going to take a while to deal with.

Pre-order your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk (the Penguin Press publicity page is -- so far -- useless).
In Time Jeffrey Ressner wondered about the difficulties of Promoting Pynchon; it certainly looks like there will be extensive and intensive Internet cove

rage.

advance reviewers say: Against the Day is killer

2006-10-23T22:19:00.000-07:00

I've heard that now from a couple of folks lucky enough to have review copies of the novel. "M&D meets GR" is the way it sounds after listening to one Pynchon devotee and reviewer rhapsodize.

Amazing how some folks on Pynchon-l keep complaining about the lack of a traditional marketing campaign, I guess they just can't see what's happening. No substitute for word-of-mouth, which is what the publisher has generated in spades with Pynchon's Book Description, with ARCs in reviewer hands now the buzz is getting bigger. Pre-publication orders at Amazon.com. Articles now appearing in top-tier pubs like the New York Times, and a place reserved on the bestseller list as soon as it's published. I don't know what more a publishing executive or author could expect from a marketing campaign that eschews the usual canned promotional crap, respecting readers enough to let them pass along word of a killer new book on the way, instead of clubbing them with paid advertising and promotional stunts (any defenestration plans out there?).

I was told today to expect a call from an Associated Press reporter who's looking for pynchonoids to interview for a feature - I'm not holding my breath, but if it's true, this is a "viral" campaign that appears to be taking hold in a serious way. Add in the various fan-built sites that are bound to emerge in the next few weeks, it's a viral (hate that metaphor, but it's what they say) campaign with legs, too.

best,
pynchonoid