23 Ways to Tell You've Read Too Much Thomas Pynchon:

1. You sometimes break into the foxtrot, even though you have no clue what the foxtrot is.

2. Every weekend, you jump through windows with a new matching dress/chainsaw ensemble.

3. Secret societies try to off you for your stamp collection.

4. You have a pet octopus and like to have intellectual conversations with him.

5. You have the unshakable feeling that you're being followed by German V-2 missiles.

6. It's normal for you to mistakenly put your mail in the wastebasket.

7. Some days everything tastes good with bananas.

8. You have a trumpet sticker with the letters "D.E.A.T.H." on the bumper of your car.

9. You can be found in the sewer looking for alligators on any given day.

10. You call your friends "The Whole Sick Crew" with a sentimental tear in your eye.

11. You are known to exclaim "Shit and Shinola!" with utter sincerity.

12. You don't trust the Monopoly guy because of his monocle.

13. When your car breaks down, you replace the engine with Maxwell's Demon.

14. Your doctor's office is in a building called The White Visitation.

15. Your anthropology teacher's name is Bongo-Shaftsbury.

16. You are part of the Herero Heritage Foundation.

17. You have moments where think you work for Yoyodyne, Inc.

18. You leave the letter V out of the alphabet because its too dubious for you to think about.

19. You buy drinks for Thanatoids.

20. You have a personal vendetta against the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

21. You find yourself being subliminally influenced by yoyos.

22. You have a perverse interest in auctions.

23. Wha?


by Sara Aronson, from: disinformation

"Who's that winner with the two-ton smile? Why it's famed post-modern author Thomas Pynchon, and now you can dress him any way you please!"

"pynchon is connected to the following things:

erection
the weather

gravity
Thomas Pynchon wrote Gravity's Rainbow

entropy
His second book, 'The Crying of Lot 49' is a small, gemlike work about the terror which entropy, in energy and information, holds in our lives.

salinger
Like J.D. Salinger, Pynchon shuns photographers, the media, and the public, living and working in secrecy.

roxbury, massachusetts
the town was founded by an ancestor or Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, jr."

from:
DIRK: the fundamental interconnectedness of all things

".... According to the catalogue of my works published by Leisure Planet Music, Thomas Pynchon, His Pavane and Galliard was written in 1988. In fact, the Galliard was finished at 7:30 a.m. on February 2, just before my bedtime, but well after sunrise in Punxsutawney. The Pavane was completed at 3:30 a.m. on February 15, very late on Valentine's Day. My first new music ensemble, the Bemidji Alliance, named after the piano player's sister's residence, gave its first performance on Groundhog Day in 1977. 

4. I would naturally be happy to learn information to the contrary. I remember reading Gravity's Rainbow on a United Airlines flight from Omaha to Los Angeles. A stewardess escorted an elderly lady to a seat right next to mine and said, "''m sure this gentleman here would be a very good conversationalist.' I stuck my nose back in the book and didn't say a word to her for the entire flight. Another stewardess saw what I was reading and exclaimed 'Gravity's Rainbow, I'm reading that. What a great book.' I still feel guilty for not talking to the old lady. "

from:
Eight Facts About
Thomas Pynchon, His Pavane and Galliard, A Piece for Cello and Piano

"Although Manhattan Beach is known for affluent conservatism, back in the early 70s it harbored a healthy counterculture. It was during this time that Thomas Pynchon wrote his classic "Gravity's Rainbow" in a tiny apartment at 217 33rd Street. ...Pynchon apparently moved to Manhattan in 1969 or 1970, taking up residence in a small bachelor apartment behind a beachfront house before moving to his place on 33rd. Jim Hall, who knew Pynchon at the time, recalls the author being "very intense, really smart ... light years beyond anyone else." Among his few friends, Pynchon displayed much of the paranoia that would mark both his writing and career. But his first landlord in Manhattan recently speculated that his privacy might simply have been due to his difficult stutter. Pynchon the eccentric was known to lock himself up for weeks at a time while working, and he was often seen carrying a yellow plastic pig. His "Vineland," published in 1997, is full of references to Torrance, Hawthorne and Hermosa Beach. The novel also contains a description of a house in the fictional town of Gordita Beach, which could easily double for Manhattan: "But having been put up back during an era of overdesign, it proved to be sturdier than it looked, with its old stucco eaten at to reveal generations of paint jobs in different beach-town pastels, corroded by salt and petrochemical fogs that flowed in the summer up the sand slopes, on up past Sepulveda ..."

from:
The Aesthetic

The date of Vineland's publication date is incorrect (first ed., 1990). That "carrying a yellow plastic pig" seems a tad romantic.

(WESTERN THEME, CATTLE, HORSES, WHOOPS)

TR: THE LIVES OF THE COWBOYS.....brought to you by Odessa Vacation Homes and Condos......if you're looking for sunshine and inexpensive real estate, you almost can't do better than West Texas......and now as we rejoin Dusty and Lefty (OUTDOOR AMBIENCE, CA TTLE IN DISTANCE), we find them making camp for the night at Yellow Springs on the Lonesome Trail south of Amarillo....

(OUTDOOR AMBIENCE, CATTLE. THEN THE RATTLE OF COOKWARE)

.... TR: This is the worst song I ever heard in my life. Absolutely the worst. I'd rather listen to sheep than listen to this.

GK:

He'd been caught that morning, with a paper shirt and vest,
He wore paper boots and spurs and pants, so they made an arrest,
And charged him with rustling, which apparently he did:
That afternoon they strung him up, the Amarillo Kid.

I can hear the people coming from every neighborhood
And I long to be in Austin when the party's getting good.


TR: I sincerely hope this is the end.

GK:

They strung him up, and shot him, and were about to give him poison,
And then one cowboy rose up in his saddle and cried, "Boys, in
All my days on lynch mobs, there was one sure way of lynchin'
That's to lock him in the outhouse with the works of Thomas Pynchon.

So they put the Amarillo Kid in the little house out back
With the works of Thomas Pynchon, a solid four-foot stack.
And he commenced to read The Crying of Lot 49,
And he groaned so loud and mournfully, they knew that he was dyin.

He finally finished that one but on Gravity's Rainbow,
They could hear him sighing and his breath was coming slow.
When they opened up the door, he had passed to his rest,
He had died of suffocation for the book lay on his chest.

He could see the ladies singing, he could smell his long-lost friends,
And his spirit went to Austin where the party never ends.


TR: Is this finally the end now?

GK: All over except for the yodel....


from:
A Prairie Home Companion, Cowboys,Saturday, June 6, 1998

"Much of Pynchon's personal life remains a mystery.
He has lived in seclusion for many years,
and his academic and military records have been lost. "

FUSIONanomaly, Thomas Pynchon