"Dick Cheney vehemently denies that talk of war, just weeks before the midterm elections, is designed to divert attention from other matters. But in that case he won't object if I point out that the tide of corporate scandal is still rising, and lapping ever closer to his feet....An article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal confirmed what some of us have long argued: market manipulation by energy companies — probably the same companies that wrote Mr. Cheney's energy plan, though he has defied a court order to release task force records — played a key role in California's electricity crisis. And new evidence indicates that Mr. Cheney's handpicked Army secretary was a corporate evildoer. Mr. Cheney supposedly chose Thomas White for his business expertise. But when it became apparent that the Enron division he ran was a money-losing fraud, the story changed. We were told that Mr. White was an amiable guy who had no idea what was actually going on, that his colleagues referred to him behind his back as 'Mr. Magoo.' Just the man to run the Army in a two-front Middle Eastern war, right? But he was no Magoo.... By maintaining the illusion of success, insiders like Mr. White were able to sell their stock at good prices to naïve victims...."
New York Times
17 September 2002

"the Grid's big function in this System is iceboxery, freezing back the tumultuous cycles of the day to preserve this odorless small world, this cube of changelessness"
Gravity's Rainbow, p. 678

"It would be an oversimplification to label the contrast between Line and Mound a contrast between modern and ancient ways of knowing, science and religion. A more accurate way to state the contrast would be between heaven-centered vs. earth-centered forms of knowledge, both ancient and modern. The "star-dictated" (601) absolutes of Mason's astronomy or Zarpazo's Jesuit theology, which thrive on neat geometries and stable hierarchies, are juxtaposed with what Zhang and Dixon call the ambiguities and "inner shapes" of earthly realities, including the sheer difficulty Mason and Dixon have making perfect celestial or magnetic measurements in the field and the myriad ways in which mortal human lives and understandings conflict with truths that science and theology claim are universal. Zhang associates these latter forces with "the true inner shape, or Dragon [Shan], of the Land," while for Dixon they represent Tellurick or earth-centered forces, especially magnetism. In the Indian Mound these forces find their most powerful centering, their most direct contact and conflict with the different energies embodied by the measuring of the Line. For Pynchon, the Indian Mound and the Dragon Shan represent not only ancient world views antithetical to Enlightenment science, but are prophetic of how that same science already contained within it anomalies that could only be resolved with the invention in the twentieth century of quantum physics, fractals, and the sciences of chaos and "complex systems" combining both linear and non-linear iterations. Hence we are meant to see in the Mound's Vortex not a unique or exceptional occurrence but an emblem for the infinite number of narrative Vortices or alternative universes already present in any Linear rendering of either space or time. "
Line, Vortex, and Mound: On First Reading Thomas Pynchon's Mason and Dixon
by Peter Schmidt.

"....Dulcinea and V., of course, are products of very different centuries. Writing in the transition period from the Renaissance to the Baroque, and casting Dulcinea as the supreme embodiment of Don Quijote's chivalric dreams, Cervantes has created a fascinating figure who is the end result of courtly love and Neoplatonist traditions —as well as a parodic reminder of the anachronistic nature of those traditions. The gorgeous green-eyed blonde, physical heir to Melibea, of Don Quijote's fantasy is also a coarse peasant woman of doubtful morality. As Riley has astutely pointed out, Dulcinea's “connection with money is maintained to the end” (Don Quixote 140) through the cave passage, Sancho's paid lashes, and finally the cricket-cage. Dulcinea, like the Orianas and Laureolas of the books of chivalry and the sentimental novels, belongs to the past; Don Diego de Miranda, the bourgeois country gentleman, is more “modern” than Don Quijote. Yet people cherish the ideal in all periods. Thus Dulcinea is very real for Don Quijote, and for the reader, even though we all acknowledge her ethereal nature.

V., on the other hand, is a product of the postmodernist milieu. (But are the two periods so different? According to Ferreras, Cervantes “escribe o recrea un universo donde el desorden, y también el crimen y la sangre, destruyen toda armonía, toda comunión en un solo ideal” [23].)10 While I emphatically agree with Riley that “any detached and overall view of Dulcinea must combine the very disparate images of her presented by Don Quijote, Sancho, other characters and the narrator” (“Symbolism” 73), these images do tend to conform to either the “ideal” Dulcinea or the “anti-Dulcinea.” In one sense, this is also true of V., “The V composing and forestalling the vide” (Redfield 159). The over-abundance of V.-signifiers in Pynchon's novel, however, corresponds well to postmodernism's “commitment to indeterminancy, openness and multiplicity” (Connor 16), its “denying dichotomies, bipolarities, . . . dissolving binary oppositions” (Mellencamp 98).11 V. is more definitely a what (“‘what: what is she?’” [53]) than a who. Perhaps, like Stencil, she is essentially a lack, a lack of order: “Pynchon does not . . . offer us Order, and in that he reflects the postmodernist outlook” (Hume 192). This is for me the greatest difference between his worldview and that of Cervantes. Even with the marked sense of desengaño and sadness found in much of Don Quijote, particularly in Part II, Cervantes always conveys to the reader some sense of order, even though it be a Baroque “orden desordenada” (I 519). Alonso Quijano on his deathbed may repudiate “los detestables libros de las caballerías” and their “disparates” and “embelecos” (foremost among them the overly-idealized Dulcinea) (II 1105), but he dies comforted by the supreme Order of grace, “‘las misericordias . . . que en este instante ha usado Dios conmigo’” (ibid.). Alonso Quijano dies sane, with “juicio . . . libre y claro, sin las sombras caliginosas de la ignorancia” caused by too much reading of the books of chivalry; his mind regains its order. In marked contrast, the final chapter of V. is a flashback to the death at sea of old Stencil, a death caused by a blind natural disorder, a gigantic waterspout (492): “Veronica Manganese had kept him only as long as she had to” (492). This is the reader's final glimpse of V., as she turns old Stencil over to disorder and death.

According to Van Delden, “the problem of how and where to find a principle of order in the modern world” is central to V. (118). The problem is unresolved at the novel's close. In comparison with the tremendous positive development of Sancho Panza, Stencil's luckless companion Benny Profane ends the novel much as he started out. Asked by the girl Brenda in Malta, “‘Haven't you learned?,’” Profane answers simply, “‘I haven't learned a goddam thing’” (454). This sense of emptiness and futility is the essence of the “lady V.” Dulcinea, even when viewed as a comic or threatening figure, never conveys such a negative impression. Enough of the ideal forever clings to her, to soften and to dulcify her image.

from:
Dulcinea and Pynchon's V. by Carole A. Holdsworth; originally published in Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 19.1 (1999): 27-39.

Deep in the heart of Texas...

"The manuscript for an unproduced musical called Minstral Island by Pynchon and Kirkpatrick Sale. Early notes, outlines, and drafts for the 1958 collaboration between Pynchon and Sale which explores the year 1998 when IBM dominates the world and artists (including musicians, sailmakers, and prostitutes) are pariahs who have yet to be assigned roles in the new world order. Pynchon collaborated on the manuscript with Sale in 1958, prior to the publication of Pynchon's first novel, V. Kirkpatrick Sale has written extensively on the political, economic, sociological, and environmental impacts of technology, even going so far as to reconstitute the term Luddite to describe a contemporary movement that is skeptical of uncontrolled technological advance. Pynchon manuscripts are notoriously rare, which makes this unpublished gem particularly exceptional."
Ransom Center Newsletter, Summer 2002

Thanks to fellow Pynchonoid, Rich Romeo of PYNCHON-L for digging this up.

"When a CNN camera crew caught up with Pynchon in Manhattan recently, he phoned back to strongly request that he not be pointed out to viewers in any videotape (a request which, after much debate, CNN opted to honor). 'Let me be unambiguous,' he said. 'I prefer not to be photographed.' .... Pynchon himself rejects any characterizations of him as a recluse, telling CNN that 'my belief is that recluse is a code word generated by journalists ... meaning, 'doesn't like to talk to reporters.' He has proven himself willing to step out of the shadows from time to time -- but on his own terms. .... Pynchon's enigmatic reputation has created an aura of mystery about him. But the truth turns out to be not quite so exotic, according to Sales. He leads a somewhat conventional life in New York City. 'He shops at neighborhood stores. He lunches with other writers. He spends weekends in the countryside with his family,' she says. Indeed, he is so conventional that you might not know him if you saw him. While CNN agreed not to isolate him and identify him specifically, he does happen to be among the people you will see in street scenes in the movie accompanying this story."
Where's Thomas Pynchon?
CNN tracks down literary world's deliberate enigma
June 5, 1997

"One night in early June of 1967, my Pynchon connection phoned me at my apartment on Shattuck Avenue. Pynchon was in town, staying with her and her boyfriend. He'd been living in L.A., flown up to Seattle to visit friends from Boeing, and on his way back to L.A. had stopped off for a day in Berkeley. She said, "Tom wants to meet you." This was like a command audience with the Pope. I kick-started my motorcycle and, I think, made it across town to her place near San Pablo Avenue before she had time to put down the phone. ....Pynchon was evidently a man of few words. I wanted very much to talk with him, to sound him out, at least to get him to laugh, but as we sat on the floor and passed around buzz bombers and grew progressively more zonked, he didn't say much, just listened intently as our hostess and host and I talked. The conversation was disjointed, grass talk consisting of little bits and revelations (Leslie Fiedler had just been busted for possession of marijuana) and silly stoned jokes, like the one about the woman who traded in her menstrual cycle for a Yamaha. I thought of Pynchon as a Van der Graaf machine, one of those generators that keeps building static electricity until a lightning bolt zaps between the terminals. All of a sudden, he pulled out of his pocket a string of firecrackers and asked, 'Where can we set these off?' "

from:
Smoking Dope with Thomas Pynchon: A Sixties Memoir

"Which brings me to my nomination for the Patron Saint of Warchalkers: Thomas Pynchon. The prescient Mr. Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 described similar cryptic scribbles by members of a secret underground postal system, long before the rise of the net. (Published 3 years before the traditional 1969 birthday of the net.) Alas, I'm not sure if the trystero would work for wifiti, but it certainly would add an air mystery (and literary history) to the endeavor."

from:
Warchalking: Collaboratively creating a hobo-language for free wireless networking.

[Note: url links to the Warchalking quote added by Pynchonoid.--Ed.]

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

"Dear Thomas,
I was encouraged to see your piece in support of Donald Barthelme. Or at least I think it was in support of him. You know how you never can tell with you. Anyway, I was pleased to discover that you thought he was/is underrated too. Hope all is well.

Love Anyways,
            Cold Bacon "

from:
An Open Letter to Thomas Pynchon

Good Evening Tyrone Slothrop

"These two-faced 'venus' in Mexico are interpreted like 'symbol of a double fruit or the principle of the duality, that represents one of the roots of the mesoamericanan religious philosophy, which comes attributed propiziatory character.' To me, 'propiziatory character' had it also the 'venus' with a single head, otherwise is not understood why they made them! If not, it is thinkable that those two-faced ones have had a 'greater propiziatory character.' [...] The characteristics of the two " venus " and of the mask have many characteristics in common with the wood sculpture of equatorial Africa. Sure, who worked the wood, did not work the stone, but the man always has been able to make all, in every direction. Independently from the doubts on the origin of the two two-faced sculptures (Fig.3 and Fig.4) , we must observ that they join two different cults (true or presumed): 1°) the feminine nude generally is considered connected to the cult of the fecundity, and 2°) the bifrontism, generally, is characterization of a God. "

"The shape of the heads reproduces the shape of the hair, enriched by ornamental patterns , traced with little lines as 'V' present also in the dorsal side. "

A two-faced V. . . . .

"In the name of fire prevention, Bush wants to allow the timber industry to log off more than 2.5 million acres of federal forest over the next ten years. He wants it done quickly and without any interference from pesky statutes such as the Endangered Species Act. Bush called his plan 'the Healthy Forests Initiative.' But it's nothing more than a giveaway to big timber, that comes at a high price to the taxpayer and forest ecosystems.

"Bush's stump speech was a craven bit of political opportunism, rivaled, perhaps, only by Bush's call to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling as a way to help heal the nation after the attacks of September 11. That plan sputtered around for awhile, but didn't go anywhere. But count on it: this one will.

"Bush is exploiting a primal fear of fire that almost overwhelms the crippling anxiety about terrorists. In a one of the great masterstrokes of PR, Americans have been conditioned for the past 60 years that forest fires are bad...bad for forests. It's no accident that Smokey the Bear is the most popular icon in the history of advertising, far outdistancing Tony the Tiger or Capt. Crunch.

"But the forests of North America were born out of fires, not destroyed by them. After Native Americans settled across the continent following the Wisconsin glaciation, fires became an even more regular event, reshaping the ecology of the Ponderosa pine and spruce forests of the Interior West and the mighty Douglas-fir forests of the Pacific Coast.

"Forest fires became stigmatized only when forests began to be viewed as a commercial resource rather than an obstacle to settlement. Fire suppression became an obsession only after the big timber giants laid claim to the vast forests of the Pacific Northwest. Companies like Weyerhaeuser and Georgia-Pacific were loath to see their holdings go up in flames, so they arm-twisted Congress into pour millions of dollars into Forest Service fire-fighting programs. "

Jeffrey St. Clair, in Counterpunch.

"He woke to rain coming down in sheets, the smell of redwood trees in the rain through the open bus windows, tunnels of unbelievably tall straight red trees whose tops could not be seen pressing in to either side. Prairie had been watching them all the time and in a very quiet voice talking to them as they passed one by one. It seemed now and then as if she were responding to something she was hearing, and in rather a matter-of-fact tone of voice for a baby, too, as if this were a return for her to a world behind the world she had known all along."
Vineland p. 315

"Anyone catch the interview with actor Larry Hagman (I Dream of Jeanie,
Dallas) on Entertainment Tonight? Much of the interview related to his
drug use, including his LSD use. He spoke in glowing terms about his LSD
experience(s). He said at first it was like going through the "gates of
hell" and that his guide told him to just go with it and after he let go,
it was one of the most wonderful experiences he's ever had. He said he had
a 'white light' experience on LSD and how he no longer fears death. He
said there are multiple planes of existence and that the next one is based
on love."

-from the MAPS list today.

"No wonder the State panicked. How are they supposed to control a population that knows it'll never die?"
Vineland pp. 313-314

"The terrible war flower
has left her footprints-
countless petals of separation and death
in white and violet.
Very tenderly, the wound opens itself in the depths of
my heart.
Its color is the color of blood,
its nature the nature of separation. "

from:
The Beauty of Spring Blocks My Way by Thich Nhat Hanh

The nature of separation?

Drawing a Line . . . .