calling all novelists influenced by Pynchon

We're interested in reading and reviewing novelists who have been influenced by Thomas Pynchon or whose books somehow share a special affinity with Pynchon's. Contact pynchonoid at yahoo.com for details.

Jokerman 8

That's the title of this intriguing new novel just received, from Richard Melo, a novelist influenced by Thomas Pynchon. We'll review it as soon as possible. Info @ Soft Skull Press

a gnostic urge drives desire for digital liberation

[...] Even the individual self, so long trapped in the human body, would finally be free to step outside its fleshy confines [...]
From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
by Fred Turner

Mu!

[...] Kratom's main active ingredient, mitragynine, binds to the same opiate receptor (mu) as opium, heroin and cocaine. [...]
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/mg19125711.000

[...]Question,-- whether a Dog hath the nature of the divine Buddha. A reply given by a certain very wise Master is, "Mu!"[...]

M&D, 22

http://www.nypost.com/seven/09282006/gossip/pagesix/pagesix.htm

'V' NOVELIST'S XXX MOVIE KIN



September 28, 2006 -- THOMAS Pynchon, the legendarily reclusive author of such celebrated novels as "V," "Gravity's Rainbow" and "The Crying of Lot 49," has a XXX-rated skeleton in the family closet - his brainy niece stars in and directs hard-core porn flicks.

Village Voice sex columnist Tristan Taormino, who had a privileged upbringing on Long Island and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Wesleyan University, went on to star in "The Ultimate Guide to Anal" Vols. 1 and 2, and then directed "House of A - - ." This week, the dark-haired beauty is set to release her first Vivid Video effort, "Chemistry," in which seven porn stars are "left to their own devices for two days and told nothing is off limits" and use "perv cams" to film each other performing sex acts.

Few know that Pynchon is the brother of Taormino's mom. For years, Taormino has tried to get him involved in - or even just acknowledge - her carnally charged career. But the interview-averse author, who lives in seclusion on Long Island and refuses to be photographed, has refused.

But Taormino is giving it one more shot. She wants Pynchon to show up for the party for her new film at 49 Grove next Thursday, and is inviting him to take part in her next movie - although not as a performer.

"I think it would be fascinating for him do commentary on the next one," Taormino told Page Six. She said Pynchon would get a bang out of what she does if he only took a closer look at her films and books, which include an anthology, "Best Lesbian Erotica."

"We're more alike than different. We're both writers and I think he's intrigued in general by pop culture," she said, adding she doesn't know if Pynchon has watched her movies. "He hasn't asked me for any and I haven't sent him any. I haven't given any of them to my mother, either." He's probably not aware of her online store, which features sex toys, lubricants and all the latest latex and rubber gear.

Not surprisingly, Pynchon's literary agent didn't return our call. And Taormino, who wistfully remembers when her uncle attended her college graduation, admitted: "I'm not holding my breath."

pynchonoid blog makes the college grade, yo

This blog is linked as a resource for

ENGL636, S II '04, M-F 1330-1445, ARM 119 :: Studies in an Author / Thomas Pynchon :: WVU Department of English

And "pynchonoid" moves out of the realm of this blog and my screen name in Pynchon-l. One requirement for the course:

"Join Pynchon-L, the list for pynchonoids"

Ambitious reading list, too, although not quite as much as the absurd suggestion I once heard, that you have to read Finnegan's Wake in order to fully appreciate Gravity's Rainbow; it puts pynchonoid.org in nice company, that's for sure, warranted or not:

Partial List of Recommended Texts

(all at WVU Library; *=also at WVU Bookstore)
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, especially Chapters XXI, XXXI, XXXII, XXXIII, XXXIV, XXXV.
Aleida Assmann, "Texts, Traces, Trash: The Changing Media of Cultural Memory," Representations #56, link (JSTOR)
Hanjo Berressem, Pynchon's Poetics: Interfacing Theory and Text
Leo Bersani, "Pynchon, Paranoia, and Literature," Representation #25, link (JSTOR)
Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History
Charles Clerc, Mason & Dixon & Pynchon
Peter Cooper, Signs and Symptoms: Thomas Pynchon and the Contemporary World
David Cowart, "The Luddite Vision,"American Literature Vol. 71 #2, link (JSTOR)
Walter Dornberger, V2
Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth
Jacob Grimm, Teutonic Mythology
*Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire
Molly Hite, Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon
*Chalmers Johnson, Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic
C. G. Jung, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Vol 9 of the Collected Works
C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Vol 12 of the Collected Works
J. Kerry Grant, Companion to the Crying of Lot 49
Kathryn Hume, Pynchon's Mythography: an approach to Gravity's Rainbow
Friedrich Kittler, "Media and Drugs in Pynchon's Second World War," in Reading Matters: Narratives in the New Media Ecology, ed. Tabbi and Wutz
Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film
Stefan Mattessich, Lines of Flight: discursive time and countercultural desire in the work of Thomas Pynchon
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon, ed. Levine & Leverenz
Frank Palmieri, "Neither Literally nor as Metaphor: Pynchon's the Crying of Lot 49 and the Structure of Scientific Revolutions," ELH Vol 54 #4, link (JSTOR)
I. P. Pavlov, Conditioned Reflexes: An Investigation of the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral Cortex
William H. Plater, Grim Phoenix: Reconstructing Thomas Pynchon
*Thomas Pynchon, V.
*Thomas Pynchon, Vineland
Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Edward Mendelson
Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus
Rchard Sasuly, IG Farben
Lance Schachterle, "Information Entropy in Pynchon's Fiction," Configurations Vol 4 #2, link (Muse)
Gershom Sholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism
Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, especially part III
*Stephen Weisenburger, A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel, (not in the library)
*Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, especially chapters I, II, V, XI
Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History
George Zipf, Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort: An Introduction to Human Ecology

...thanks to Dave Monroe for bringing this to the attention of Pynchon-l.

Against the Day

That's the title of the new book, according to Slate.

curiouser & curiouser

culturebox
The Pynchon Post
Did the master make an appearance on his Amazon page?
By Troy Patterson
Posted Wednesday, July 19, 2006, at 3:32 PM ET

Things did not delay in turning curious when the first beats of the drumroll began for Thomas Pynchon's forthcoming book. Last month, lit-bloggers and news-writers reported that Penguin Press would issue the author's sixth novel in December. This whetted the palates of those hard-core fans who have spent the years since 1997's Mason & Dixon speculating that Pynchon was at work on a doozy about lady mathematicians of the old school and also, uhm, Mothra. Last week, Amazon.com put up a page that listed Untitled Thomas Pynchon at a svelte 992 pages and bore a description purportedly written by the master himself. In fact, it purported quite well indeed and also rather charmingly, promising an archetypal Pynchonian buffet of settings, characters, and old tricks ("Characters stop what they're doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically.") Then the description just vanished from the page.

Was this a hoax? A jump-the-gun glitch? A hype? In any event, one Amazon customer must have gone through his Web browser's cache and reposted the thing on the customer discussion board, touching off an instant classic of that kind of chatter where M.F.A. meets LSD. The following comments are fairly typical: "I am saying that the blurb is Pynchon parroting Pynchon … viral-marketing or, more hopefully, a Swiftian self-parody and critique of Internet subcultures (a sort of new, updated Tale of a Tub.)" Whee!

(For the record, Penguin Press's publicity chief disavows all knowledge of the blurb, and Amazon hadn't sorted its story out by press time. Pynchon did not immediately return an answering-machine message left at what I reasonably assume to be his Manhattan apartment.)

To be sure, when Mason & Dixon came out nine years ago, the scholars and nuts who compulsively post to the pynchon-l mailing list were on the case in cyberspace. But the new book with the rather coyly withheld title will enter an Internet Age in bloom, which is just too perfect. Labyrinthine structures, shifting identities, abstruse interconnections, funky mail systems—in its delirious maximalism, Pynchon's work has more than a few affinities with all this fine new technology, and the technology enables Pynchon fans to interact in a wholly Pynchonian way. Ladies and germs, start your master's theses, your conspiracy theories, and your attributions of prophecy: Here's where hypertext meets literature.
Troy Patterson is Slate's television critic.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2146152/

Copyright 2006 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

book description

[UPDATE 16 July 2006: After appearing on the Amazon.com page, the Book Description disappeared. Maybe somebody pulled the trigger too soon, Amazon also announced a Book Description would be published this week. After thinking about it a bit, and re-reading the text, I believe the fact that it appears over Pynchon's name indicates that he either wrote (doubtful, it sounds a lot like marketing copy, I think he revised/approved it) or approved it, and thus it should be taken seriously as yet another rare instance of Pynchon writing about his fiction.]

from Amazon.com:

Book Description
Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.

With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.

The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx.

As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it's their lives that pursue them.

Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they're doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.

Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck.

--Thomas Pynchon

About the Author
Thomas Pynchon is the author of V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, Slow Learner, a collection of short stories, Vineland and, most recently, Mason and Dixon. He received the National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 992 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The (December 5, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN: 159420120X
• Shipping Information: View shipping rates and policies
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,444 in Books (See Top Sellers in Books)
  Yesterday: #4,044 in Books

• 
  

1904

from the OED:

wahoo, int.
DRAFT ENTRY Sept. 2004
orig. and chiefly U.S.
Brit. /whu/, /whu/, U.S. /whu/ [Imitative. Cf. YAHOO int.]

An exclamation used to express excitement, enthusiasm, or delight, or to attract attention.

1904 Washington Post 24 June 3/5 The old stage coach long-drawn yell ‘Wahoo’ was echoed through the hall. 1951 in V. Randolph Pissing in Snow (1976) 118 She kept a-hollering ‘Wahoo! Wahoo!’ 1983 P. FUSSELL Class vii. 167 Noise and vociferation identify the proles, who shout ‘Wahoo!’ at triumphant moments in games. 2000 Red Herring Mar. 416/3 It's $150 million's worth of nothing right now... But if they get even one company to market, then wahoo!

Gravity's Rainbow, 452:

“1904 […] was the year the American Food and Drug people took the cocaine out of Coca-Cola, which gave us

p-list sez it's set in Chicago, 1987

Pynchon novel out in December

by Josh Getlin, June 22, 2006, Los Angeles Times

Thomas Pynchon, the reclusive, award-winning author of "Gravity's Rainbow," "V," "Mason & Dixon" and "Vineland," is finishing up a new novel, and the book will go on sale in December, his publisher announced this week.

"There is not yet a title, and we're not releasing information about the subject matter at this point," said Tracy Locke, associate publisher for Penguin Press. "At this point, that's really all I can tell you."

Pynchon's new novel, his first since "Mason & Dixon" in 1997, is shrouded in mystery, as were many of his previous books before publication. The author, born in 1937 in Glen Cove, Long Island, N.Y., has long avoided publicity, and his books have acquired a cult-like status among many readers. — Josh Getlin

M&D illo'd

from:
SCENES AND IMAGES FROM "MASON & DIXON"
Francisco Munuera Wallhead


[link goes to must-read International Pynchon Week page]

a 'second generation' modernist

Washington College Senior Wins Nation's Largest Undergraduate Literary Prize

CHESTERTOWN, Md., May 21, 2006 — Most college seniors will look back on their graduation ceremony as a day of pomp and circumstance culminating in a handshake and a diploma. For Marshall Shord, 21, a Washington College English major from Berlin, Maryland, the ceremony brought another reward: a check for $55,907. Shord's critical thesis on Thomas Pynchon, along with his portfolio of essays, stories, and poems, earned him the largest literary award in the country exclusively for undergraduates—the Sophie Kerr Prize—presented Sunday, May 21, 2006, during the College's 224th Commencement ceremonies. The awarding of the Sophie Kerr Prize, given annually to the graduating senior who demonstrates the greatest "ability and promise for future fulfillment in the field of literary endeavor," has in recent decades been a highlight of the commencement ceremony at the 224-year-old liberal arts college. The Prize, worth $55,907 this year, is among the largest literary awards in the world. Washington College has awarded more than one million dollars in prize money since it was first given in 1968, most often to writers of poetry and fiction. Scholarly and journalistic works, though less often selected, are given equal consideration. Shord was one of 31 to submit a portfolio for consideration, but it was a critical thesis on novelist Thomas Pynchon that earned him departmental honors from the English department and caught the attention of the Sophie Kerr Committee. In making the award, they praised his "intellectually adventurous" thesis while also noting the quality of his poetry. English Professor Richard Gillin, who presided over the committee's deliberations, stressed that the prize can be awarded for student writing outside the submitted portfolio—in this case, the critical thesis Shord submitted as a graduation requirement. But it was clear that the committee was also impressed with Shord's creative writing and especially his poetry. Gillin praised Shord's poems for their "stark imagery and slowly developing realizations that are often plangent and unsettling." Professor Thomas Cousineau, Shord's thesis adviser, echoed Gillin's enthusiasm for this year's winner, calling Shord's examination of Pynchon's major novels one of the best theses he had ever seen. "I was especially impressed by his complex reading of these novels as the work of a 'second generation' modernist writer who managed to find highly original ways of imitating the methods of his high-modernist master James Joyce," Cousineau said. "Marshall also offered intriguing applications to these novels of the reinterpretation of the Narcissus myth that Marshall McLuhan proposed in his landmark Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man." Shord's professors expect him to continue on to graduate school. "In fact, we will insist on it," Cousineau said with a smile. The Sophie Kerr Prize is the namesake of an Eastern Shore woman who made her fortune in New York, writing women's fiction during the 1930s and 1940s. In accordance with the terms of her will, one-half of the annual income from her bequest to the College is awarded each year to the graduating senior demonstrating the best potential for literary achievement. The other half funds scholarships, supports student publications and the purchase of books, and brings an array of visiting writers, editors, and publishers to campus to read, visit classes, and discuss student work. Her gift has provided the nucleus for an abundance of literary activity on the bucolic Eastern Shore campus. Washington College is a private, independent college of liberal arts and sciences located in historic Chestertown on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Founded in 1782 under the patronage of George Washington, it is the first college chartered in the new nation.

Contact Information:		John Buettner, Director of Media Relations 410-810-7408 jbuettner2@washcoll.edu
Sending Institution:		Washington College
Story Date:		May 20, 2006
Keywords:		Marshall Shord, Sophie Kerr Prize, literature, award, Washington College

69

Happy Birthday, Thomas Pynchon!

(Read about his 38th surprise birthday party at Tim Ware's fine HyperArts Pynchon Pages site.)

bursting the limits of time: new book of interest to Mason & Dixon readers

Rudwick, Martin J. S. Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution. Published with the support of the Getty Grant Program. 840 p., 145 halftones, 34 line drawings. 7 x 10 2005 Cloth $45.00 spec 0-226-73111-1 Spring 2005

In 1650, Archbishop James Ussher of Armagh joined the long-running theological debate on the age of the earth by famously announcing that creation had occurred on October 23, 4004 B.C. Although widely challenged during the Enlightenment, this belief in a six-thousand-year-old planet was only laid to rest during a revolution of discovery in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In this relatively brief period, geologists reconstructed the immensely long history of the earth-and the relatively recent arrival of human life. Highlighting a discovery that radically altered existing perceptions of a human's place in the universe as much as the theories of Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud did, Bursting the Limits of Time is a herculean effort by one of the world's foremost experts on the history of geology and paleontology to sketch this historicization of the natural world in the age of revolution.

Addressing this intellectual revolution for the first time, Rudwick examines the ideas and practices of earth scientists throughout the Western world to show how the story of what we now call "deep time" was pieced together. He explores who was responsible for the discovery of the earth's history, refutes the concept of a rift between science and religion in dating the earth, and details how the study of the history of the earth helped define a new branch of science called geology. Rooting his analysis in a detailed study of primary sources, Rudwick emphasizes the lasting importance of field- and museum-based research of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Bursting the Limits of Time, the culmination of more than three decades of research, is the first detailed account of this monumental phase in the history of science.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of illustrations
Acknowledgments
A note on footnotes
Introduction
Time and geohistory—Historical parameters—Historicizing the earth—Text and illustrations—Maps of knowledge

Part one: Understanding the earth

1. Naturalists, philosophers, and others
1.1 A savant on top of the world
First ascents of Mont Blanc—Science on the summit—Return to civilization—Conclusion
1.2 The Republic of Letters and its supporters
Savants, professional and amateur—The Republic of Letters—A variety of supporters—Conclusion
1.3 Places of natural knowledge
Laboratories and museums—Savants in the field—The social life of savants—Scientific publication—Conclusion
1.4 Maps of natural knowledge
The literary and the philosophical—Natural history and natural philosophy—Philosophy and theology—Conclusion

2. Sciences of the earth
2.1 Mineralogy as a science of specimens
Minerals and other fossils—Identification and classification—Fossils of organic origin—Fossil localities—Prize specimens—Conclusion
2.2 Physical geography as a spatial science
Huge solid facts—The primacy of fieldwork—Proxy pictures—Maps as instruments—Conclusion
2.3 Geognosy as a structural science
-stops: -.5in 0in .5in"The mining context—Structures and sequences—Primaries and Secondaries—Sequences of Gebirge—Fossils in geognosy—Conclusion
2.4 Earth physics as a causal science
The “physics” of specimens—The “physics” of physical geography—The “physics” of geognostic structures—The “physics” of rock formations—Conclusion
2.5 The question of time
The short timescale versus eternalism—Volcanoes, valleys, and strata—Estimates of the timescale—Encounters with theologians—Conclusion

3. The theory of the earth
3.1 Geotheory as a scientific genre
The meaning of “geology”—The goals of geotheory—Conclusion
3.2 Buffon’s cooling globe
Buffon’s first geotheory—Nature’s epochs—The earth’s timescale—Conclusion
3.3 De Luc’s worlds ancient and modern
The “Christian philosophe”—De Luc’s binary system—Natural measures of time—Conclusion
3.4 Hutton’s eternal earth machine
A deistic geotheory—Cyclic processes—A theory confirmed by fieldwork—Time and eternity—Conclusion
3.5 The standard model of falling sea levels
The multiplicity of geotheories—Neptunist geotheory—Conclusion

4. Transposing history into the earth
4.1 The varieties of history
The diversification of history—Chronology and biblical history—Chorographers and antiquarians—Herculaneum and Pompeii—Conclusion
4.2 Fossils as nature’s documents
Human history and its natural records—The natural history of fossils—Fossils and the earth’s revolutions—Conclusion
4.3 Volcanoes and nature’s epochs
The making of a physical geographer—The volcanoes of Auvergne—Epochs of volcanic activity—A lake on the site of Paris—Conclusion
4.4 Rock formations as nature’s archives
The volcanoes of Vivarais—Nature’s erudite historian—Censors and critics—Exporting geohistory to Russia—Conclusion
4.5 Global geohistory
Causal processes and geotheories—The place of contingency—Saussure as a geotheorist—De Luc as a geohistorian—Conclusion

5. Problems with fossils

5.1 The ancient world of nature
The deep past as a foreign country?—Fossils and geohistory—Migration and transmutation—Conclusion
5.2 Relics of former seas
Vanished shellfish—Living fossils—Fossil fish and possible whales—Explaining the former world—Conclusion
5.3 Witnesses of former continents
Fossil plants—Large fossil bones—The “Ohio animal”—Giant elks and bears—Conclusion
5.4 The antiquity of man
Humans in geohistory—Texts and bones—History from artifacts—Conclusion

Interlude: From survey to narrative

Part two: Reconstructing geohistory

6. A new science of “geology”?
6.1 Revolutions in nature and society (1789–91)
Meanings of revolution—Blumenbach’s “total revolution”—Montlosier’s continuous revolution—Geotheory as a flourishing genre—Conclusion
6.2 Geotheory as geohistory (1790–93)
De Luc’s new system—A differentiated “former world”—The role of fossil evidence—A critique of Hutton—Conclusion
6.3 Theorizing in a time of trouble (1793–94)
Geotheories and focal problems—Dolomieu’s mega-tsunamis—Dolomieu on the Nile delta—The sciences under the Terror—Conclusion
6.4 Geotheory politicized (1793–95)
De Luc and Blumenbach—Cultured despisers of religion—The politics of Genesis—Conclusion
6.5 “Geology” redefined (1794–97)
The sciences after Thermidor—Desmarest’s survey of geotheories—La Métherie’s geotheory—Saussure’s Agenda—Dolomieu on “geology”—Conclusion

7. Denizens of a former world
7.1 A mushroom in the field of savants (1794–96)
Fossil bones as a focal problem—The young Cuvier—The megatherium—The mammoth—Conclusion
7.2 Cuvier opens his campaign (1797–99)
Cave bears and fossil rhinos—Dolomieu and de Luc as Cuvier’s allies—Cuvier’s research program—Hostile critics—Jefferson’s megalonix—Conclusion
7.3 The Napoleon of fossil bones (1798–1800)
Savants in wartime—Cuvier and the First Consul—Cuvier’s network of informants—Cuvier’s international appeal—Conclusion
7.4 Lamarck’s alternative (1800–1802)
The threat of transformism—The response to Cuvier’s appeal—Mummified animals from Egypt—Lamarck’s Parisian fossils—Conclusion
7.5 Enlarging a fossil menagerie (1802–4)
A peaceful interlude—A cumulative case for extinction—Earlier and stranger mammals—Conclusion

8. Geognosy enriched into geohistory

P chooses cover artist for new Gravity's Rainbow

From: "Erik T. Burns"
To:
Subject: Miller/Pynchon in Variety Magazine
Date: Wed, 3 May 2006 14:52:20 +0100


Miller time; News Brief
Steven Zeitchik
30 April 2006
Daily Variety

A9 2006, Variety, Reed Business Information, a division of Reed
Elsevier, Inc
When he's not writing new graphic novels for Hollywood to snap up, "Sin
City" creator Frank Miller has an unusual sideline: drawing for Thomas
Pynchon.

Penguin Classics was redesigning its line of influential novels and
asked Pynchon if he'd like a new jacket for his novel "Gravity's
Rainbow." At first Pynchon resisted, says publicist Caroline Farrington.
But he came back and said he'd allow it, on one condition: if Miller did
the design.

Miller, at work on the Weinstein Co.'s "Sin City 2," agreed. A new
edition of the tome will be released in October.

she wouldn't use his name without his permission, would she?

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

God calling, timed release

http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0510102

via Godlorica:

Physics, abstract
physics/0510102

From: Stephen D. H. Hsu [view email]
Date (v1): Tue, 11 Oct 2005 20:15:52 GMT (5kb)
Date (revised v2): Tue, 6 Dec 2005 06:20:04 GMT (7kb)

Message in the Sky

Authors: S. Hsu, A. Zee
Comments: 3 pages, revtex
Subj-class: Popular Physics

We argue that the cosmic microwave background (CMB) provides a stupendous opportunity for the Creator of universe our (assuming one exists) to have sent a message to its occupants, using known physics. Our work does not support the Intelligent Design movement in any way whatsoever, but asks, and attempts to answer, the entirely scientific question of what the medium and message might be IF there was actually a message. The medium for the message is unique. We elaborate on this observation, noting that it requires only careful adjustment of the fundamental Lagrangian, but no direct intervention in the subsequent evolution of the universe.

Full-text: PostScript, PDF, or Other formats

Gravity's Rainbow, p. 4]

"You didn't really believe you'd be saved. Come, we all know who we are by now. No one was ever going to take the trouble to save you old fellow.... "

the Portuguese word for "fool"

Scientists find 'mass dodo grave'

The dodo was mocked by Portuguese and Dutch colonialists for its size and apparent lack of fear of armed, hungry hunters. It took its name from the Portuguese word for "fool", and was hunted to extinction within 200 years of Europeans landing on Mauritius.

you lookin at me?

Psychologists at the University of Liverpool have found that people still find it difficult to understand how mirrors work.

...from: Humans Do Not Understand Mirror Reflections, Say Researchers

....more than enough mirrors in Pynchon's work to confuse readers; in the opening of Mason & Dixon is one good place to start.