Talk:Thomas Pynchon/Archive02

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This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Contents 1 Deletions 6 Jan 2006 2 Changes 16 Jan 3 W.A.S.T.E. 4 thomas 5 Pynchon and the Swedish Prize 6 Royster refs 7 Still to do 8 Source for Playboy Japan statement? 9 The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Deletions 6 Jan 2006

For example, the satirical newspaper The Onion published an article mocking the American media coverage of Elián González; in the article, Pynchon and Salinger both come out of seclusion to tell the American public something vitally important, but all news organizations ignore them in favor of the Elián story. ^[1]

1. ^  "CNN Still Releasing News Piled Up During Elián González Saga". The Onion 11 October 2000 (link verified 18 December 2005).

• Relevant?

I say yes, if only because we have pitifully few sources actually indicating anything about Pynchon's "media mystique". Anville 19:08, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

• It's trivial, has already dated, and doesn't add anything to what the Salm quote already says. It was barely amusing in the first place. Too much space in the entry is already devoted to gossip and irrelevancies. 58.164.62.144 07:33, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

It is remotely possible that Paris Hilton may be aware of Salm's criticism. In episode #1.22 of The O.C., Hilton makes a cameo appearance as a graduate student writing her thesis on "Magical Realism in American Literature," and asks Seth (the protagonist) if he's ever read Gravity's Rainbow, describing it as Pynchon's "masterpiece."

• Relevant?

Bleh. Probably not; it really only exists to extend the Arthur Salm quotation a little. Anville 19:08, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

His most recent novel, Mason & Dixon, contains a scene where two characters speculate why heterosexual men find lesbian pornography arousing, casting their explanation in algebraic terms.

• Accurate? Page ref? 60.228.45.49 00:03, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

Yes, it's accurate. The passage is quoted in Depictions of lesbian sex in pornography; it occurs in chapter 54, on pages 526–7. The characters in question are Tenebrae and 'Thelmer: "Brae has discover'd the sinister Volume in 'Thelmer's Room, lying open to a Copper-plate Engraving of two pretty Nuns, sporting in ways she finds inexplicably intriguing..." They are reading an installment in the "Ghastly Fop" series, this particular one being an abduction fantasy of sorts, involving tattooed Natives, a Chinese feng shui Master, and a Conspiracy of Jesuits employing both diabolickal Instruments of enforc'd Submission and a Steampunk Telegraph fueled by piezoelectrick Fluid...

Rilly, I thought everyone had accepted the idea long ago that, thanks to Thomas Pynchon, a solid grounding in hallucinatory drugs, BDSM technology and elementary calculus is essential to all serious literature students. (Joke?) Anville 19:08, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

• No doubt. I guess it's remotely accurate. The way it's put doesn't really reflect what's going on in the scene and nor does it give a representative impression of Pynchon's technique or themes. The cross-reference isn't a justification - anyone seeking out that scene or the novel for a "depiction of lesbian sex in pornography" is sure to be disappointed!

The "Recurring themes" section still needs a lot of work so it will no doubt get tidied up. 58.164.62.144 07:33, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

Changes 16 Jan

"In the mid-1990s, after many years in which he was believed to be dividing his time between Mexico and northern California, Pynchon moved to New York City; also around this time, he married his agent, Melanie Jackson, and fathered a son, Jackson. The disclosure of his location, not surprisingly, led some to try to track him down."

• As it stood, the section had him inviting Rushdie to dinner in New York in 1990 and then moving to New York "in the mid-1990s". That might have been the case, but the two paragraphs seemed contradictory. I don't know exactly when he moved to New York, or the date of his marriage, but have tidied it up as best I could.

Is there any consensus to delete some more of the trivia (and the footnotes!) cluttering up the article? Shouldn't the main focus of the entry be on Pynchon's published work? Do we really need any more than that introductory sentence about him also being known for "his avoidance of publicity; very few photographs of him have ever been published"? Abaca 20:55, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

To have any claim to completeness, I believe that we do need more than one sentence, although the sheer mass of unorganized trivia still needs, ahem, editing. If the link farm currently growing at the bottom of the article were trimmed down, and if the "Hoaxes and rumors" section had any references at all, this article would make a decent showing at FAC. Anville 16:52, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

Abaca, please, do not delete any stuff at all. Anything one could possibly even be remotely interested in should be included. If you think the article is too long, there is always a possibility to split it up in sub-articles. For example it is perfectly possible to create an entry called Thomas Pynchon trivia and link that from the article, so that you keep only the most interesting stuff on the mainpage and the trainspotting stuff in its own page. Nixdorf 22:27, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

* I disagree. Selectivity is a key ingredient of a quality reference article. Comparisons with Wikipedia entries on other of Pynchon's contemporaries who do give interviews, such as John Updike (who has also appeared on The Simpsons a couple of times) or David Foster Wallace, show up just how lop-sided towards journalistic fluff this entry on Pynchon is. The focus should be on Pynchon's life and work, not on revelations that he talked about baseball at dinner with Salman Rushdie or once had a "complex" about his teeth, or on hoaxes and publicity-mongering generated by others. Some of what has been allowed to persist in the current article seems to have been designed to present a negative impression of Pynchon (and his work), perhaps reflecting what one or two contributors are "interested" in conveying, but which is not representative or even-handed or informative for the general reader. Many of the more trivial bits of information could be relocated (though I truly doubt, for example, that the Rushdie or Laurie Anderson or Nirvana tidbits would make the cut in their respective entries), and the "Media aversion" and "Hoaxes" sections should be combined and summarised down to about two or three brief paragraphs at most. For an idea of what a decent reference article on Pynchon might look like, see the entry on J.D. Salinger. Eight footnotes (several of them double-barrelled, many of them merely tabloid journalism) is ridiculous. Abaca 23:45, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

I get your point, and I agree the article could be restructured. However I do not see the need for loosing information for that reason. What is defintaley not true could go, such as the pure hoaxes, I agree. What is true or doubted should stay. Regarding tidbits provided by the Jules Siegel article, Jules stresses (see "Lineland", and his own remarks above) that he is not presenting Mr. Pynchon in an unfavorable light, but fairly and lovingly considering him a friend, and knowing him first-hand he should know. Nixdorf 08:57, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

While pure hoaxes are certainly not true, they are still worth recording. Word of a hoax propagates because it sounds plausible, and because people find joy or satisfaction in repeating it. As Carl Sagan sez in The Demon-Haunted World, the "genuine scientific paydirt" in UFOs is not what they tell us about aliens, but what they tell us about humans—the way our minds work, what we desire, how we hallucinate. The notions that Pynchon was the Unabomber or that he was really Salinger—we might call such ideas "memes"—say little about the man Thomas R. Pynchon, but they speak of how the world sees that man. Every encyclopaedia article on an author, if its is worth its scholarly salt, records what opinions people have had about that author and their work. There is no reason, a priori, why the record of these opinions should stop with the official litterati, canonized by their preservation in "scholarly journals", as if Social Text and Postcolonial Studies were a kind of amber. We should be concise and scrupulous in reporting what "mystique" a writer like Pynchon has, but we should not skip past it glibly. After all, when Pynchon dies, that will be all which is left—books, inspiring people to scrawl muted post horns in public latrines. Anville 18:09, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

Point taken. Nixdorf 18:17, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

W.A.S.T.E.

Enjoy. Anville 15:58, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

thomas

who on earth is this Thomas Pynchon guy? please answer me

Pynchon and the Swedish Prize

"Hmmm," I thought, "the lead needs expansion. And wait," I thought again, "we never really return to the bit about Pynchon and the Nobel Prize, do we?" Sifting the wheat from the googlechaff, I found the following sources, which may yet be of some use to us:

• William Grimes, "Toni Morrison Is '93 Winner Of Nobel Prize in Literature". New York Times Book Review 8 October 1993.
• "Early Nobel announcement prompts speculation". CNN Book News, posted online 29 September 1999.
• Andrew Ervin, "Nobel Oblige". Philadelphia City Paper 14–21 September 2000.

I also dug up the following, which may be relevant for the "Wanda Tinasky" rumour:

• "The crying over Lot 49 of Thomas Pynchon's letters". Salon 10 March 1998.

Finally, though Pynchon has yet to receive the Swedish prize, Elfriede Jelinek—who translated Gravity's Rainbow into German—has.

Best, Anville 20:17, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

Royster refs

The Royster pdf is a good summary - thanks for including it. But pretty much all of the info in it has been around for a long time, and Royster is not the original source, so there's no need to cite him for every little detail in the entry. (The 1964 Berkeley rejection was new to me, however, and connects with Oedipa's visit there in Lot 49.) Abaca 10:49, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

I figured I was overcorrecting; generally, I don't care too much about footnoting things like birthdates and parents' names. Thanks. Anville 13:50, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Still to do

What remains to be done:

• 1998 controversy over correspondence (< 1 paragraph)
• status vis-à-vis the Nobel Prize (to justify remark in lead, < 1 paragraph)
• overview of literary criticism: poststructuralist, hypertextualist, obscurantist, etc. (approx. 2 paragraphs?)
• Incorporate the following remarks of J. K. Grant:

Ask most people who Thomas Pynchon is and chances are they will either have no idea or they will identify him as the author of The Crying of Lot 49. They may be able to name some or all of his other works, but most are unlikely to have read them, even in college literature courses [...] Pynchon, so goes the thinking, is a hugely talented and innovative writer who has made such a name for himself that ignoring his work would be inappropriate; however, the stories in Slow Learner have been dismissed as apprentice work, both V. and Gravity's Rainbow are much too long and complex for the average reader, and Vineland is too recent to have attracted a reliable safety net of critical commentary for the nervous instructor to fall back on."

I imagine the last statement holds even more true for Mason & Dixon, published since Grant wrote A Companion to The Crying of Lot 49.

And so, each year, thousands of students are introduced to the novel and, I'm willing to bet, each year a substantial number of them come away from the experience, despite the best efforts of their instructors, convinced that Pynchon is too difficult—too weird, too clever, too something—for them. This is certainly my experience of teaching Lot 49, and my colleagues assure me it is theirs also.

• Expand the lead (I'd guess around two paragraphs, maybe three), as requested in peer review.
• General shake-down: find sources for remarks left unsourced (where this is reasonable), standardize the periods and parentheses, and so forth.

All this done, I think the article would have a fair showing over at WP:FA. What's more, as of just this moment, the WP article is the sixth Google hit for our reclusive writer—so we better make it good. Anville 14:20, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

• Note: it has been rather a while since Grant wrote his Lot 49 companion; his remark Vineland being "too recent to have attracted a reliable safety net of critical commentary" is a little bit outdated (and not just by the publishing of Mason and Dixon, which would fall into both the "too long and complex" and "too new" categories). Nowadays, I think perhaps as many people who have heard of Pynchon will recognize him as the author of Vineland as will recognize him as the author of Lot 49. Just something to keep in mind... Zafiroblue05 22:42, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

Duly noted. Thanks. Anville 12:08, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

Source for Playboy Japan statement?

I can't find a source for Melanie Jackson's denial of the Playboy Japan interview. (I keep jacking into the Matrix and asking it for help, but all it gives me are mirrors of this very article, some more outdated than others.) I tried LexisNexis, but their server keeps spitting me out with an error message, HTTP 405 to be exact. If anyone else who has a LexisNexis subscription would like to try, I suppose it couldn't hurt. And, if anyone knows a better place to look, please suggest such. Anville 14:52, 4 February 2006 (UTC)

The Illuminatus! Trilogy

you might be aware of the similarities between gravity's rainbow and The Illuminatus! Trilogy, both released around the same time, both with crazy narrative structures, similar themes, Illuminatus even references several of pynchon's works... so i'd like to invite editors of this page, who know what it takes to get something in the same vein featured, to comment on this article: The Illuminatus! Trilogy. its up for peer review before FAC here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Peer_review/The_Illuminatus%21_Trilogy. any comments in that peer review welcome. Zzzzz 15:38, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

thx to everyone who contributed to or commented on this article in the past few weeks. this article is now up for "featured article" status. please go to Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/The Illuminatus! Trilogy to vote Support or Oppose with your comments. Zzzzz 17:55, 7 March 2006 (UTC)