Thomas Pynchon’

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“Tombstone, Arizona, During The 1880’s Is, In Ways, Our National Camelot”

April 19, 2015 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

I haven’t yet read Oakley Hall’s McCarthy Era Western, Warlock, but now I must. That’s the book Thomas Pynchon named in 1965 when Holiday magazine asked him to suggest an underappreciated title to its readers. It’s set in 1880s Tombstone, Arizona, which Pynchon believed to be Arthurian in stature. Here’s what he wrote about it:

Tombstone, Arizona, during the 1880’s is, in ways, our national Camelot; a never-never land where American virtues are embodied in the Earps, and the opposite evils in the Clanton gang; where the confrontation at the OK Corral takes on some of the dry purity of the Arthurian joust. Oakley Hall, in his very fine novel Warlock(Viking) has restored to the myth of Tombstone its full, mortal, blooded humanity.  Earp is transmogrified into a gunfighter named Blaisdell who, partly because of his blown-up image in the Wild West magazines of the day, believes he is a hero. He is summoned to the embattled town of Warlock by a committee of nervous citizens expressly to be a hero, but finds that he cannot, at last, live up to his image; that there is a flaw not only in him but also, we feel, in the entire set of assumptions that have allowed the ­image to exist. It is Blaisdell’s private abyss, and not too different from the ­town’s public one. Before the agonized epic of Warlock is over with—the rebellion of the proto-Wobblies working in ­the mines, the struggling for political control of the area, the gunfighting, mob violence, the personal crises of those in power—the collective awareness that is Warlock must face its own inescapable Horror: that what is called society, with ­its law and order, is as frail, as precari­ous, as flesh and can be snuffed out and assimilated back into the desert a easily as a corpse can. It is the deep sensitivity to abysses that makes Warlock, I think, one of our best American novels. For we are a nation that can, many of us, toss with all aplomb our candy wrapper into the Grand Canyon itself, snap a color shot and drive away; and we need voices like Oakley Hall’s to remind us how far that piece of paper, still fluttering brightly behind us, has to fall.

—Thomas Pynchon•

 

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“I Don’t Know If He Even Exists”

December 28, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Film | Permalink

When Thomas Pynchon, famously fame-resistant, won the 1973 National Book Award, Professor Irwin Corey accepted on his behalf, offering up his usual high-low mishegoss, the perfect patter to represent the novelist. The amazing Paul Thomas Anderson has based his latest film on the Pynchon novel Inherent Vice. In a new Guardian profile by Mark Kermode, the director is asked about his relationship with the incognizable author. An excerpt:

“One thing Pynchon doesn’t have is a public profile. He is famously camera-shy (even his fleeting Simpsons cameos placed a cartoon paper-bag on his head), and Anderson seems determined not to throw any light on his rumoured involvement with the movie. Although Joaquin Phoenix has stated that Anderson talked regularly with Pynchon, my questions about meeting the author are met with uncharacteristic evasion.

‘He doesn’t meet people,’ Anderson deadpans. ‘I don’t know if he even exists.’

So you don’t know what he thinks of the film?

‘I can only hope that he’s happy it…’

But you didn’t deal directly with him?

‘No, no, no. I just… I just stay out of it. I just try to work with the book, you know, and to treat the book as a collaborator.’

He looks me in the eye, daring me to try again. I mention the rumour (confirmed by Josh Brolin) that Pynchon visited the set and can in fact be glimpsed in the movie.

‘Well, that’s like those stories about B Traven [the mysterious author of Treasure of the Sierra Madre, who believed that ‘the creative person should have no other biography than his works”]. No one ever knew who Traven was, and these pages would supposedly appear under [the director] John Huston’s door with notes and stuff. Or they’d be on the set and look over and there’d be a guy with a hat and sunglasses, and they’d all be going, ‘Is that B Traven? Is that him?’ So it’s all very mysterious to talk about Pynchon, but I tread delicately because he doesn’t want anything to do with all this, and I just have so much respect for him. I hope I can be like him when I grow up.'”

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“As Bad Writers Go, He Took The Cake”

November 13, 2012 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

Gore Vidal regularly diminished other writers-often really talented ones–as a means of elevating himself. It’s an immature and cheap way of making yourself seem superior. (It’s the same thing that Chevy Chase, that miserable prick, does with fellow comedians). In a 2006 interview conducted by Jon Wiener that’s published at Los Angeles Review of Books, Vidal used this tactic on Truman Capote and Thomas Pynchon, two writers who were his betters and who turned out works that will outlast anything he did. Not even close. An excerpt:

“Jon Wiener: 

One of the things they do at community colleges is teach writing. I think there are programs everywhere now. At my school, U.C. Irvine, we have an undergraduate major called ‘Literary Journalism.’ It started only a couple of years ago, but it already has over 200 majors, and if there are 200 at Irvine, there is a similar number at a hundred other schools. This means hundreds of thousands of students are studying to be writers. What do you make of this?

Gore Vidal: 

We have Truman Capote to thank for that. As bad writers go, he took the cake. So bad was he, you know, he created a whole new art form: the nonfiction novel. He had never heard of a tautology, he had never heard of a contradiction. His social life was busy. To have classes in fiction — that really is hopeful, isn’t it. People can go to school and bring in physics. The genius of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow: he had to take all of his first year courses at, what was it, Cornell? One of his teachers was Nabokov. And everything he had in his first year’s physics went in to Gravity’s Rainbow. Whether it fit in or not, it just went in there. That’s one way of doing it.”

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“A Screaming Comes Across The Sky. It Has Happened Before, But There Is Nothing To Compare It To Now.”

August 15, 2012 in Books, Videos | Permalink

As President Nixon was drowning in the cesspool of Watergate, Professor Irwin Corey accepted the National Book Award in 1973 at Carnegie Hall on behalf of reclusive Gravity’s Rainbow author Thomas Pynchon.

The opening of Gravity’s Rainbow rivals that of A Tale of Two Cities and Anna Karenina:

“A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it’s all theatre. There are no lights inside the cars. No lights anywhere. Above him lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day through. But it’s night. He’s afraid of the way the glass will fall–soon–it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light only great invisible crashing.”

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