Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Tuesday, February 17, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Khakee meets The Crying of Lot 49 At work again. It's quiet at the moment and is likely to be for the rest of my shift (knock on crappy particleboard countertop). Today was one of those quiet zenith/nadirs in my Pynchonalia, as I read, finally, Jules Siegel's "Who Is Thomas Pynchon...And Why Did He Take Off With My Wife?" the Playboy article from 1977 that's the gossipy Rosetta Stone of Pynchon info. Why it only took me, oh, eight years or so to come up with the idea of putting the title in a search engine, I couldn't say.On the one hand, the article is a great read, filled to bursting with the sort of info I wanted to know (what his bedroom in Manhattan Beach, where he wrote and re-wrote Gravity's Rainbow, was like; what kind of student he was; likes; dislikes; lovers. On the other hand, the article reads, without too much effort, as an attack on Pynchon by the author, a friend since college, for committing adultery with the author's wife. It is an attack on one of the few things Pynchon holds dear--his privacy. (Similar motives might be attributed to Pynchon's former agent, Candida Donadio--and one of the things that always boggles me whenever I learn any details about Pynchon's life is how often those people have the kind of names you find only in Pynchon's books--auctioning of letters from Pynchon. Also, kind of a depressing read, although I was kind of gratified to know that Pynchon, like me, had tried to become a movie critic and had gotten shot down. And like a dream I've woken from and barely remember, there are parts in those articles that also relate to my life, albeit secretly. After months of quiet, the great grey coincidence turbine is winding up again, beginning to once more send fluttering whorls of unconnectedly connected facts and events into my life. In my more languid moments (like now, thank particleboard), I imagine trying how to pull apart one of the great literary puzzles of our day--why writers interest readers at all--a puzzle I'm inspired to solve by my restless interest in Pynchon's silhouette which I find myself straining to see more clearly even as I turn my eyes away in humble shame. There's got to be more to it than the simple idea--simple now, anyway, in our post-postmodern era--that the reader lives a glorious fantasy not just in the lives of the characters on the page, but in the imagined life of the character who creates those characters and puts them on the page. I want to imagine Pynchon in that bedroom, on that bus heading into the hills of Mexico, on that stretch of Santa Monica Freeway, hanging out at the appropriately named Either/Or Books, staring in post-dental pain at the waves as dusk pulses at his vision in a narcotized rhythm. I want to see him so I can imagine him, and I'm ashamed at how selfish the urge to love can be--that loving something will speed you in your rush to defile it. And that decency, not love, stays the lover's hand, makes the covetous, finally, avert their eyes. posted by Jeff Lester | 7:01 PM | |
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