Thomas Pynchon’s glorious invisibility
Thomas Pynchon’s career as one of the 20th century’s most elusive celebrities began in 1963. The 26-year-old’s first novel, V, received a rave review in the New York Times, and Time magazine dispatched a photographer to Mexico City, where the author lived. According to legend, Pynchon jumped out of his apartment window to evade the snapper, and took a bus to the mountains. From then on, he systematically evaded the public eye, refusing to talk to journalists or be photographed; he did not even turn up at the ceremony where Gravity’s Rainbow was honoured with the National Book Award in 1974.
And so the literary genius became a near-mythical figure, a counter-cultural shadow who could never be tracked down. The stories of people who knew him, and people who wish they had, are collected in a new documentary film entitled Thomas Pynchon: A Journey into the Mind of [P.], directed by Fosco and Donatello Dubini. The interviewees cannot even agree on what he looked like: some remember his eyes as green, others swear that they were blue.
One writer, Jules Siegel, tells how his wife ran off with Pynchon in the 1960s, and alleges, bizarrely, that Pynchon was involved with the US government’s LSD experiments on unwitting subjects. Others tell anecdotes of Pynchon haunting bookshops in disguise, or turning up incognito at Pynchon-lookalike parties. The man himself, of course, is nowhere to be seen. Continued →
These two books tell the before and after of a catastrophe. Philippe Petit narrates the almost unbelievable story of how, one morning in 1974, he walked back and forth for an hour across a tightrope illegally rigged between the summits of the World Trade Center. American Ground, meanwhile, is an account of the politics and logistics of the massive clean-up operation after the twin towers’ fall. From walking in the air holding conversations with birds, to tunnelling through the rubble finding charred body parts: such is the change wrought by a handful of fanatics.
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