Pynchon in Poland

Here’s a neat piece on a Pynchon conference in Poland. The thesis of the paper the author presented sounds somewhat similar to some ideas I had about Lemuria in the book when I wrote about it a while ago.

I’ve only been in one gathering of Pynchon specialists before, and they were nowhere near as eccentric as those Nick Holdstock describes. n+1 academic conference descriptions always, at least in this and the Elif Batuman versions I’ve read, sound closer to something out of The Futurological Congress than those I go to; but I haven’t been terribly adventurous in my choices either.

I googled Holdstock, as I sometimes will do, and found linked a degree or two from his personal blog this essay in the finding-Pynchon genre by Robert Goolrick, which I don’t remember reading before. And this struck me as odd, because I did a senior research project on Pynchon that I thought had involved reading most everything in English that had published on him at the time, including specifically biographical-type pieces. Perhaps I exaggerate my thoroughness, or I did read it and forgot about it. I admit to being curious about the rest of the letter mentioned here, and I have examined some of Pynchon’s graph-paper letters in person.

An unrelated question: Hannibal is clearly self-parody. But was The Silence of the Lambs also?