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Well hello.
Why?
Why not first. Not so that a
billion people can read the book. You can get
Gravity's Rainbow in a pretty
edition for $12.95 or something, three or four bucks used
(love those seventies paperbacks), or free from the library.
The digitization of libraries will be ...
something, but that's way off. When
it starts happening for reals (when there's money in it)
GR will be way down on the list,
behind the complete Danielle Steele and Naked
Lunch a-and maybe even that
Infinite Jest (just a guess -- we
haven't seen the numbers).
Besides, putting a book
- on the WWW
- in HTML (however simple)
- in little pieces that aren't even in order
is not
what digitization
is all about. It's wasteful, slow, and totally not
egalitarian. (We don't even want to know what this looks like
on non-Netscape browsers.)
But this isn't work or even serious play. To us it's
sort of an incantation. To have these words floating
somewhere in the ether is, we can't help feeling, a
good thing -- as a spell, against
falling objects....
So -- type up your favorite passage. Or two. We did a
lot of typing at work one summer (and learned a lot about
Pynchon's style in the process).
("In the process" -- isn't that
spooky?)
You can put it up yourself
and tell us where it
is or email
it to us with whatever relevant images (if you're worried
about copyright
restrictions, say). We will, un bel di, put up links to the
several Pynchon (re)sources on the web -- and maybe the passages themselves will even be referentially linked!
(Note March 2000: What the hell did we mean by "referentially linked?" We don't know -- we were smoking way too much pot.)
Swell, huh?
P.S.: If you are a V.
fanatic or something, maybe you should start your own
Pynchon News Service(tm).
P.P.S.: Where's the name from? Check out the
beginning of that excellent passage about "Richard M.
Zhlubb". Note the initials of the source of the "news item".
Then extrapolate.
We didn't come up with that blinding flash -- it seems
to be in just about every litcrit book on
GR. (When we finished it for the
first time we were so desparate for Pynchon-talk -- that's
what we did, instead of the last month of ourfourth semester
of college, read books like that. Maybe it's just the school
we go/went/go to, but people there have no time
for Pynchon, 'cept maybe The Crying
of Lot 49 in English 115 if the teacher is
under forty.)
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