Pynchon and History: Metahistorical Rhetoric and Postmodern Narrative Form in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon (Studies in Major Literary Authors)
Althouse (Free subscription) | 15 hours ago
Hey, it's the Tiny Tim song Thomas Pynchon was talking about! This insane song appears on Tim's 1968 album "God Bless Tiny Tim," so all that ice caps melting business has nothing to do with our present-day angst over polar bears and obeisance to the Great God Gore . Unless Tim started it all. Who are those kids anyway? And why did adults subject the youngsters to this trippy apocalyptic weirdness?...
Little Green Footballs (Free subscription) | yesterday
Tiny Tim at the peak of his talents. One of the strangest performances you’ll ever see. Via Boing Boing , where they inform us that this song is referenced by Thomas Pynchon in his new book, Inherent Vice . [Video]
the brain police (Free subscription) | yesterday
There once was a man named Herbert Kaury who was more popularly known as Tiny Tim. At a time when it was not unusual to be unusual, Herbert was truly unusual. He was born in 1932 and discovered a love for the music of another age. In fact he became an archivist, a one man repository of obscure knowlege of composers and performers. Though he had a quite normal speaking voice, one day, singing along...
Boing Boing (Free subscription) | 11/21/2009
Gary says: I’m reading the latest Thomas Pynchon book, Inherent Vice, and he makes reference to this song. It’s like Tiny Tim is tripping on acid, entertaining children, and predicting global warming — all at once....
<HTMLGIANT> (Free subscription) | 11/20/2009
Some say Thomas Pynchon got nabbed of the 1974 Pulitzer for Gravity’s Rainbow due to a majority of the presiding panel’s distaste for his scene where our hero eats feces out of the ass of a prostitute (not to mention a very particular description of what sort of whose anatomy the protruding waste reminds our [...]
Bibliobibuli (Free subscription) | 11/19/2009
The National Book Award winners were announced November 18 during a ceremony in New York City. These are probably the major US awards after the Pulitzer Prize, and there are several categories. The prize for fiction went to Irish author Colum McCann for Let the Great World Spin , which is based on life in New York City in the 1970s. The piece was described as an "indelibly hallucinatory portrait...
Earth and other unlikely worlds (Free subscription) | 11/19/2009
A few years ago, Jonathan Lethem published an essay in The Village Voice, ‘Close Encounters: The Squandered Promise of Science Fiction’, in which he decried the close-mindedness of the genre and sketched an alternate history in which Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow won the Nebula instead of Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous With Rama in 1973, leading to a reconciliation...
Isak (Free subscription) | 11/19/2009
No surprise here: The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor won the Best of the National Book Awards Fiction tonight, in a public vote that received more than 10,000 responses in the final stretch. Find my NBA review of the book here, and the nascence of the mild (and, it seems, totally unnecessary) campaign for its win here. O'Connor's book was chosen by readers over the other finalists: Invisible...
entschwindet und vergeht (Free subscription) | 11/13/2009
Well I don't care-for, th' things I eat, Can't stand that boogie-woogie beat- But I'm sold, on, suicide! You can keep Der Bingle too, a- And that darn "bu-bu-bu-boo," Cause I'm sold on suicide! Oh! I'm not too keen on ration stamps Or Mothers who used to be baby vamps, But I'm sold, on, suicide! Don't like either, the Cards or Browns, Piss on the country and piss on the town, But I'm S.O.S.,...
The Guardian Books Blog (Free subscription) | 11/12/2009
While Orwell's dystopia is embedded in our culture, an equally powerful novel exploring parallel themes is almost completely unknown This week's Berlin Wall ceremonies marked a golden moment in the history of that most benighted of cities. They also reminded us of the incredibly enduring power of Nineteen Eighty-Four: it's almost impossible to write or think about totalitarianism without slipping...
Books (Free subscription) | 11/11/2009
Books for sale and reviewsAbout 200 books for sale in total.fiction, non fiction and science.Including: Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon (good condition)Masquerade, Kit Williams (as new)
Just One More Page... (Free subscription) | 11/08/2009
This month Wendy supplied us with a list of first lines and asks which books we’ve read and which would make it to our tbr list on the basis of the first line. Bold = the books I’ve read Pink = tbr pile 1. Call me Ishmael. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick 2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. Jane Austen, Pride...
The Rap Sheet (Free subscription) | 11/06/2009
Here comes the annual onslaught of year-end “best books” lists, beginning with Publishers Weekly . There’s plenty of controversy surrounding the fact that none of the titles on PW ’s top-10 rundown was written by a woman . But what’s lost in all of that is the fact that so many choices in the Fiction and Mystery categories are crime fiction: Michael Connelly’s The...
Wired: Underwire (Free subscription) | 11/05/2009
What keeps The Simpsons humming after 20 years of animated antics? A “brilliant concept,” hard work, characters that never age and a cavalcade of high-octane guest stars, according to the show’s longtime producer Al Jean. Working with brainy guests like Stephen Hawking and Thomas Pynchon — just two of the hundreds of actors, musicians and other [...]
TED BURKE, like it or not (Free subscription) | 11/04/2009
Steinbeck is of the generation that arrives just after the Muckrakers,Upton Sinclair, Frank Norris, Sinclair Lewis, who thought that fiction was something of a sociological/anthropological tool in getting at the skewed relations between races and classes in a capitalist economy. Some larger truth, discovered by a focus imagination, could get beyond supposition and provide the correct vision for reform....
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