Word: pynchon
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DIED. WILLIAM GADDIS, 75, venerated modernist author; of prostate cancer; in East Hampton, N.Y. Gaddis, who published four complex novels in 40 years, never achieved a popular following, but he did win ecstatic acclaim from critics. His innovative use of language and masterly social satire inspired comparisons to Joyce, Pynchon and Melville. When scholars tried to deconstruct his work, he said, "What can I do if people insist I'm cleverer than I think...
...reputation has grown in inverse proportion to his output, enabling him to draw Sean Penn, John Travolta, George Clooney and Woody Harrelson to Australia to shoot The Thin Red Line, due out at Christmas, about the 1942 battle for Guadalcanal. Look for Jean-Claude Van Damme in a Thomas Pynchon-scripted vehicle next summer...
What I like most about these definitions is that they give us a way of looking at some of the great works of art produced in the last 40 or 50 years, strange and tricky works by Pynchon, Nabokov, Beckett and many others. The danger of talking about postmodernism as something that robs us of meaning-as Paglia says humanities scholars are trying to do to us today-is that many of these so-called "postmodern" authors are profoundly moral, presenting some of the difficulties of making meaningful literature in our time...
...have the stomach for all-out scandal. The last scandal I enjoyed without qualification was the one triggered by the revelation that a writer named Clifford Irving was about to publish a book based on extensive interviews with Howard Hughes--a moneybags so maniacally reclusive that he made Thomas Pynchon seem like William Ginsburg. Irving, of course, had dreamed it all up, presumably figuring that a man reclusive enough to make his words particularly valuable would be too reclusive to blow the whistle...
Morrison's power and influence as a writer lie in her ability to appeal to critics and ordinary readers alike. Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, authors of top 1997 books, are inaccessible to most of the world. Literature is inexorably about life, and so the best literature should speak, on different levels, to everyone as Morrison's writing does, over and over. Toni Morrison sends us in search of the meanings of love, belonging, ostracism, violence and beauty through stories of black people and, now, raceless people. Thanks for recognizing her as the "Great American Storyteller." SARAH MILLER New Haven...