PYNCHON AND I ...meeting our match in cyberspace Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr.(8 May 1937) was born the very week, the very month, that the North American Baha'is were putting into place their first organized and systematic teaching Plan-1937-1944-for the extension & consolidation of the Baha'i community in the western hemisphere.Pynchon is an American novelist, a MacArthur Fellow, a polymath, a workaholic, some say a genius. He is noted for his dense and complex novels.

1. PYNCHON AND I
...meeting our match in cyberspace
Part 1:
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr.(8 May 1937) was born the very week,
the very month, that the North American Baha'is were putting into
place their first organized and systematic teaching Plan: 1937 to 1944
for the extension and consolidation of the Baha'i community in the
western hemisphere. Pynchon is an American novelist, a MacArthur
Fellow, a polymath, a workaholic, some say a genius. He is noted for
his dense and complex novels.
Both his fiction and nonfiction writing encompass a vast array of
subject matter, styles and themes, including--but not limited to---the
fields of history, science, and mathematics. For his most praised
novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon won the 1974 U.S. National
Book Award for Fiction.1 Some see him as the finest postmodern
writer of our time.
Pynchon is also known for being very private; very few photographs
of him have ever been published, and rumours about his location
and identity have circulated since the 1960s, although in the last
several years he has become more of a public figure. Pynchon's most
recent novel, his eighth, is Bleeding Edge. It was published less than
one year ago, on 17 September, 2013. In that novel Pynchon may
have encountered a subject that resists even his ample literary
capacities.2
Part 2:
After graduating from high school in 1953 at the age of 16, Pynchon
studied engineering physics at Cornell University. In 1953 I had just
begun my 9 year baseball, hockey and football career spanning, as it
did, my late childhood and adolescent life in a small town in
Ontario's Golden Horseshoe. I was in grade 4 in 1953, and in love

2. with a girl who lived several houses away who knew nothing of my
love. My mother had just joined the Baha'i Faith which claimed to be
the newest, the latest, of the Abrahamic religions. This Faith had been
in Canada for a little more than 50 years at the time, and it had a
membership of several hundred in what was a very conservative
country next to what is and was, arguably, the most dynamic country
in the world, the USA.
Pynchon's first published story, "The Small Rain", appeared in
the Cornell Writer in May 1959, and it narrated the actual experience
of one of Pynchon's friends who had served in the Army. Pynchon
received his BA in the following month, in June 1959. Four months
later, in the second week of October, I joined the Baha'i Faith, and
watched the first episode of The Twilight Zone, an
American television anthology series created by Rod Serling.
In September 1962, in the opening weeks of my traveling for the
Canadian Baha'i community, a journey which was to last for the rest
of my life---in Canada for a decade and then in Australia, Thomas
Pynchon was employed as a technical writer at Boeing in Seattle,
where he compiled safety articles for the Bomarc Service News, a
support newsletter for the BOMARC surface-to-air missile deployed
by the U.S. Air Force.
Part 3:
Pynchon's most celebrated novel is his third, Gravity's Rainbow,
published in 1973 just as I was about to begin working at what is now
the University of Tasmania as a senior tutor in education studies. I
knew nothing of Thomas Pynchon, and I would not learn of him and
his writing for another 40 years.
That novel's artistic value is often compared to that of James
Joyce's Ulysses. Some scholars have hailed it as the greatest
American post-WW2 novel, and it has similarly been described as
"literally an anthology of postmodernist themes and devices".

3. Gravity's Rainbow received the 1974 National Book Award . That
same year, the Pulitzer Prize fiction panel unanimously
recommended Gravity's Rainbow for the award, but the Pulitzer
board vetoed the jury's recommendation, describing the novel as
"unreadable", "turgid", "overwritten", and in parts "obscene".
In 1975, Pynchon declined the William Dean Howells Medal of the
American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1975 I was working in
Melbourne Australia and teaching behavioral studies to library
technician trainees among other vocationally oriented students, was
the secretary of the Baha'i group of Kew, a suburb of Melbourne, and
was about to enter my second marriage. I was 31.
This now famous writer is frequently cited by Americans as a
contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Renowned American
literary critic Harold Bloom named him as one of the four major
American novelists of his time, along with Don DeLillo, Philip Roth,
and Cormac McCarthy. I have never been a reader of modern novels,
novels written during my adult life, and so it is not surprising that
Pynchon was never on my radar. But it is high time that he has
arrived on my screen. Pynchon's novels have led critics to classify his
work as postmodernism, high modernism and hysterical realism.
Pynchon does not like to talk with reporters, and refuses the spectacle
of celebrity and public appearances although, as I say above, he has
recently assumed a more public profile in his New York life.
Part 4:
I first came across this novelist in 2014 just as I entered the first
weeks, the first year, of my 70s. I had been retired from a 50 year
student and employment life, 1949 to 1999, for 15 years and had
reinvented myself as a writer and author, poet and publisher, online
blogger and journalist. I have taken an interest during the years of my
retirement, 1999 to 2014, in authors who become reclusive: Patrick
White, Emily Dickinson, J. D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon. It is said

4. that while "people like Salinger hide, people like Pynchon "run." But
they all create solitary characters and personae; then they disappear
into their fictions. This asocial predisposition came to have a certain
fascination to me since I had become more reclusive myself
especially as I entered my 70s in 2014. I have been both running and
and hiding in recent years, partly if not mostly, because of the
medications I take for bipolar I disorder.
Pynchon is not exactly a recluse, though, and neither am I. In select
company, he’s intensely social and charismatic. I, too, claim a degree
of sociability, if not charisma. In spite of his famously shaming Bugs
Bunny teeth, he was rarely without a girlfriend for the 30 years he
spent wandering and couch-surfing before getting married in 1990 at
the age of 53.1 -Ron Price with thanks to 1Wikipedia, 29/8/'14, and
2Alexander Nazaryan, Thomas Pynchon Meets His Match: The
Internet, Books, 9/11/'13.
All of his books are in some way
autobiographical as all of mine.
But, after a brief examination of
his life and a review of some of
his writing, I must say that he &
I are in different leagues, on very
different trajectories & universes,
cosmologies and raisons d'etre....
Our life-spans are not that much
different, although he belongs to

5. that silent generation & me, well,
I'm a war-baby or one of the first
baby-boomers depending on just
how one defines the generational
markers....We have, indeed, both
met our match, cyberspace, as we
head through our 70s and into our
old-age, the years after 80.....if we
last that long, eh Thomas.....eh??1
We both came of age during the
countercultural Sixties, although
you are suspicious of seriousness
and I have imbibed it with relish,
and we both center our lives on
a sweaty quest for the unspoken,
the unattainable. Thomas, don't
you think it's a Farsi matter of...
kam kam, ruz beh ruz....little by
little and day by day as they say
and as I've heard it said so many
times in my last 60+ years?????2

6. 1 "Not only is the internet a vast, endlessly connective, suggestive,
allusive medium, and ever-expanding, but it is gleefully self-referential,
loving nothing so much as to talk about itself, on its own
terms and turf. It is impossible to explain outside its own
experience." See Alexander Nazaryan, "Thomas Pynchon Meets
His Match: The Internet," Books, 9/11/'13.
2 The Baha'i community I have moved in all these years has
many Persians and this phrase is a popular one.
Ron Price
28/8/'14.