"Pynchon From A to V" by Gerald Howard

A citation in Ross Posnock's excellent critical study Philip Roth's Rude Truth led me to this 2005 Bookforum article by editor Gerald Howard, both a personal memoir of one reader's ingestion of megadoses of Pynchon and, more interestingly, a fascinating glimpse behind the scenes at Pynchon's publishers. There's quite a bit of little-known or previously unknown Pynchoniana here, including lists of rejected titles for V. and Gravity's Rainbow. James Ellroy readers will note that one of Pynchon's early titles for the former was Blood's A Rover, a Housman phrase Big Bad JE has since made his own. This very well-written article is required reading for anyone deeply interested in Pynchon. (The page uses a small font-size, so you may be forced to magnify to readability.)

In unrelated news, new posts on Mindful Pleasures have been nonexistent for the past few months because I'm concentrating on novel-writing (and re-writing...). Sometimes this goes quite well...and sometimes I feel as though my head is trapped inside a metal box lined with mirrors and I'm screaming at my own reflection for four solid hours at a stretch. So much for the pleasures of the writing life. No wonder Hem felt like killing bulls....Anyway, the writing continues and the books (plural) are coming...novels...big stuff....Stay tuned.