And the Winner of this Years Nobel...Not American?

If the spokesman of the Nobel Prize committee is truly a spokesman, then it doesn't sound like America will be getting any Nobel Prizes in the near future :( Read the article here.

Honestly I'd like to see David Foster Wallace get the prize, but I doubt that would ever happen...he died before anyone could see his true potential, though I do believe he has contributed more to the field of writing then almost any modern writer.

Seriously though, with people like DeLillo and Pynchon with no medals around their necks, how can they honestly not think about America? Isn't writing supposed to be about how people respond to their environment? 

Heck with Updike and Oates...both great writers, but they have nothing on Pynchon and DeLillo.

Weekend Funnies

Okay, so this is really more creepy than funny, but in the video below, some guy basically explains (in way too much detail) that the man in the video is Thomas Pynchon and then spends two minutes explaining what we can take away from it.

Some of you might recall that CNN did a story on Pynchon and filmed him walking down a crowded New York street, but did not say who he was in that crowded street. This is the video.

I don't know if this actually is Pynchon; even if I did know what he looked like, it would be hard to say that it's him because the picture is just way too blurry.

Even funnier than the video is the comments to the video. Enjoy...

The Thomas Pynchon Wiki

Apparently more than one person out there thinks Thomas Pynchon is one of the most complex people around. Need proof? Have you been to the Thomas Pynchon wiki project? Every major work (except for Slow Learner) is there. If you never read him, and want to see just how complex he is, then check out this site, and you'll learn very quickly why his books can be like puzzles. I recommend starting with the one for Against the Day. I'm surprised someone hasn't given this kind of treatment to Joyce.

Apparently the whole thing started the same day the book launched, because it was just way to hard for readers to keep track of everything. Here's the annotations for just one page of the 800+ page Pynchon epic:

Page 683
Franz JosefFranz Josef (1830-1916), Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary and Bohemia from 1848 to 1916. His 68-year reign is the third-longest in the recorded history of Europe.
the BelvedereThe Belvedere Palace, Vienna, comprises two magnificent baroque mansions facing each other across a sloping formal garden. Prince Eugene of Savoy, whose campaigns against the Turks enabled the Habsburg Emprie to reclaim Hungary, purchased some land beyond Vienna's city walls in 1693, upon which he ordered a park with elaborate water features and fountains to be built. In 1714 the Prince had the lower Belvedere built and in 1721 the upper one. The Palace now is open to public tours. See Belvedere Pictures.

Prince Eugene of SavoyPrince Eugene of Savoy (1663-1736) was the greatest general to serve the Habsburgs.

BallhausplatzBallhausplatz is a square in central Vienna containing the building that over 200 years has been the official residence of the State Chancellor. As a result, Ballhausplatz is often used as shorthand for the Austrian Chancellery
the Anglo-Russian EntenteCf page 618:the Anglo-Russian Entente.
WilhelmstrasseCf page 496:Wilhelmstrasse.
gemütlicher alter JungeGerman: good old boy.

a man who is standing where he should not be.This ominous sentence could be applied to the likes of GWB and those shady charcters who allegedly stood on the grassy knoll (among others).
some symmetry was being brokenSpontaneous symmetry breaking in physics takes place when a system that is symmetric with respect to some symmetry group goes into a vacuum state that is not symmetric. At this point the system no longer appears to behave in a symmetric manner. A common example to help explain this phenomenon is a ball sitting on top of a hill. This ball is in a completely symmetric state. However, it is not a stable one: the ball can easily roll down the hill. At some point, the ball will spontaneously roll down the hill in one direction or another. The symmetry has been broken because the direction the ball rolled down in has now been singled out from other directions [2].

Here, the meaning appears to be that the equilibrium of the twinned professors is broken; Werfner is in London, where he "should not be" (Renfrew's territory); a historical stasis has been broken; this must mean something. Perhaps a foreshadowing of the collapse of the Great Power "symmetry" of 1814 to 1914.

Not spontaneous symmetry broken, just plain broken symmetry. Cf page 537:broken symmetries.

Thomas Pynchon

Not long ago I spent nearly all my day, off and on, trying to track down a copy of an international newspaper that printed, allegedly, a current photograph of Thomas Pynchon (by current I mean within the last 10 years). Why? I really don't know. I was bored at work, and honestly (i.e. shamefully), I believe I have developed a huge man crush on Pynchon that revivals only that of David Foster Wallace.

I went through dozens (probably more like hundreds) of websites, databases, and blogs searching for Pynchon's mysterious face. I found his infamous clips from The Simpsons, those shots of him in his youth, a fuzzy picture of the alleged shot that CNN got of him walking down a busy New York City street, and, my favorite, photos that used computer technology (complete with aging filters) to show what Pynchon would look like based on his only confirmed photos (they were scary to say the least).

I confess I enjoyed my search; who wouldn't? They were full of wild theories about his Navy days and what he did to want such deep cover, how he had plastic surgery and was living down in TJ, that he was really J.D. Salinger, and that he had been dead for years and it was really just a group of writers using his name as a pen.

In the end, I still had not seen the alleged photo of him. In the end, I'm not sure I'd want to. The mystery of him is what I admire so greatly. I have The Crying of Lot 49...that's enough to keep me happy...at least for now.