Thomas Pynchon | Thomas Pynchon

Jan.12.2013 Pynchon & Dylan: A Couple of Sites This Thomas Pynchon-site has linked to and featured my blog of 1/1/13. If you have an interest in Pynchon and don't know if it, check it out. http://masondixon.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page#Featured_Article I am flattered to be included -- but reading what is already...	Jan.01.2013 MASON & DIXON My latest piece has gone up at: http://www.broadstreetreview.com/index.php/main/article/pynchons_mason_dixon_revisited/I thought my idiosyncratic charm suffered in the editing, so I am reproducing the original below. Literary scholars are invited to compare and contrast.And Happy New Year to...
Oct.20.2012 Interesting Times: Signals and Blessings HAT TRICK Once again, ladies and gentleman and ships at sea, you may address me as prize-winning author Thomas Burchfield. (Yes, that does play a sweet melody, doesn’t it?) This is because Dragon’s Ark has won its third award for 2012: runner up (second place) for Best Horror...	Apr.19.2012 Dick Clark, in Black and White I had to turn off Yahoo Safe Search to find this image, I’ll have you know! This morning I went down to our large garage (an extremely rare Bay Area phenomenon) and dug out the March 1977 issue of Playboy magazine. I’d bought that issue, used, for author Jules Siegal’s memoir about his strained...
Jan.03.2012 My 2012 Reading I can happily say that last year I succeeded at the "100 Book Challenge", though not with the margin of error I'd expected. Ended up reading 105 books in 2011, the last one being Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson. In 2012, I'm concentrating on BIG books: fat, weighty tomes...	Apr.21.2011 Gaddafi’s Official Outfits and Other Works of the Imagination In the early years, while I tapped away every morning imagining that my novel would be finished soon, the editor of a local anarcho-syndicalist newspaper for which I sometimes wrote suffered from an interesting delusion. He believed that the writer Thomas Pynchon had been writing letters to his...
Jan.31.2011 The Best of the Best: How Bright They Shine Are there certain writers who intimidate you with the sheer scale and breadth of their talent? Authors who are so far ahead of the rest of the pack that sometimes after reading them it's hard to regard your own work with anything but contempt? For me the names that spring to mind are Jim Shepard...	Aug.25.2009 New Pynchon novel enjoyable so far I'm more than halfway through "Inherent Vice," Thomas Pynchon's new novel, and I'm really liking it. It's funny, and the writing is brilliant. It's essentially a detective novel set in Los Angeles, an homage to Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett but with a strong dose of "The Big...