Pynchon on Simpsons

[perezoso]

James Caan and Thomas Pynchon guest on the official
season premiere, 11/14/04, of The Simpsons, when junior Hugh Hefner Bart opens a Playdude treehouse.

http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/


http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/WinnipegS ... 13737.html

[perezoso]

So who saw it? If you blinked ya missed it: Marge is at the great bakeoff and suddenly "Thomas Pynchon" is asked about his favorite recipes, and in a deep resonant voice, a character with a bag over his head says something like " V-licious, the Gravity's Rainbow Cookbook, and the Frying of Latke 49" --V, Gravity's Rainbow, and the Crying of Lot 49 being novels by TRP. Connotations, connotations. Cookbook--an Anarchist Cookbook perhaps? Frying---hmmmmm--possible psychedelic overtones; Latke is a russian dish--eggs and potatoes or something. Weird but fun. There were other possible Pynchon themes as well--the sex with the octopus complaint voiced against Bart's Playdude Treehouse-- (cephalopods make a few appearances in Gravity's Rainbow..some light late night reading)

“After Homer suddenly develops a knack for cooking, he unwittingly competes against Marge in a bake-off.”

[Zlatko Waterman]

While I don't watch tv, EVER, I appreciate your sharp comments, my old adversary on "Freedom Hall."


Shit, you're a sharp bastard, Perezoso.

But you are Perezoso.

Why don't you just finish the fucking doctorate like I did and terrorize the neighborhood?

That's what you secretly desire, isn't it, Perezoso?

Marvelous cerebrum you're possessed of, by the way.


Had you been my student at Essex, I would have given you the Doctorate.


Just for playing "Body and Soul."


It's Friday and I have a bottle of Chardonnay under my belt.


But we could be pals, you and I. If you could just shed a bit of phillistinism about Modern Art. ( or whatever they call it--- just the same as Coltrane on a melody, my friend).


Oh, God, aren't you the perfect fiend around Ms. Peri---(?)

All those pseudonyms just to prove you're a troll.

Listen to my friend Don Steinberg's album. A mandolin virtuoso:


http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/de ... ce&s=music



A good woman with a good soul, Ms. Peri.



Zlatko


p.s. email me at any time at:




gustonjoy@earthlink.net



--Zw

[perezoso]

Grazias, Padre Zlatko, but getting into a UC PhD is proving to be quite unfeasible, since I have threatened and mocked a few too many of the profs I have had--even ones kind enough to award me an A. I have the grades and decent GREs, but the letters are damn near impossible to obtain, and I don't lick boots very well; nor do I enjoy the current post mod. fad, and I'm not shelling out 50 a pop for the apps either. Additionally, I detest English lit., a fact I realized after finishing my MA (even if at Cal State Barato); I'm better at 1865--1945 American writers but was told by a few adjuncts and full-timers that I have worked with that that is "glutted." I don't think many PhD committees would approve of my dissertation on, say, Ambrose Bierce either: "Detonations: Bakunian Interpretations of Bierces' Civil War Stories." Or maybe Saroyan: "Head on a Pike: Bill Saroyan, California, and Genocide." So I have been taking a few grad. linguistics courses here and there, and they may be mostly useless, but I find it more enjoyable than the belle-lettrist biz. Plus my secondary language skills are more in Spanish than in French--not good if you want to hang with the lit. peeps.

I enjoyed reading your poems, and the drawings with the Verlaine poem. You are a poet and not a bad artiste. I am no poet. I can sling a little prose. Yeah I have been listening to to 'Trane on Miles' Kind of Blue: I think I'm reaching 500 times with KOB, and still enjoy. Yes this is a nice site: Ms. Peri is wonderful. No major flame wars. I won't mention how I am trying to avoid certain ex-Phreedom Hall or LitKicks people; though did I say that Levy Cashout sucks mierda? Yeah I guess I did. Even phuckin-phirsty and ellipsis are here! Sort of like hearin' your favorite David Cassidy songs on the radio. NOW if only the Great Holy Goof himself were to appear!. Hell i'd even leave permanently for that...

I don't smoke pot anymore, and I'm trying, with difficulty, to abstain from alcohol.

hasta

[Doreen Peri]

Missed it. Darn it.

The only thing we watch on tv around here is news. And much of the time, I get saturated with it and it makes me want to cry.

Thanks for the kind words, you two. (Can't talk about anybody behind their backs around here, y'know! Darn public forum... heh)

I would really like to publish some of your essays in the Great Ideas section of the main site, peresozo.

(No, not any of the ones you wrote under your other pseudonyms. I'm trying, with a little difficulty, not to remember those.)

Let me know, ok?

Here's a lousy poem I wrote called "gravity's rainbow"

there is a measure of the amount of energy
in a system that is available for doing work;
we linger. we seek. we lurk. we dwell in murky
facilitations of relations and matter.
entropy increases.
that's the only thing that matters
when spatters of universal energy
degrade to an ultimate state of inert uniformity.

this is the pynchon story,
a communication theory
a numerical measure of the
uncertainty and outcome,
a capable narrator flash forwarding
shifted viewpoints.

frequently,
much of what happens, just happens,
cursory, fluid. much is fantasy but it is often
difficult to distinguish lucid dreaming from
nightmarish quantification. we can relinquish
sections numbered, divide by rows of sequences,
Gravity's Rainbow the goal or the demise
of black humour and fantasy.

there is human alienation in the chaos of modern society
obsessive, paranoid, ridiculous, grotesque.
there is esoteric mathematical language.
we drink it, entropic, full, never thirsty again,
the glass, a closed system.

it is a strange scientific quest to discover the mysterious,
often conspiratorial in a futuristic world of closed societies.

pynchon speaks. we listen.
open to hear a stolen
rendition.

dp - 2-20-2003

[Zlatko Waterman]

Lord Lazy One:

Your personal confession/ academy resume ( no accents on this computer) sounds a good deal like mine.

Sometimes I think it comes down to how much of the bullet the incisors will fit over. Or how much excrement will prove palatable.

I was hurled from several seminars and re-routed after several eight-hour doctoral exams. I wrote one analogy between Whitman and Rimbaud on part of my written finals and got roto-rooted by the department head who chastened me for "lacking a proper sense of historicity"

All in all, I was lucky to emigrate to California and set up at a community college teaching Latinos to read, write and speak English. The recent immigrants were my best students in thirty years of teaching.

I, too, was so-so in the requisite language (German, in my case) chops to pass the exam. But I did it, teaching myself French and taking a college German course first. My Spanish, like yours, is stronger. Loving Borges and all the Southern Bunch and working in the Sacramento Valley fields strengthened my second language.

So I, too, have paid my dues with Benny Profane and The Whole Sick Crew.

You and I are dead on in both liking Pynchon-- "Gravity's Rainbow", "V", "Vineland"" . . .Lot 49" and the wonderful "Mason and Dixon" ( I am a closet lover of Samuel Johnson, too).


Nice to hear from you and nice to inspect the damage you do to your targets after launch.


Your friend in California,


Zlatko