I can’t wait to read the new Ander Monson book: Neck Deep and Other Predicaments: Essays

Someone doesn’t like Against the Day:

Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, “Against the Day,” reads like the sort of imitation of a Thomas Pynchon novel that a dogged but ungainly fan of this author’s might have written on quaaludes.

But she often gets her panties in wad, right? Here’s another take on it. And another. I’ll have to obtain a copy and see for myself, which will take a while, the obtaining and the seeing both.

The 29th issue of Tin House came in the mail the other day, and all I can say is Wow, just wow.  It’s subtitled “The Graphic Issue,” and that’s absolutely what it is. There are excerpts from graphic novels, a graphic essay, and get this, the forward from Gravity’s Rainbow Illustrated.  That’s right, somebody illustrated every page of that book.  I have to admit I haven’t finished Gravity’s Rainbow after a number of years, but I love Pynchon none-the-less; The Crying of Lot 49 was awesome. So, who would do such a thing?  From the “Editor’s Note” of issue 29:

Zak Smith contributed some of his pen-and-ink drawings from his awe-inspiring project, Gravity’s Rainbow Illustrated, in which the Ivy League artist/punk porn star matched all 760 pages of Pynchon’s classic, image-for-page.

Punk porn star! In the forward to Gravity’s Rainbow Illustrated you’ll encounter a pornographer with a muted post horn tattoo, and another pornographer named Benny Profane.  What’s the porn-Pynchon connection? Check it out.

ETA: the illustrations online….thanks davidbdale for the link!