As the world turns on the street below my apartment, I'm lying on the sofa watching the ceiling spin, getting seasick, still drunk from last night, but anyway;
Thomas Pynchon said in his book Gravity's Rainbows,
the object of life is to make sure you die a weird death. To make sure that however it finds you, it finds you under very weird circumstances.
Yes, Thomas, death's weird.
If you're preeminent, like Thomas Pynchon, every bit of dribble that comes out of your month is going to be quoted by some rag or the other.
Gravity's Rainbows sold 3 million copies, which means Pynchon the שלומיאל; so out of the 8.5 Billion people living in our world, only 3 million read it, or 5%.
If you walked Times Square asking the odd person if they've heard of Thomas Pynchon, 9 out of 10 will say no. Pynchon wouldn't stand out in a crowd, and he doesn't want to; he's an uncircumcised recluse who eats fish sticks alone in the basement every night.
I have a Pynchon Voodoo doll on my desk that looks like the Straw man in the Wizard of OZ. I'm waiting for the right time to set it on fire.
He reserves a booth at The Olive Tree in upper Long Island on the 3rd Friday of every month; nobody knows him there, not even the staff; none of them have heard of Inherent Vice.
If you Google Pynchon, you'll find the same pic his agent made public 40 years ago, looking like a 12-year-old kid that's hot and sweaty with acme
Thomas Pynchon writes opaquely; his novels are often punishingly soul-destroying. He enjoys the exalted pleasure of squeezing his reader's testicles.
Bon voyage, Thomas Pynchon, sitting alone in your basement bar drinking Dewars straight, looking for nothing, happy to be alone.
Dylan Thomas was born in Wales in 1918.
He was a Romantic who had no use for the Communist Manifesto.
Thomas is primarily known for his imaginative use of language and vivid imagery.
As a youth he struggled to find his identity; in a letter to a friend saying;
my own obscurity is quite an unfashionable one, based, as it is, on a preconceived symbolism derived. I’m afraid all this sounds wooly and pretentious from the cosmic significance of the human anatomy.
Dylan published his first poem, Shards of Broken Light on Christmas Day, December 1934.
The Almanac of Time Hangs in the Brain:
The seasons numbered by the inward sun,
The winter years, move in the pit of man;
His graph is measured as the page of pain
Shifts to the red-wombed pen.
The calendar of age hangs in the heart,
A lover's thought tears down the dated sheet,
The inch of time's protracted to a foot By youth
and age, the mortal state and thought Aging both
day and night. The word of time lies on the chaptered
bone, The seed of time is sheltered in the loin:
The grains of life must seethe beneath the sun,
The syllables be said and said again*
Thomas's poems were full of questioning and despair.
On November 9th, 1953, Dylan Thomas was standing at the bar of the Whitehorse Tavern in New York, reciting poetry to patrons, downing a shot of rye, after each poem, and finally collapsing after the 18th poem.
With a fan's help, he makes it back to his hotel, taking the elevator to room 257, dying of cardiac arrest in bed sometime between 2 AM and 5; lucky to die the way most people want to, in his sleep.
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