Pynchon fans rejoice

Against The Day It's been a long wait since Mason & Dixon, and a few head-bagged appearances on The Simpsons just don't satisfy anyone jonesing for that word-fix only a big fat Pynchon novel provides.

I was introduced to Pynchon in 8th grade by the resident genius in our school, John Hopeck. I wasn't quite ready at that point, but when I read The Crying of Lot 49 a couple of years later, I was hooked. And I mean hooked.

My 5th-printing Bantam copy of Gravity's Rainbow is always within arms reach on a shelf; covered with scribbles, bookmarked, held together with library tape. When I took a Pynchon course in grad school, I had to buy a second copy just to read it pageturningly; the first mutated into a self-referential palimpsest, encrusted and imbricated, a slow evolving process of becoming its inner meaning, like some Pynchon sentence that begins with bright, innocent simplicity and ends up dragging a constellation of laggard concepts kicking and screaming across your corpus callosum. Heh heh.

Can't wait to see what the sensei has been up to...