Pynchon Pre-Birthday Bash a Regular Krupp Wingding

Red Hook’s Freebird Books is throwing a party Sunday afternoon in honor of Thomas Pynchon‘s upcoming 71st birthday, but the announcements the store’s co-owner, Peter Miller, has been sending out are already making waves. One writer who received the invitation feting “that lovable recluse and buck-toothed prophet of paranoia” wrote Miller to complain that “it is insulting to characterize Mr. Pynchon by his teeth,” then found fault with the menu, which consists of “foodstuffs famously vomited by Gravity’s Rainbow‘s Tyrone Slothrop: burgers, homefries, chef’s salad with French dressing, Moxie, after-dinner mints, Clark bars, salted peanuts, and ‘the cherry from some Radcliffe girl’s old-fashioned.’”

“There are many wonderful foods in Pynchon’s work, starting with bananas and good coffee. perhaps,” this unnamed writer chastises. “Mason & Dixon… is loaded with some interesting foods…What Slothrop vomits is a (light) comic riff on bad food in our fast-food overprocessed world. Honor Pynchon’s life-embracing love of the right kind of food, if one is having a party for him, I say.”

“I will say, in full disclosure, that I surely do not have the sense of humor Mr. Pynchon does,” the letter winds down, “so perhaps I am too earnest and am making mountains out of what Pynchon would not.” Perhaps. Anyway, if Miller isn’t hauled into jail for postering party fliers around the neighborhood—and he reports that he’s already gotten one warning—the party’s set to begin at 3 p.m.

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