Happy birthday, Thomas Pynchon! 82, today!
Here is Against the Day‘s Jesse’s school essay on “What It Means to Be an American,” in its entirety:
“It means do what they tell you and take what they give you and don’t go on strike or their soldiers will shoot you down.”
And here’s a quote from Thomas Pynchon’s introduction to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four:
“Those who don’t learn from history used to have to relive it, but only until those in power could find a way to convince everybody, including themselves, that history never happened, or happened in a way best serving their own purposes—or best of all that it doesn’t matter anyway, except as some dumbed-down TV documentary cobbled together for an hour’s entertainment.”
Finally, here are some quotes from across Pynchon’s oeuvre:
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.”
“Our history is an aggregate of last moments.”
“The man’s thirst for guilt was insatiable as the desert’s for water.”
“A million bureaucrats are diligently plotting death and some of them even know it.”
“Who claims Truth, Truth abandons.”
“‘Explosion without an objective […] is politics in its purest form.'”
“Politics is a kind of engineering isn’t it. With people as your raw material.”
John Madera's fiction may be found in Conjunctions, Opium Magazine, The &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing, and many other journals. His criticism may be found in American Book Review, Bookforum, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Rain Taxi: Review of Books, The Believer, The Brooklyn Rail, and many other venues. Recipient of an M.F.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University, John Madera lives in New York City, where he runs Rhizomatic and manages and edits Big Other.
