Youthful indiscretions

Now that I’m home and nearly done with the semester, I’ve got time for something I haven’t done since my last visit home: reading for pleasure. Having been put in the mood for him by an interesting conspiracy theory I heard on the radio as I drove up from Ann Arbor, I opened up Thomas Pynchon’s volume of short stories recently and had to share this.

From “Entropy,” Pynchon’s character considers post-war iconography:

“…And the tango. Any tango, but more than any perhaps the sad sick dance in Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat. He thought back: what had tango music been for them after the war, what meanings had he missed in all the stately coupled automatons in the cafés-dansants, or in the metronomes which had ticked behind the eyes of his own partners? Not even the clean constant winds of Switzerland could cure the grippe espagnole: Stravinsky had had it; they all had had it. …”

And, from the author’s introduction:

“In the character of Callisto, I was trying for a sort of world-weary Middle European effect, and had put in the phrase grippe espagnole, which I had seen on some liner notes to a recording of Stravinsky’s L’Histoire Du Soldat. I must have thought this was some kind of post-World War I spiritual malaise or something. Come to find out it means what it says, Spanish influenza, and the reference I lifted was really to the worldwide flu epidemic that followed the war.”

The lesson? Even Thomas Pynhon was a pretentious faker once. Actually, editorially, I might add that he probably still is, but (crucially!) at some later point he mastered the art of letting someone else pick up after him. A great — and forthright! — author.