Bob Mould interview/performance today on Soundcheck. Plus, a guy who wrote a book about Pet Sounds. Should be archived by 4 or 5 if you can't catch it live. WNYC is podcasting shows now, too, although I think they're only doing certain segments, not whole shows.

Werner Herzog is talking about his new documentary, Grizzly Man, on Fresh Air. Which isn't about music, but it's the one that Richard Thompson scored.

Corwood, here's an article on Gravity's Rainbow. Haven't read it yet so I can't vouch for it, but I figure you're willing to take the chance.

And an actual music-related item: Ron Rosenbaum on the link between Emmylou Harris, heartbreak songs, and black holes in B-flat.

Excellent, Joe! Thanks! I read a reference to Bookforum's article on Pynchon on Maud Newton's website (I think, but also I seem to think that it was in the context of discussing James Wood's criticism, so... I don't know).

Get a chance to listen to "Waltzing with the Dogs" yet, Corwood? I know you're busy, but I can't imagine you not digging it. Corwood Jr.'s (sorry, don't remember his board pseud) first words could be "Stop dropping acid!" Okay, probably not, but I bet you go around singing it after you hear it.

Heh. In keeping with today's Natter:

As most Pynchonians know, Corlies Smith—universally called Cork—was Pynchon's editor from the very start of the author's career. A tall, handsome, casually aristocratic publisher of the old school (tweed jackets, unfiltered Pall Malls), he was idolized by the younger set at Viking for his staggering achievements, his impeccable literary taste, and his dry and sometimes startlingly profane wit ("It does, however, have the best horse-fucking scene I've ever read," he deadpanned memorably about a novel at one sales conference).

Get a chance to listen to "Waltzing with the Dogs" yet, Corwood?

Not yet, but I have a good excuse: my home computer's soundcard is dead, and we can afford a new one yet. OK, that's actually fairly lame, now that I've written it out.

Joe, did we reference this in our literary scatological greatest hits?

Most unforgettably, there is the immortal scene in which Slothrop, hooked up to a sodium Amytal drip, hallucinates dropping his harmonica down the toilet of the Roseland Ballroom, a nightclub where Red, aka Malcolm X, sells gage while Charlie Parker is onstage laying down some very advanced changes on "Cherokee." Down the shitter Slothrop goes, into the murky, fecal depths of white America's racial imagination, in an inward journey that reads like a cutting session with Ralph Ellison, James Joyce, Sigmund Freud, and Leslie Fiedler. Astounding.

I bought Illinois ! I figured for someone who loves novelty value, I needed the banned cover. Plus, all my favorite Sufjan songs were off it anyway. I am listening to it now. I hope all I haven't heard is as good as what I have.

OK, that's actually fairly lame, now that I've written it out.

No, it isn't. I'll stick a copy in the mail. Seems like I had something to send to you or maybe the youngun. Course that's gonna require remembering what it was or plowing through the many piles at home & office.

("It does, however, have the best horse-fucking scene I've ever read," he deadpanned memorably about a novel at one sales conference).

Memo
To: TP
From: Cork
Subject: Horse-fucking

No one's a bigger fan of horse-fucking than I: doing, watching, you name it. But there are limits to what one can expect one's readership to accept. And I speak to credibility, not sensibilities. Albino alligators in Manhattan sewers? Fine. An army commander engaging a prostitute for coprophagy? Brilliant symbolism. But when it comes to horse-fucking, the horse can pitch, the horse can catch, the non-whinnying pitcher can stand on a ladder, use an arm, a baseball bat, a zucchini, his girlfriend's cat that he's always hated (think of it as a tip o' the cap to Rabelais) - doesn't matter, but... and I can't stress this enough, if the horse is fucking, not getting fucked, the catcher had damn well better be another horse or Catherine the Great or maybe a Tijuana sideshow performer. No one is going to believe a bit of Silver on Lone Ranger action. Even WD40 wouldn't help. Love the book, but work on that chapter, my friend.

P-Cow, I think you'll find the whole work worthy. Incidentally listen to what your buddy Lorrie Moore has to say about Pynchon:

Pynchon's mind is the steel trap of American literature: Nothing, large or small, has ever escaped it. Each "novel of ideas"—because Pynchon is arguably our brainiest novelist, this anemic and offputting label gets slapped on his books like an award sticker—is built detail upon detail, painstakingly, by a man with a tireless eye and appetite for the world. The narrative mosaic that emerges is strong and dazzling as a mirror, depthlessly reflective as a mirror, and, not unlike a house of mirrors, each novel manages to ensnare an entire era, its facts and wandering energies enticed and held captive there, though rarely without mercy. Delicious peanuts are tossed in to amuse and feed; for in art, even a mirror is a living creature.

Pynchon has a historian's sense of story (front and back), a musician's sense of line, a philosopher's sense of truth and woe, a hip vaudevillian's wit. His books keep unearthing a hidden America and reinventing the language in which we think and speak of it—or might think and speak of it, or will soon think and speak of it. His novels leap and trespass; they even violate the oft-repeated advice not to begin a story with a character waking up (Gravity's Rainbow; Vineland) and can be found to have applicable political currency when quoted virtually at random: "It is a universal sin among the false-animate or unimaginative to refuse to let well enough alone" (V.). Or, "‘Why fire at Sideling Hill?' Dixon all innocence. ‘Not at the Hill,' chuckles Capt. Shelby, ‘—at what's coming over the Hill'" (Mason & Dixon).

Pynchon's work is fearless, funny, questing, teeming with all manner of originality and surprise.