Anthony Lee Collins

There is one American writer, however, whose fiction is the literary equivalent of a vast box set: a blissful, bizarro anthology of rock, jazz, pop, blues, country, show tunes, novelty numbers, you name it. Thomas Pynchon’s novels are like a giant jukebox just waiting to happen. Some of the songs are real, some are imaginary. All of them Pynchon makes his own. No other American writer has put so much music into his fiction.

Hmmm. That's from this article. Is that why I enjoy Pynchon so much? Well, no, I think there's more to it.

But it is a factor, I'm sure of that.

I've started to post on the Inherent Vice wiki. So, after years of very limited Wikipedia participation (I made edits to one article once), mostly because Wiki Markup Language annoys me because it seems arbitrarily different from HTML, I'm finally having to learn how these things work.

Oh, and noted jazz enthusiast "Uncle Mike" Sheldon is featured in this week's installment of the story "Carly."

Later: Of course, my specific enthusiasm for Inherent Vice may just be as simple as the fact that a writer I really like suddenly decided to write a mystery, and (of course) I'm now writing mysteries. But I think it's more than that, too.

(I am tempted to say that Thomas Pynchon is my "favorite writer," but I don't feel that I've read enough to have a favorite writer. When I say that Robert Altman is my favorite director, as I do here, I have at least seen a lot of movies. By the way, it did surprise me, in searching for the post I linked to above, how many times I have mentioned Altman in this blog – though I don't know why I should be surprised.)

Also, as in this entry, the New York Times blog After Deadline just mentioned another of my favorite rules:

[Caption] Mike L. has remained a father to a daughter that wasn’t really "his."

Use "who" for people, not "that."

Yup.