You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read?

Hi, this is Michael Silverblad, and this is Bookworm.

I thought that today, since we are in a period of great unusualness in the book world,

a period during which Thomas Pinchon finds himself on the bestseller list after 17 years of virtual silence,

I thought it was important for Bookworm to salute him.

That writing created the consciousness of a generation,

say the post-Keezy Ginsburg generation,

is the Pinchon generation.

And I'm thinking of the many cliches that have surrounded Pinchons' work from the very beginning,

critical adjectives that almost always get used, I decided I would make a list of what people say about Thomas Pinchon.

They call him encyclopedic, crazed, obsessed, Byzantine itself a pinch on word, slapstick. And I was thinking, well, what do I do with this Pinchon show? How do I go ahead? And I thought of calling a friend of mine who's a friend for 20 years, who's been editing for the last 10 years a journal called Pinchon Notes. He's one of the prime Pinchon watchers in America, and I thought I'd have him on John Kraft, co-editor of Pinch-on notes. Are you there, John?

Yes, hello, Michael.

Hi, have I forgotten any of the adjectives?

One of the obvious ones that comes to mind is paranoid.

It's self a pinch-on word.

It's self a pinch-on word, the pinch-on word, probably.

Oh, you could use tamer-sounding ones like you said encyclopedic, erudite, historical, experimental. Has black humor gone by-by?

I think so, though you sometimes still see it.

I was wondering, what we'd call this generation, it's not the Pynchon generation anymore to a lot of readers and writers, is it?

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