BRIAN WILSON AND THOMAS PYNCHON: UP IN SMOKE

Fair warning: It's going to be painfully obvious to the readers of this blog in the next few months before the publication of the new Pynchon novel that I'm a big fat unapologetic fanboy of his stuff. He's one of those grandiose figures like Orson Welles, Groucho Marx and Charles Mingus that loom large in my artistic pantheon.

According to the new bio of Brian Wilson, Catch A Wave: The Rise, Fall and Redemption of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson, Jules Siegel and his then friend Thomas Pynchon paid a visit to Brian in Beverly Hills:

When Siegel brought his friend Thomas Pynchon up to the house one night, the famous hipster novelist sat in stunned, unhappy silence while the nervous, stoned pop star — who had dragged him into his then-new Arabian tent to get high — kept kicking over the oil lamp he was trying to light. "Brian was kind of afraid of Pynchon, because he'd heard he was an Eastern intellectual establishment genius," Siegel recalls. "And Pynchon wasn't very articulate. He was gonna sit there and let you talk while he listened. So neither of them really said a word all night long. It was one of the strangest scenes I'd ever seen in my life." (p.103-104).

(via the P-list)