(photo from The Bizargrass News Network)
Musician and performance artist Laurie Anderson has been telling a story lately in interviews and during her stage show. She wanted to make an opera out of the novel Gravity’s Rainbow, written by the notoriously reclusive author Thomas Pynchon:
I wrote him a letter proposing doing an opera based on “Gravity’s Rainbow”. I got a beautiful letter from him saying he’d be delighted, but with one stipulation: that it be scored for solo banjo. Some people have a great way of saying “no way”. At some point I’d like to try again to see if he’s expanded the instrumentation.
Now, I try to use The Celestial Monochord to talk about things I like, in hopes of understanding them better and helping them grow. And I certainly don’t know what Thomas Pynchon may have been thinking — or certainly there’s no good evidence that I know better what he was thinking than Laurie Anderson does. Nor, for that matter, am I certain just how facetious Ms. Anderson may have been in recounting the story …
but … but …
IS SHE OUT OF HER MIND? It seems obvious — at least given the little information I have, which is Anderson’s own multiple descriptions of the incident — that had she accepted the challenge, we would have an opera of Gravity’s Rainbow, written for banjo. How perfect is that?
It’s well to remember that Pynchon is a considered one of the most innovative living artists, but he doesn’t hang with the literary or high-art crowd … for some reason. Perhaps he finds them too closed-minded, too predictable. Some reports have him as some kind of aerospace engineer working for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, I think it was.
My theory is he was not politely saying “No.” He was saying, “Yes, but only if you make an effort to broaden your imagination. You’ve been doing the same schtick since the 1970’s. Why not try something else?” The fact that Anderson interpreted Pynchon’s proposal as a solid “No” suggests (to me, anyway) that Pynchon knew exactly who he was dealing with and how she would react. I can think of at least a half-dozen brilliant, innovative, and versatile banjoists who should follow up on this signal from the mysterious Mr. Pynchon. I wonder if playwright and banjoist Sean Dixon of BanjoBanjar knows about this …
And Anderson’s a fiddler! She should know better.