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05:37 | 23-11-2013 | Culturology, History, Literature | No Comments
чудесный анекдот про носки (sic!) из жизни гениального Фридриха Киттлера — со слов Джеффри Уинтроп-Янга:
Pynchon was a special case in the densely populated Kittler pantheon: he was the only living writer whom Kittler accorded the veneration he usually reserved for dead engineers. And Pynchon was to blame for the only time I saw Kittler lose his cool.
To shore up my finances I had started freelancing for the Südwestfunk, the Southwest German Broadcasting Network. Having reviewed the German translation of Slow Learner, I proposed a longer feature on Pynchon and submitted an outline describing his well-known invisibility. My boss turned it down and accused me of amateurish gullibility: all this talk about Pynchon’s inaccessibility, he scoffed, was nonsense. He had been told by colleagues that Pynchon wasn’t withdrawn at all; on the contrary, he was openly living with his girlfriend in a villa in southern France and happy to talk to anybody who dropped by. In fact, he had just attended the Frankfurt Book Fair wearing his “customary yellow socks.”
The socks got to me, and I suspected they would get to Kittler too. I looked him up in his office the next day. He was in an exceptionally bad mood and quickly worked himself into a state of nicotine-fueled indignation. Long before folks in the Freiburg English department ever heard of Pynchon, he had already read and studied him in English and German. He had deciphered much in Gravity’s Rainbow that US scholars had yet to discover. He had planned to organize a conference in, of all places, Peenemünde but had been shot down by the East German authorities because the Russians appeared to be stationing SS-20s where there once had been V-2s. He had done all this, and now some broadcast stooge had access to Pynchon? He was familiar with his socks? Realizing that he had crossed over into possessive petulance, he calmed down and pointed a cigarette at me. Find out whether there’s anything to it.
Of course there wasn’t. At our next meeting my boss mentioned in passing that the whole story down to the socks had been a case of mistaken identity. I left a note in Kittler’s mailbox: Pynchon’s feet unsullied by culture industry. A few weeks later I ran into him outside the German department, surrounded by the usual praetorian throng. His mood had visibly improved. “Na, was für Socken trägt Pynchon heute?” — “Well, what socks is Pynchon wearing today?” — he cried, his face lit up by a beatific canine smile. “It was a nice touch though. Pynchon himself could have come up with it.” Pause for effect. “In love as in literature, footwear has an undeniable reality effect.” Still grinning and trailed by a puzzled entourage, he disappeared into a lecture hall. It was the last time I ever saw him.
это ли не утрата волшебства, о которой так много писал Вальтер Беньямин?