Iskender Savasir wrote:

>Tidbit on Pynchon- He is a Rossini fan, so far as I know. The more
>or less famous quote form the Gravity's Rainbow comparing Beethoven
>9th with Rossini had greeted my local intranet users for months.

Here is another Pynchon tidbit.  I was a graduate student in physics at
Cornell in the late fifties and lived with three other physics students
on the ground floor of a big house.  The upper floors were occupied by
other students, including Pynchon, still an undergraduate, I believe.
One of my apartment mates, J.J. Sakurai, was a modern music enthusiast,
and one day was playing an LP of Webern orchestral music as I recall.
We rarely saw Pynchon, but on this occasion he came down to inquire
about the music, asking if it was by Charles Mingus.

This was well before Pynchon was a well known author - perhaps a decade
before the publication of "The Crying of Lot 69" which I believe was his
first novel.

Incidentally physicists on this list may recognize Sakurai as the author
of the best modern quantum mechanics text available.  He was a brilliant
theorist doing cutting edge research even as a graduate student. He died
way too early, and the text was assembled out of notes he left behind.

Bernard Chasan

             ***********************************************
The CLASSICAL mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R)
list management software together with L-Soft's HDMail High Deliverability
Mailer for reliable, lightning fast mail delivery.  For more information,
go to:  http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html