I love Thomas Pynchon. I’ve read only three of his books to completion[1] and one of those (Gravity’s Rainbow) left me so bewildered that I cannot reliably think about anything more than vague plot points.

By far my favourite Pynchon[2] is The Crying of Lot 49. It’s a punchy post-future brainfreeze of a novella more or less about an ancient feud between two postal delivery services.

The Crying of Lot 49

Probably the most interesting idea in the book[3] is that of the W.A.S.T.E mail system – about which I’ve written before. His ideas about surveillance and underground communication networks that manifest in things like the W.A.S.T.E P2P network are only now becoming a reality.

What I like most about Thomas Pynchon is the way that his work keeps on inspiring people to do unique, obscure and subversive things. A great example is the San Jose Semaphore challenge which was recently cracked. The Semaphore is a work by artist Ben Rubin which was commissioned by Adobe Systems[4] and installed on one of their office buildings.

The San Jose Semaphore

The installation is made up of four lights that continuously(every 7.2 seconds) change to one of four possible positions. The positions transmit a message – a semaphore. A public challenge was issued in 2006 to decode the message transmitted by the semaphore. A few weeks ago two guys cracked it. The process of cracking the code is astoundingly complex, involving codes within codes within codes.

So what did the semaphore transmit? The complete text of The Crying of Lot 49, of course.

The greatest measure of any writer/speaker/teacher/scam-artist is when their ideas continue to confuse and challenge people – when their ideas remain dangerous. Not only are Thomas Pynchon’s ideas still dangerous, they are still futurist; we are still waiting for their arrival in our world.

[1] Having also attempted and dropped Mason & Dixon
[2] Which also happens to be his shortest
[3] And there are numerous; the first mention of a full-time DJ, the first mention of all-electronic music
[4] Makers of Acrobat etc. and purchasers of Macromedia (and its Flash brand)