Pynchon in Public 2015

I’ve been taking part in Pynchon in Public for the past 3 years. Here’s what the Pynchon in Public website says about the Thomas Pynchon related event:

Hereby instigating an annual May 8th culture jamming festival to be herein evidenced by photographic, textual, cartographic and video documentation. To prove it really happened, that our world was not projected.

Post horns, W.A.S.T.E. insignia, the novels of Thomas Pynchon read unashamedly on trains, while still sub rosa. 

It is simple, it is inevitable, it has begun.

Below are my past contributions, most recent first.

2014 – I made three coloured tags with bows and put them on my front door, a car with my surname on it and a postbox:

2013 – I made a muted posthorn out of a map and put this on my study window so the traffic could see it. 'Honk if you like Pynchon' it says:

2012 – I made this tag for my hand luggage and attached it to my handbag and placed my bag on the table next to The Crying of Lot 49 on my train journey to Norfolk:

Here are the types of things that the Pynchon in Public website recommend you can do on May 8th:

• Reading books, in public, by or about Thomas Pynchon.
• Reading work of his ‘heirs’, such as David Foster Wallace, Jennifer Egan, David Mitchell, Rachel Kushner, Neal Stephenson and Dave Eggers.
• Reading work of authors who have cited Pynchon as an influence. These include: Don DeLillo, Ian Rankin, William Gibson, Alan Moore, Bruce Sterling and David Cronenberg.
• Organising a local version of the W.A.S.T.E. postal network, as described in ‘The Crying of Lot 49′. See www.plot49.com and Silent Tristero’s Alternate Mail Project for some UK local examples.
• Organise a ‘Philately Gone Wild’ club night. Patrons could come dressed as their favourite Pynchon character, covered in mute post horn symbols in body paint or Weimar era cabaret stars.
• Launching model V-2 rockets in an appropriate safe open area.
• Adopt a Pynchon character’s name for the day.

I’m not sure what to do this year, but am thinking of adding temporary collars/tags to the local urban animals that I know (with the guardian’s permission, obviously).