Really/not really, Tom

From Dorothy Gambrell's Cat and Girl, via the dead blog Pynchonoid.

Finally got a copy of the new Thomas Pynchon novel, Bleeding Edge, purportedly about the 9/11 attacks (I won't be reading any reviews all the way through at least until I'm done with the book), and opened it up to the first page to find to my amazed delight that it starts almost exactly where I would have been on that fictional day, on the day that comes every [jump]
spring when the Callery pear trees burst into bloom all over the Upper West Side, schlepping a couple of kids to school. True, Pynchon's protagonist is a woman and her kids are going to a dodgy-sounding private school instead of a pretty-good public one, but she could easily be one of my playground buddies in 2000 or 2001, before the New Gilded Age had begun pushing us apart. (She's also the 2001 cheerful-mom equivalent of a 1930s private eye, but that's another matter.) Once in my youth I dreamed that Anthony Burgess, of all people, had written a novel literally for me, somehow getting it to me printed and bound as a surprise—woke up before starting to read so that there isn't much to remember—and I liked Burgess a lot, but Pynchon to me is not just a bigfat great writer but an imaginary friend; so this is actually less a dream come true than a truth becoming unexpectedly dreamlike.

Anyhow, it is time for me to get around to saying something about something (see something? say something!) that has been disturbing me for quite a while now, in which Pynchon is, perhaps unwittingly, involved: I'm convinced that he is, or was, my favorite blogger, Really Tom Friedman (the blog has ceased, but its archive is at the link), who showed up pretty regularly twice a week from March 2011 to July 2013, whenever a Friedman column appeared in the Times, to write a pitch-perfect and hilarious parody of it.

Thus if the Times were to print a column by Friedman beginning like this—

it is not an exaggeration to suggest that the authoritarian lid that has smothered freedom in the Arab world for centuries may be coming off all 350 million Arab peoples at once. Personally, I think that is exactly what is going to happen over time. Warm up the bus for all the Arab autocrats — and for you, too, Ahmadinejad.

—then Really Tom would go,

I’m clearly drowning in this Arab unrest story. Having been soundly rogered by Iraq, I calmly warned of the adventurous quality of the Egyptian unrest. When action shifted to Libya, I shifted too, though it was different for me in the sense that, desperately trying to get Pinch Sulzberger to bump me up to business, I had kidnapped myself via Eritrean pirates and I was shifting, indeed, shuffling in my self-made manacles.

And that’s what the Falafel Revolutions are all about. There are 350 million Arab peoples. That’s right, people, “peoples.” I know that looks funny, and the boys in the copy room are doing shots right now. They have a drinking game about my column’s pleoneologisms. Which is almost Greek for “new, yet unnecessary, words.”

The conceit was that the Real Tom wrote these wild but wholly Friedmanian effusions under the influence of a lengthy series of rare, implausible drugs—a "jimson weed chaw", a

hallucinogenic algae that only grows on the underside of an ice shelf and which the aborigines call “Paisley Leaf Christ,”

a copepod that boils up like quinoa and comes down like mescaline 

an orange and purple daisy with the usual special properties

a toad in Lake Van whose dried flesh is rich with DMT and alkaloids 

hallucinogenic lichen... and surprisingly equally potent rosemary which are perfect complements in a poultice

and so on. And then it was the job of the "boys in the copy room" at 42nd Street to wrangle them into the appearance of sanity; but if you clicked back and forth between Tom in the Times and Really Tom on the blog, you saw as no critical essay could show you how deeply wacky the actual Tom (no doubt reasonably sober and probably at home in Bethesda, but a psychopath all the same) was.

But it wasn't just the riotous imagination and the hallucinogens that made me think of Pynchon. Really Tom was more private than any blogger I knew of, in the sense that even his anonymity was private. He broke character less often than Stephen Colbert does, and he haughtily discouraged fans. I never succeeded in making a comment on the site, and the only interactive thing that worked was a poll page where you could vote for Friedman as the presidential candidate of an unnamed party (obviously Friedman would not associate himself with a party). You couldn't vote against him. I tried enticing him out a few times from my own blog (as longtime readers may recall), with a troll persona: "C'mon, Tom, how come you haven't blogrolled me yet?" But he never bit.

From Alex De Campi,  "Raindrops Keep Falling on the Dead" (video, 2010), via Frederator.

The most Pynchonian thing of all, though, was the sheer quality of the parody, spot-on and truly funny almost all the time, and the discipline with which he kept cranking it out, as if it were some kind of Oulipian task the writer had set himself. Pynchon, who had written an enormous and enchanting novel (Mason & Dixon, my own favorite) entirely in a weird simulacrum of the English of the 18th century.

Tom:

Andrew Ng is an associate professor of computer science at Stanford, and he has a rather charming way of explaining how the new interactive online education company that he cofounded, Coursera, hopes to revolutionize higher education by allowing students from all over the world to not only hear his lectures, but to do homework assignments, be graded, receive a certificate for completing the course and use that to get a better job or gain admission to a better school.

Really Tom:

my friend, Ngoma !Qdong, a linguistics professor at Penn, who’s traveled with me to Honduras for two reasons: first, because Honduras is the Las Vegas of medicinal herbs, and second, because she has a pitch for a new e-learning platform. This is necessary because in the next century, people who go without college will be left outside the flatnessized workforce, and basically left behind, rapture-style, to live in concrete hovels and tin roof shacks and give birth at 13. This is painful because Americans just don’t like going to school; we are a simple people. 

The crisis in American education is of course an opportunity for American publishing companies, whose tentacles in textbooks, academic journals, entrance exams, tutoring and education content management systems are fattened yearly with the flop-sweat of overachieving high school sophomores. 

Of coure they're all still there, links to the Times intact; you can read them yourself.

Eventually he signed up for the Twitter, and over the next year or so exchanged a few messages with maybe four fans. I'm especially pleased that I sent him a Tweet of encouragement one day when a particularly boring Friedman column left him saying he had written a bad post himself. And then he finally broke character, like Prospero breaking his staff, and said farewell, and that was it.

And just a little after that Bleeding Edge appeared, and I started thinking about the theory again. What if the column was exactly what I just said it was, an Oulipian exercise, just keeping in shape while the master went through the drudgery of making a final draft of his novel and getting it ready for publication?

There's one more really peculiar piece of evidence, which is what made me want to write this up: an unsigned column in the New York Observer,  May 24 2004, inviting readers to

Write your own Thomas Friedman column!

1. Choose your title to intrigue the reader through its internal conflict:

a. War and Peas

b. Osama, Boulevardier

c. Big Problems, Little Women

2. Include a dateline from a remote location, preferably dangerous, unmistakably Muslim:

a. Mecca, Saudi Arabia

b. Islamabad, Pakistan

c. Mohammedville, Trinidad

and so forth; all very clever, all precisely in line with what Really Tom Friedman would be doing in 2011-13. What's really interesting about it—what got Dr. Google interested, at any rate—is the examples of Friedmanian name-dropping:

a. The Jacuzzi was nearly full when Ayman al-Zawahiri, former surgeon and now Al Qaeda’s head of operations, slid in.

b. It was Thomas Pynchon on the phone. “Tommy,” he said, probably aware we share that name ….

c. Despite the bumpy flight, I felt comfortable in the hands of a pilot as experienced as Amelia Earhart.

Gnomesane? Either Pynchon read this column and was struck with the idea at the time, coming back to it when he had a free four or five hours a week seven years later; or, even more likely, he wrote that Observer column himself!

By David Rees, via Rolocroz, 2005.