I'm suppressing the impulse to leave your comment as it is, and change the post to be about people who have sex with animals.
Heh, that would be a good one. Mean, but funny.
Hey, economists can win a Macarthur, though it's 'unpromising' according to this funny Slate analysis from a few years ago. They concluded that your odds were best as a humanities professor at Harvard or Berkeley. Switch to decifering Mayan glyphs and you're a shoe-in, Brad.
Thanks for the poetry tip, I'll have to check out Clover.
Oh, and as far as Pynchon, don't you think the award in 1988 - after 15 years of silence following gravity's rainbow - might have been a mash note: "we love you, please publish again"?
Or maybe it was more along the lines of, "we think if you had the money to go to Betty Ford and dry out then you'd stop writing letters to the Anderson Valley Advertiser and actually finish that novel we hear you're working on".
Not for nothing, but I tend to think that great writers are going to write great things regardless of whether or not they get a fat foundation grant. I don't think that giving a ton of money to unknown writers makes them more likely to turn out something incredible; it pretty much just makes them more likely to get a plasma TV in their bathroom.
Also, Jackson Pynchon is a cool-ass name.
From the article:
[Richard Powers'] 1995 novel "Galatea 2.2" was made into a movie, "Gattaca," starring Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman.
Wha? I've never seen "Gattaca," but the plot summary sounds nothing like Galatea 2.2.
I was surprised to read that too, PJK. We should ask KF, who's writing an article on Powers.
Highly-placed sources in the Powers camp have revealed that Gattaca doesn't have a damned thing to do with Galatea 2.2. Comforting to know, no?