7/27/2023 0 Comments Bleeding edge by thomas pynchon![]() ![]() I made calls to dead phone lines, and replies to my Quail queries arrived days later, and told me alternately "blocked/failed" or "this recipient does not exist." I argued with a reverend about witchcraft and mercantilism, and overnight ordered an episode of The Simpsons. In the case of checking this Bleeding Edge review, the challenge was heightened by seeking out facts about a man so private rumors around him multiplied and verifiable facts became scarce. The more you understand about any given thing with all its qualifications, the more you see how slippery "fact" can be. Another: how many tons of cocaine do Britons consume annually? Which demographics were surveyed, and who paid for the research? What about "incidental" cocaine laced in other drugs?įact-checking is a search for someone to trust, and for some acceptable balance of smaller, true details that amount to one bigger fact. How much does it cost to fly drones over the Mexican border? You have to learn whether they cross into Mexican airspace, decide whether pilot salary counts as "operating costs", and confirm everything with Border Patrol. The harder the questions, the trickier the answers. ![]() Solving that, you'll have to consider the margin of error, and decide between native Italians v "ethnic" Italians v plain old Americans of Italian-descent. How many Italians live in New York's Little Italy neighborhood, for instance? You can go to the US Census, and they'll ask you which districts you consider its boundaries. Even simple tasks can be far more complicated than they first appear. Magazines hire fact-checkers to make sure every sentence can be called accurate, and checkers clean up stray mistakes, keep the writer honest and ward off legal trouble. Granted, fact-checking is often strange work. After only a few days, my life briefly became a Pynchon novel, on a quest to discover Thomas Pynchon himself. This was an otherwise normal job, except that it required me to confirm facts about literature's most notorious "recluse" – a writer who has never given an interview, and around whom facts, fiction and conspiracy mix freely. I'd been assigned to fact-check a magazine review of Pynchon's new novel, Bleeding Edge, out tomorrow. A few weeks ago, around 3am, I wrote an email to someone known as "the Great Quail", who I thought might be able to help, being the administrator of a comprehensive Thomas Pynchon website. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |