Thomas Pynchon Sat Here

This morning, I discovered Thomas Pynchon is/was a ‘Godzilla Freak’. I have contended my story ‘The Godzilla Run’ is writing itself. What is coming, is scary, right out of The Twilight Zone. “”Takeshi”
Pynchon is fond of transplanting characters from one novel to another. Takeshi Fumimoto is a perfect example. He made his first appearance as a bit player in Gravity’s Rainbow where he was one of a pair of wacky kamikaze pilots. His first name is almost surely borrowed from Takashi Shimura, the star of Godzilla — a film referenced in the very same sentence, when Zoyd plays the Godzilla theme music to accompany Takeshi’s first appearance. (Pynchon seems to have been thinking about this beast for some time: There’s a boat named Godzilla II in The Crying of Lot 49 — and the word is that he loves Japanese horror flicks. In fact, at one point rumor had it that he was writing a book with Mothra as a major character.) Godzilla is referenced several times in Pynchon’s 2009 novelInherent Vice.
To read why Thomas Pynchon likes Godzilla and other Badasses, there is no better source than his own essay Is it O.K. to be a Luddite?.

Hippybear: “Pynchon has been a guest voice on The Simpsons at least twice.”

Groening made this claim during an interview I did with him in 1989, six weeks before the first episode of the Simpsons aired. He didn’t say he knew Pynchon, only that he’d met him. Maybe they’re mates now. Who knows?

Ever since the appearance of Thomas Pynchon’s epic, mind-bending Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), rumors have circulated among the faithful that the elusive author was working on two new projects: a novel about Japanese monster movies and one dealing with the 18th century drawing of the Mason-Dixon line between the (then) colonies of Pennsylvania and Maryland. Fragments of a Godzilla-like episode indeed appeared in Pynchon’s Vineland (1990), and now here comes a real monster: Mason & Dixon 

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-pynchon-hoax

Two weeks ago, Andrew Essex, a former New Yorker staffer, wrote in to say that, thirteen years earlier, both he and The New Yorker had fallen victim to a prank. In “Godzilla Meets Indie Rockers,” a Talk of the Town story from June 24, 1996, Essex reported that Thomas Pynchon, a notorious hermit, had become a groupie of the nineties New York rock band Lotion. (We recently mentioned the article on the occasion of the release of Pynchon’s new novel, “Inherent Vice.”)
The band members told Essex that Pynchon, wearing a Godzilla T-shirt, had approached them after a concert at a Cincinnati laundromat-cum-rock club; that he didn’t reveal his identity until months later, when he spotted a copy of his short-story collection lying around backstage; and that he always paid his restaurant bills in cash.