So way back in the olden days of 1996 a New York band called Lotion, who had one good song whose title I can’t remember, put out a record called Nobody’s Cool with liner notes by Thomas Pynchon—which was a pretty big deal, given that Pynchon, one of the best novelists of the past century, is notoriously reclusive nature and at the time hadn’t published anything in six years. So the New Yorker published a little piece on Lotion’s biggest fan, in which the members of Lotion claim that Pynchon had been showing up at their concerts all over the country dressed in a Godzilla T-shirt, and that he’d only introduced himself after he’d been to a few. It was a funny, quirky story. It was also, at least in part, a hoax.
