Date: 27 Mar 92 21:28:24 GMT
From: hoey@aic.nrl.navy.mil (Dan Hoey)
Reply-to: sf-lovers-written@Rutgers.Edu
Subject: Daniel Pinkwater sighting

At Lunacon last weekend I was privileged to see an interview with Daniel
Pinkwater, author of a number of odd tales for children, young adults, and
childish geezers like me.  He apparently never goes to conventions, but
someone managed to offer him something he couldn't refuse, I forget what.
But since if you missed it, you probably won't get to see him ever again,
I'll try to remember what I can.

He looks like he describes himself: very round, kind of like the pictures
on Fat_Men_From_Space, if I remember them right.  He's not quite as
spherical as the life-size statue in the photo on the back of
Alan_Mendelsohn,_The_Boy_From_Mars, but close.

He told us the story of that statue.  The book marketers made several
copies (``I wish they had told me what they were planning to pay for it.  I
would have liked to make a bid.'' [paraphrased from DMP]) and distributed
them to high-selling bookstores, and by raffle, and gave a few to Pinkwater
to dispose of.  He had a very active fan club at a high school in Ohio,
so he sent one to its president.  It didn't arrive, and didn't arrive;
apparently the whole high school was beginning to turn against him because
he wasn't delivering on his promise.  So he tracked it through the shipper,
and there was this signature that nobody at the school recognized.  Somehow
they checked through the school board files and found out that the person
with the signature used to be a custodian at a different school in the
district.  Eventually they noticed that a teacher at the different school
had the same name as the president of the fan club, so when the statue had
arrived at HS A addressed to this guy, they'd said, oops, send it over to
HS B.  The teacher at HS B got this statue in the mail and thought ``Hmm,
I know that guy,'' but couldn't place him.  So he put the statue in his
office, and waited for the guy who sent it to come by, and every day when
he came in he'd think, ``Hmm, I know that guy.''  When they straightened it
out, the teacher had become so attached to it he tried to get them to loan
him the statue on weekends.  Pinkwater decided there's something unsavory
about this, and has advised them not to lend the statue.

Asked what of his writing he liked best, he said it all needed rewriting,
so he would rather it all be chucked.  But when asked about the ``Norb''
comic strip, he changed his mind, and said that strip was good.  Nobody
understood it though, it was supposed to be a strip from the Golden Age of
comics, where the strip told a story instead of just making a joke every
day.  People kept thinking they just didn't get it, though.  It ended after
a year, though the strips have been collected in an edition published by
Miscellany Unlimited.

Someone asked about the features he keeps using, like avocados and raisin
toast.  The answer was something like ``all the classic literature of the
Western world uses avocados and raisin toast.''

Everyone thinks his name is a pseudonym.  He said it isn't.  Asked if it
had been changed, he said yes, but the old name meant something equally
strange in the old language.  He wouldn't elaborate.  Anne Werkheiser
thinks it came from one of those movements to suppress the Jews in
centuries past, where they made them all take funny names (She learned this
from a Biology professor at USC, who made a study of these names, motivated
by her own name: Katzenellenbogen, German for cats' elbows.) so they
wouldn't be mistaken for Christians.  It's sort of the inverse of
Magyarization, where they made all the Jews take Hungarian names so they
wouldn't stand out.  But I digress...

He ended up by reading his favorite story from Fish_Whistle, the story
called ``Play it Again, Wolfgang.''  He had to hunt for it, because he
could never remember the titles he gave to the pieces.  It was the one
about the hipster couple in the inner city, and the smarmy DJ who played
his request as a seduction aid.

Dan Hoey
Hoey@AIC.NRL.Navy.Mil