User:Sideming

A partial newbie to Pynchon: I've readGR 3 times, Crying of Lot 49 twice, Vineland once, got halfway through MD (the mechanical duck found my off switch) and I am now a third of the way through V. and my second round of AtD.

Si_de_ming is my Chinese name from college, For the exact reasons Pynchon mentions in AtD, my nickname was "Mr. Death."

An economist by training, my current interests are Sanskrit/Jyotish and Proust. I have an MDiv from Harvard Divinity School where I studied Gnosticism under His Eminence Archbishop Demetrios, current Primate of the Greek Orthodox Church in America; and Islamic Mysticism under Annemarie Schimmel -- but I personally do not practice.

AtD hits close to home. My father's people were from the hill country across the Ohio from the Mason-Dixon line, and Webb Traverse talks and thinks very much like my beloved grandfather, not a miner but a steel worker -- though in a very similar place to Webb's. And like Webb's sons Frank, who thought to become an engineer, and Kit, who later works on planes, my father indeed became an engineer working on planes.

My mother's family are all Serbian. Serbo-Croatian was her first language, and I still have cousins in Belgrade, Novi Sad, Subotica. I was raised in the Serbian Orthodox Church. With an engineer father and a Serbian mother, Tesla was like a patron saint in our family. I have travelled in the Balkans, Greece and Turkey (where my wife works as an archaeologist), and spent some time in the monasteries of Mt. Athos.

I have had dinner with the current pretender to the Serbian throne, Crown Prince Alexander, but I just can't ring him up to say hello.

Lastly I grew up in Ohio, Cincinnati -- and find it intriguing that Pynchon seems to have spent some time there. As far as I'm concerned, he nailed Columbus bang on.

I now live in the San Francisco Bay area where I read Pynchon and Proust.