That's honest of him. But, I guess I'd rather he just truncated that whole bit, enough to set up the fact that Pynchon certified his essay interesting, and just used it as a run-up to the essay itself, which must be interesting if Pynchon found it interesting. V is a pretty excellent book. The interesting thing about Pynchon is that I've grown averse to clever self-mystification, but Pynchon doesn't really bother me on that level. Maybe for his contemporaries there was more of a hullaballoo about it, but for me growing up later he was always more just this guy who wanted his privacy and let his work speak for itself- a refreshing, even self-depracating mystery.