THOMAS TOONTOWN. The Voice of Thomas Pynchon voice made an impressive, expressive debut on The Simpsons last January. (Amy's Robot has excellent coverage of that epochal event.)

But wait--there's more! On November 14, the Voice returns for the opening episode of the new Simpsons season. (Fox doesn't consider last weekend's new "Treehouse of Horrors" episode to be the official opening episode.) If you want to catch it, make sure you don't get some football game instead--this is the time of year when The Simpsons is often delayed by sports coverage.

Elsewhere in Toontown, Roz Chast cartoons in The New Yorker have now referred to the publicity-shy Pynchon at least twice: once in the November 8, 2004 issue ("Thomas Pynchon's Evil Twin") and once in the December 25, 1995 issue ("Happy-Go-Lucky-Father-of-Two-Avid-Golfer-Longtime-Magnetic-Tape-Salesmen-Kiwanis-Member or Thomas Pynchon"). You can check out the cartoons at Cartoonbank.com, where one can order New Yorker cartoons on shirts, coffee mugs, greeting cards, and frameable artwork.

Besides being a cartoon figure, Pynchon is also an author of some repute. According to this German website devoted to Pynchon, 2004 Nobel Prize recipient Elfriede Jelinek recently remarked that "It's a joke that he hasn't got the Nobel Prize and I've got it." Jelinek, a translator of Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow, went on to say, "I cannot get the Nobel Prize if Pynchon hasn't got it. That's against the laws of nature."

So what else is going on Pynchon-wise? The prevailing rumor on the Pynchon mailing list is that he's putting final touches on a novel having to do with mathematicians in Europe during the early twentieth century.

Meanwhile, in cyberspace, Pynchon turned up at AmIAnnoying.com. So far he has been voted Not Annoying by a 2-to-1 margin!