In the meantime, in between time … — Popular song Where have you been in the uterim? — Finnegans Wake I t is, to use a highly typical Pynchon word, rather “odd” that The Crying of Lot 49, a slim novella which, because he was short of cash, Thomas Pynchon dashed off for Esquire on time borrowed from a long haul of erecting the vast cathedral of Gravity's Rainbow , should have become an overnight...