VV(11): A Curious Sea Story

[Dave Monroe]

"There is a curious sea story about Pig Bodine" (V., Ch. 8, Sec. ii, p. 218)

Cf. "It is this way with sewer stories.  They just are.  Truth or falsity 
don't apply" (V., Ch. 5, Sec. i, p. 120)?  Except that, despite the fact 
that Winsome "had heard" this story "from Pig himself" (p. 218), and might 
well be, a la the recounting of father Fairing's journal via Manfred Katz 
via ... via ... via Zeitsuss (?), "pretty much apocryphal and more fantasy 
that the record itself warranted" (p. 120), not to mention tht it might 
"occur to anyone to question" Pig Bodine's "sanity" as well (ibid.), for 
some reason I have no doubt that Pig Bodine has told essentially the truth 
here. No unreliable modernist Jamesian/Conradian/Melvillean narrator here.  
Why WOULD one lie about such a thing?

Reminds me ...

"Oddly enough, I had not intended this to be Dennis's story at all--he was 
supposed to have been a straight man for Pig Bodine.  The counterpart in 
real life to this unwholesome bluejacket was actually my starting point.  I 
had heard the honeymoon story when I was in the navy [....]  we were out on 
shore patrol duty [....]  Our beat was a desolate piece of shipyard 
perimeter [....]  So to my shipmate, as senior member of the patrol, fell 
the obligation to pass the time telling sea stories, and this was one of 
them.  What had actually happened to him on his own honeymoon is what had 
happen [sic (!)] to Dennis Flange.  I was heavily amused not so much at the 
content of the story as at the more abstract notion that anybody would 
behave this way.  As it turned out, my partner's drinking companion figured 
in a wide body of shipyard anecdote. [...] he had become a legend.  I 
finally did get to see him the day before I was discharged [...]"

Pynchon, Thomas.  "Introduction."  Slow Learner:
   Early Stories by Thomas Pynchon.  Boston: Little,
   Brown, 1984.

Discussing here the short story, "Low-lands."  Hell with where Pynchon's 
lurking these days, I want to know what happened to the ur-Bodine.  By the 
way, anyone have any solid evidence that Pynchon's character was a direct 
influence in the Christening of teevee's favorite Clampett cousin?  But 
wait, there's more.  Note, of course, "decadence" (p. 218).  Will get to 
that in a post or two.  And the good ship, the "U.S.S. Scaffold"--ominous, 
in a black-humorous way, indeed.  And what was that Brian Eno line about 
"creative as well as custodial talents"?

But note "Task Force 60, made up of two carriers, some other heavies, and a 
circular screen of twelve destroyers" (p. 218).  Seeing as we've ben talking 
about clocks here ... ignoring, for the moment, the "other heavies," do note 
those "two carriers"--and what do we carry with? Hands, maybe?--in that 
"circular screen of twelve destroyers," along with that "60."  Not so 
concerned about the exact position of those "two carriers" in that "circular 
screen" right now, with the time they might indicate (ca. 3:10-3:15?). 
Though they are "steaming a few hundred miles east of Gibraltar" (p. 218), 
headed eastward, apparently, "somewhere between Barcelona and Cannes" (p. 
219; and as in "Film Festival"--"Pig wanted to make a career someday of 
playing male leads in pornographic movies" [p. 218]), and "It was maybe two 
in the morning" (ibid.), nonetheless ...

Cf. ...

http://www.bullatomsci.org/clock.html

Though at a realtively safe twelve minutes to midnight as of 1963, when V. 
was published ...

http://www.bullatomsci.org/clock/nd95moore2.html#anchor100462

Only two minutes to midnight in V.'s more recent setting in 1956 (indeed, 
since 1953) ...

http://www.bullatomsci.org/clock/nd95moore1.html#anchor95140

Here's the rundown of changes ...

http://www.bullatomsci.org/clock/doomsdayclock.html

Currently at nine minutes 'til doomday and holding ...

Note the "forward lookouts telling themselves sea stories to keep awake" (p. 
218)--a la Pynchon and his senior shipmate ...

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