working for Boeing

[Otto]

CATALOGUE NOTE
First edition, presentation copy, inscribed and signed on the verso of the
half-title: "9/29/63 To my friend Bart, whether he reads it or not-Tom."
Bart, the father of the present consignor, worked with Pynchon at Boeing in
the early 1960s. Although thirty first editions of V., including advance
reading copies, are recorded in American Book Prices Current, only one of
those was signed by the notoriously reclusive Pynchon.
http://tinyurl.com/2w427


Recently I've enjoyed "A Trove on New Works by Thomas Pynchon? Bomarc
Service News Rediscovered" by Adrian Wisnicki (Pynchon Notes 46-49, 2003,
pp. 9-34). I think it's a valuable essay with convincing arguments pointing
to some other articles that our man probably or possibly wrote during his
years at Boeing. I agree to Wisnicki that it is indeed kinda strange that we
have only one article (the first two pages)

"So the more one reads _Bomarc Service News_, the more one discovers ways
Pynchon's work at Boeing seems to have inspired the creation of his fiction.
One also gains a better understanding of the true range of Pynchon's
engineering expertise, an expertise surpassing that displayed in even the
more demanding technical passages of _Gravity's Rainbow_. If then newsletter
seems wholly anonymous and technical at first, one eventually perveives a
combination of larger patterns and stylistic nuances that makes it
relatively easy to identify Pynchon's articles with some confidence, though
a number of uncertainties necessarily remain." (34)

As always, or not?

"Togetherness"
Aerospace Safety, December 1960, pp. 6-8.
Thomas H. Pynchon [sic], Bomarc Aero-Space Dept., Boeing Airplane Co.,
Seattle
http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_together.html

Mathew Winston: "Auf der Suche nach Pynchon" (1975),
in: Ickstadt, H. (Hg.), Zum Romanwerk von Thomas Pynchon,
Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1981, S. 306-322, übersetzt von Thomas Piltz.
Orig.: "The Quest for Pynchon", Twentieth Century Literature, 21, (1975),
278-287.





Otto