working for Boeing

[joeallonby]

I particularly enjoyed the reference to the optimist who jumped off the
Empire State Building. As he passed the twentieth floor, he yelled "So far,
so good!"

Does this joke pop up anywhere else?


on 7/5/04 10:54 AM, Otto at ottosell at yahoo.de wrote:

> 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
>