WP on Zak Smith

[Ya Sam]

this is NOT that self-multiplying article about 'fans still passionate'

Book Notes
Sunday, November 26, 2006; Page BW11


Pictures of Pynchon


All of Zak Smith's obsessions, he says, trace back to his teenage years in 
Prince George's County. "The same sort of projects are interesting to me," 
he explains. "I liked girls then. I like girls now." He also likes comics 
and big philosophical novels. Thomas Pynchon's 1973 novel Gravity's Rainbow 
has long been his favorite book.


Here's where the obsession comes in: In 2003, Smith spent nine months holed 
up in his Brooklyn apartment drawing Gravity's Rainbow page by page. In the 
process, Pynchon's images popped out at Smith in ways they hadn't when he 
was just reading the book for pleasure. "I noticed that grids or graphs or 
grid-like shapes were in the language a lot," he says. He also ran across a 
lot of challenging pages containing little more than two people talking. 
"You're like, I don't know what I'm going to do with this," he recalls. And 
the book hardly ends with a visual bang: "The last page is the same two 
people talking!"

Smith trained as a fine artist at Yale and Cooper Union -- his specialty is 
portraits -- so it makes sense that the end result of his endeavor is less 
an illustrated novel than a series of eerie, high art interpretations. None 
of the 760 images contains any of Pynchon's text, for example, though each 
is numbered to match a page in the novel's Viking Press edition.

When the Whitney Museum displayed the series in its 2004 Biennial show, it 
took up an entire wall. Pynchon fans hovered around it pointing out their 
favorite spots. There was Pirate among the banana trees! There was Slothrop 
in the pig costume! There were the B-57 bombers!

Now fans who missed the show can join the fun: Tin House has collected 
Smith's drawings into a volume called Gravity's Rainbow Illustrated, which 
will be released November 28th, just a week after Pynchon's new novel, 
Against the Day, hit stores.

It's not likely that Smith will take on that 1,085-page book, though. "All 
my work is very labor-intensive," he says, "so I don't like to do the same 
project twice." In fact, his last big series, "100 Girls and 100 Octopuses," 
was conceived as the "anti- Gravity's Rainbow." An arrangement of 98 surreal 
paintings, each showing a woman in a room with an octopus, the series has no 
narrative in it at all. Only when he was deep into the project did Smith 
realize he'd been foiled: The image of the girl with the octopus appears in 
Gravity's Rainbow, too.


-- Marcela Valdes

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/22/AR2006112201580.html

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