VL-IV p30, 31, 32

[Dave Monroe]

On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 8:36 AM, Michael Bailey
<michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:

> but anyway, back on page 32,
> "Check's in the mayo" indicating that at least he hasn't lost his
> sense of humor.

p. 32 "Check's in the mayo"  A brilliant throw-away Feghoot. In the
fifties, a science fiction writer
named Grendel Briarton wrote a series of short, funny pieces for
Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine titled, "Through Time and Space
With Ferdinand Feghoot." They all worked the same way: establishing a
silly and complicated story line for the sole purpose of setting up a
painfully outrageous pun. Pynchon is addicted to the form; one of the
best Feghoots ever written is the "Forty million Frenchmen" gag ("for
DeMille young Frenchmen ...") on page 559 of Gravity's
Rainbow.

http://www.mindspring.com/~shadow88/chapter3.htm

On Feghoot(s), see, e.g., ...

http://www.awpi.com/Combs/Shaggy/index.html
http://home.tiac.net/~cri/2002/feghoot.html

And on the M of F&SF, cf. ...

"the way Isaac Asimov explains it" (SL, "Intro," p. 12)

Asimov, Isaac.  "Order!  Order!"
   The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction,
    Vol. 20, No. 2 (February 1961).

http://ff-asimov.ifrance.com/ff-asimov/Ess-O.html
http://www.asimovonline.com/oldsite/Essays/physics.html
http://www.asimovonline.com/oldsite/Essays/f_and_sf_essays.html

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0211&msg=73011

And from Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds, "'That High Magic to Low Puns':
Thomas Pynchon, Wit, and the Work of the Supernatural,"  Rocky
Mountain Review, Vol. 54, No. 1 (Spring 2000) ...

   At the same time as these characters are selected out of grace, the
systems they inhabit offer another kind of magic, a possibility for a
life-generating alternative to entropy. This other motion toward grace
originates in the dozens of puns in Pynchon's novels, puns that
perform not only to mark the accidental homonymic relationships among
sounds, but more actively to create entire plots to take the place of
the malevolent God's plots, thereby generating a complete ontological
system originating in The Word.  In The Crying of Lot 49, the pun
produces energy against entropy in its ability to multiply meanings,
to proliferate "output" from a single source, a word, or an image. The
pun, even more efficiently than Maxwell's Demon, defies the second law
of thermodynamics (not to mention the first law): it actually creates
realities, causing a word to do the work of several with minimal
energy. With such linguistic generativity, these puns reinscribe the
sacred into the secular world, visiting a supernatural effect upon the
world of physical laws, and in so doing, they work a typological
anti-causality against a perceived Calvinistic, predetermined linear
end-direction. Puns in Pynchon's novels transfigure the natural
landscape, therefore, and not by virtue of demonic presences that hide
in the history of postage stamps or in Nazi armies; instead, this
supernatural effect comes from the will of language itself, language
made palpable through visible and readable signs.
   The activity of puns and their place among the supernatural marks
of grace proceed from a generally eschatological and specifically
Puritan obsession in Pynchon's novels....

http://rmmla.wsu.edu/ereview/54.1/articles/hinds.asp

And see as well, e.g., ...

Culler, Jonathan, ed.  On Puns: The Foundation of Letters.
   Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1988.

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0308&msg=84632