Unscrewing the navel allusion

[Jeff Sunbury]

I love that story. The mental image conjures a cartoon by Don Martin (w/
MAD magazine 1956-1988) in which a man pulls an annoying hair from his
shoulder with the sound effect "POINK" and his arm drops off.

inre the publication of V. - I re-read V. in March this year and came
across a 2009 grad student thesis: (RE)VISIONS OF GENOCIDE:NARRATIVES OF
GENOCIDE IN THOMAS PYNCHON’S V. AND GRAVITY’S
<http://repository.library.georgetown.edu/bitstream/handle/10822/553016/joycePeytonMeigs.pdf?sequence=1>
RAINBOW<http://repository.library.georgetown.edu/bitstream/handle/10822/553016/joycePeytonMeigs.pdf?sequence=1>
that
refers to an April 1962 typescript draft of V. in letters between Pynchon
and his Lippincott editor, Corlies 'Corky' Smith, also, the ref. 'Smith,
Shawn. Pynchon and History: Metahistorical Rhetoric and Postmodern
Narrative Form in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon. New York: Routledge, 2005.
I'm new to this P-list so this may be old news.


On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 9:45 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> It is 1958. "Candida was delighted by [Robert] Gottleib's [S & S editor]
> enthusiasm for the Catch--18 manuscript.[[only 75 pages]. Finally,
> someone got it! "Ii thought my navel would unscrew and my ass would fall
> off, " she often said to describe her happiness
> when negotiations went well with an editor."   She had also received a
> positive response from Tom Ginsberg at Viking.
>
> S & S, we know, did publish Catch-22 and Ginsberg, a decade later,
> Gravity's Rainbow.
>
> I think it is clear from the stuff about Candida from this bio that
> Pynchon woudda probably read Catch-18 while he was writing
> V. as, at least I hinted at,,\ I say proudly full of myself, when I think
> I found some echoes of Heller in the early parts of V....
> Candida sent it, gave it, to about everybody.
>
> Catch--22 was not published until October 1961,  approximately 6--9 months
> before V. would have been set to be published by
> Lippincott in early 1963. (We know part of V. was published in 1961, but I
> do not know when V., finished, was offered to
> publishers, if it was...(that is, unless CD had made a deal early with
> Lippincott based on a major part of it.)
>
>
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