M&D Deep Duck 4-6: The Whole Sick Crew

[Mark Kohut]

Hilarious names except for the real one, a joke by straightness...

Slowcombe reminds me of Ed "kookie' Burns, I think he was, or Fabian
or any of those 'singers' or anyone really who runs the comb thru his
hair patiently, show-offingly.

Knot-tying is the God Particle on a ship. Done badly and there's death?


On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 3:26 PM,  <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
> Pynchon spends some time describing some of the crew of the Seahorse on its post-attack sailing. Why not pre-attack? Maybe he didn't want to go for heart-string-pulling pathos about named characters being killed or wounded? Are his detailed descriptions based on old Navy buddies, or does each have his own significance?
>
> Pig Bodine, of course, is an our old friend from V and GR. Pynchon describes his real-life counterpart in the intro to Slow Learner:
>
> "As it turned out, my partner's drinking companion figured in a wide body of shipboard anecdote. Transferred before my time to shore duty someplace, he had become a legend. I finally did get to see him the day before I was discharged ... The minute I caught sight of him, before I heard him answer to his name, I swear I had the strange ESP knowledge that that's who he was."
>
> Slowcombe, the fifer, recruited via an opiated Pint. Can't find any enlightening references to the name, though "slow comb" makes me think of someone who's ineptly playing a home-made kazoo - one of those tissue paper wrapped around a comb affairs.
>
> Jack "Fingers" Soames, he of the eponymous Gesture that strangely lacks any hostile Intent.
>
> Veevle, "legendary thro'out the Royal N. for being impossible to wake to stand Watch." The most Pynchonesque-sounding name.
>
> Pat O'Brian, scribbling' Sea Stories. An homage to the writer of historical sea novels in the 1970s.
>
> And Botswain Higgs,a play on the Higgs Boson. Bo'sun Higgs is obsessive about neatness in Knot-work. Is there anything in that that could be construed as Higgs Boson-like?
>
> Laura
> (crossing my fingers that the feeble cable that feeds my internet, which has more than once succumbed to squirrels, manages to stand up to the Blizzard of the Century, in full force as I type this)
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l