Re: Pynchon’s Layers Statement

[Mark Thibodeau]

As a precocious, very early-reading pre-schooler who was obsessed with our
family's full set of Encyclopedias (including a general set meant for first
year university students, a set of medical encyclopedias meant for students
entering pre-med, science encyclopedias divided by discipline intended for
undergrads, etc), I certainly remember being obsessed by the overlay
sections, yes, mostly featuring human body systems (bone, internal organs,
muscles and ligaments, adipose, blood, nervous, skin) but also featuring,
iirc, a pretty kick-ass technical overlay of an ICBM! And this, from a
series where the section on whales focused mostly on which species of whale
got you the most bang for your buck in the still-extant whaling industry!

You know, after a few weeks as my teacher, my first grade teacher told my
parents to keep me away from books, and you know what? Hindsight being
20/20 and all, I think on some level she was right.

Cheers!
yer old pal Jerky

On Mon, Dec 13, 2021 at 11:35 AM Allen Ruch <quail at shipwrecklibrary.com>
wrote:

> Yeah, that's the whole "Playboy" article. Jules used to be (ok, maybe
> justifiably) pissy about posting the complete text, because it was 95% of
> the reason anyone bought his shitty book "Lineland." But now that he's
> shuffled off this mortal coil, as shall we all one day, I took the liberty
> of posting the entire piece about a month ago. ("Playboy" has no online
> archives, so...) I actually bought a used copy (insert jokes here) of the
> 1977 issue and transcribed it with the help of OCR. I plan to scan the
> whole article and post it as an accompanying PDF, but my fucking printer
> has stopped working. (Printers, amiright?)
>
> —Quail
>
> On 12/13/21, 11:28 AM, "Joseph Tracy" <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>
>     As I recall it was a friend of Pynchon’s who recorded the incident. He
> said it was when Pynchon  lived in Manhattan Beach and they met someone who
> came over and was asking about the writing and Pynchon used the analogy to
> explain his process. I thought this was on S Logos but I am not really sure
> on that part. I was looking for anything biographical at the time. Just
> reread the Jules Siegel Playboy article from S Logos. not there. Is that
> the whole thing? Could he have written something elese or someone else have
> done so from that period. Now I want to know, because I sure as hell didn’t
> invent it.
>
>     > On Dec 13, 2021, at 9:40 AM, Allen Ruch <quail at shipwrecklibrary.com>
> wrote:
>     >
>     > I was wondering about Joe’s reference myself. I don’t recall Pynchon
> making that remark, yet it did ring a distant bell: maybe someone else said
> it about him, or maybe Pynchon said it in a review of another’s writing?
>     >
>     > Larry and I gathered the vast majority of Pynchon’s uncollected
> writing here:
>     >
>     > http://shipwrecklibrary.com/the-modern-word/pynchon/sl-essays/
>     >
>     > Anyway, I just searched all these pieces of “uncollected” writing
> for these terms: “medic” “text,” “layer,” “transparent” and “overlap.” I
> didn’t find anything. Maybe it was from the introduction to “Slow Learner?”
> I haven’t read that in a while.
>     >
>     > —Quail
>     >
>     > PS: My own memory is so unreliable that to this day I *insist*
> Grimace, the McDonald’s mascot, had FOUR arms when I was a kid. Everyone
> thinks I’m crazy, but one day I’ll find that commercial on YouTube…
>     >
>     > From: David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
>     > Date: Sunday, December 12, 2021 at 6:34 PM
>     > To: Allen Ruch <quail at shipwrecklibrary.com>, Joseph Tracy <
> brook7 at sover.net>, The Whole Sick Crew <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>     > Subject: Pynchon’s Layers Statement
>     >
>     > Skimming the interaction between Joe & Allen, I see Joe refer to a
> statement by Pynchon about his layers of writing:
>     >
>     > Joe:  “As you know, because the story, I’m fairly certain, came from
> your [Quail’s] and web page, Pynchon once compared his writing to one of
> those medical texts with overlappable transparent layers.”
>     >
>     >
>     > Then Joe lays out a 3 layer structure in Pynchon’s writing.  This
> caught my attention because just this week a guy  in the Reddit group ATD
> read (in which I’m participating) proposed his own 3 layer structure that
> seems nearly identical to what Joe proposed.  So this 3 layer idea seems to
> be floating around the internet now, and I’m curious about where it came
> from, and what Pynchon said about his own use of layers in his writing.
>     >
>     >
>     > So, Big Quail, can you send a link, or just send the whole thing to
> this list?  I’m sorta shocked that I’d never seen it in all my years
> reading Pynchon. Clearly I didn’t dig through the Spermatikos Logos pages
> deep enough back in the day.
>     > --
>     > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>
>
>
>
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>