Spoilers for V. & Moby-Dick

[Arthur Fuller]

As it happens, I too just finished *V.* for the nth time, after a lapse of
decades. Only now do I realize the serious influence it had on me. One
small example: when I switched from journalism about films and jazz to
journalism about software, I once submitted six articles to a magazine
called Computing Canada. (That's the standard approach when pitching an
editor for the first time -- bring half a dozen pieces and hope s/he
accepts one.) Turns out, the editor read them and wanted all six! There
was, however, a small problem. The magazine had a rule that a maximum of
two pieces could be by the same author. So I was tasked with coming up with
two pen names. I took both from V., and used them in full. I'll give you a
hint: Their surnames were Godolphin and Bongo-Shaftsbury.

On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 1:46 PM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> Great stuff.....thankee.....
>
> On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 1:39 PM Erik T. Burns <eburns at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > just a head's up if you haven't read these two books I am going to quote
> > the last lines below so turn away now!
> >
> > I just finished reading V. for the nth time but the first time in
> probably
> > 20 years, and it was rollicking fun & obscure mystery all the way through
> > as expected. When I finally got to the end, the final lines gave me a
> real
> > Moby-Dick frisson and looking at the two of them together (see / sea
> below)
> > I understand why.
> >
> > Given the peacock tails / spouter whales poem much earlier on in the
> book,
> > and the overall arch of Stencil's madly obsessive search for V. and
> > answers, and the fact that Stencil like Ahab goes down with his ship,
> maybe
> > there's more just the anxiety of influence at work.
> >
> > anyhoo, just a thought. If anyone knows of any critical work that looks
> at
> > these two books together, do tell. (I know of some on Melville & TRP, but
> > they are about Gravity's Rainbow, mainly, like this one
> > <https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/24078356>).
> >
> > Moby-Dick (last lines, pre-epilogue):
> >
> > Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white
> > surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great
> shroud
> > of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.
> >
> > V (last lines):
> >
> > Draw a line from Malta to Lampedusa. Call it a radius. Somewhere in that
> > circle, on the evening of the tenth, a waterspout appeared and lasted for
> > fifteen minutes. Long enough to lift the xebec fifty feet, whirling, and
> > creaking, Astarte's throat naked to the cloudless weather, and slam it
> down
> > again into a piece of the Mediterranean whose subsequent surface
> phenomena
> > - whitecaps, kelp islands, any of a million flatnesses which should catch
> > thereafter part of the brute sun's spectrum – showed nothing at all of
> what
> > came to lie beneath, that quiet June day.
> > --
> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> >
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>


-- 
Arthur