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There must be cubicles like this all over the ETO: only the three dingy scuffed-cream fiberboard walls and no ceiling of its own. Tantivy shares it with an American colleague, Lt. Tyrone Slothrop. Their desks are at right angles, so there’s no eye contact but by squeaking around some 90°. Tantivy’s desk is neat, Slothrop’s is a godawful mess. It hasn’t been cleaned down to the original wood surface since 1942. Things have fallen roughly into layers, over
a base of bureaucratic smegma that sifts steadily to the bottom, made up of
millions of tiny red and brown curls of rubber eraser,

pencil shavings,

dried tea or coffee stains,

traces of sugar and Household Milk,

much cigarette ash,

very fine black debris picked and flung from typewriter ribbons,

decomposing library paste,

broken aspirins ground to powder.

Then comes
a scatter of paperclips,

Zippo flints,

rubber bands,

staples,

cigarette butts and crumpled packs,

stray matches,

pins,

nubs of pens,

stubs of pencils of all colors including the hard-to-get heliotrope and raw umber,

wooden coffee spoons,

Thayer’s Slippery Elm Throat Lozenges sent by Slothrop’s mother, Nalline, all the way from Massachusetts,

bits of
tape,

string,

chalk

. . . above that
a layer of forgotten memoranda,

empty buff ration books,

phone numbers,

unanswered letters,

tattered sheets of carbon paper,

the scribbled ukulele chords to a dozen songs including “Johnny Doughboy Found a Rose in Ireland” (“He does have some rather snappy arrangements,” Tantivy reports, “he’s a sort of American George Formby, if you can imagine such a thing,” but Bloat’s decided he’d rather not),

an empty Kreml hair tonic bottle,

lost pieces to different jigsaw puzzles showing parts of
the amber left eye of a Weimaraner,

the green velvet folds of a gown,

slate-blue veining in a distant cloud,

the orange nimbus of an explosion (perhaps a sunset),

rivets in the skin of a Flying Fortress,

the pink inner thigh of a pouting pin-up girl

. . . a few old Weekly Intelligence Summaries from G-2,

a busted corkscrewing ukulele string,

boxes of gummed paper stars in many colors,

pieces of a flashlight,

top to a Nugget shoe polish can in which Slothrop now and then studies his blurry brass reflection,

any number of reference books out of the ACHTUNG library back down the hall—
a dictionary of technical German,

an F.O. Special Handbook or Town Plan

—and usually, unless it’s been pinched or thrown away, a News of the World somewhere too—Slothrop’s a faithful reader.

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Slothrop's desk in Gravity's Rainbow","cells":[{"id":0,"value":"md`# Lists within lists . . . Slothrop's desk in _Gravity's Rainbow_`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":46,"value":"md`\"No, this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into.\"`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":57,"value":"md`Thomas Pynchon's _Gravity's Rainbow_ is not only famously difficult but also deliberately disorientating. The book seems to be structured around a series of recursions. One finds oneself going deeper and deeper into detail, only for the frame of reference to jump back up a level, or several levels, without much warning. This can happen even at the level of individual sentences.\n\nHere's an example from earlier in the book, with lists nested within lists. As Justin Vaughn notes in [a discussion thread on lists](https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0002QF), here jumping out of nests happens by way of a simple ellipsis (\" . . . \").\n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":13,"value":"viewof togglecss = checkbox({\n description: \"Once you've read the below and tried to follow it, tick this box to display the prose as a set of nested lists\",\n options: [{ value: true, label: \"Reveal lists within lists\" }],\n value: false\n})","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":4,"value":"$35","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":54,"value":"md`## References and inspiration\n\n - [A thread about lists on tufte.com forum](https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0002QF)\n - [Opening pages of _Gravity's Rainbow_, available online](https://www.penguin.com/ajax/books/excerpt/9781101594650)\n - [_Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's_ Gravity's Rainbow, by Zak Smith, TinHouseBooks 2007]()\n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":74,"value":"FileAttachment(\"gravitys-rainbow_zak-smith_p18.jpeg\").image()","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":78,"value":"md`## Implementation code`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":15,"value":"injectedcss = togglecss\n ? html.fragment``\n : html.fragment``","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":51,"value":"md`## Dependencies`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":18,"value":"import { checkbox } from \"@jashkenas/inputs\"","pinned":true,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":23,"value":"import { html } from \"@observablehq/htl\"","pinned":true,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"}],"files":"$W36","stdlib":"1","titling":"auto"}} 34:"$33:body"