Another emigration, this time to the frozen wastes of Canada, forced further adjustments of culture and aesthetics. But out of this re-location was born his artistic and literary proclivities. A pimply person began producing poems, short stories, drawings, designs, and posters. It was the Summer of Love, 1967, and as the hair grew longer, the bell-bottoms grew wider and the pink and green psychedelic drugs were free. Laurence and his friends raced ten-speed bikes all over Ontario, got so incredibly high, and watched Jane Fonda wearing her provocative fish-bowls in Barbarella.

Still every inch a hippie, he was at the University of Western Ontario from 1972 to 1990, first as a student, then an apprentice, and finally a professor. The Freshman year contained a terrible bike crash which occasioned a bona fide near-death experience, and after recovery a gradual progression into the delirious happiness of the Disco era, replete with the platform shoes and the hideous polyester shirts. Soon, Laurence had moved on to graduate school, working as a late-night DJ at the hard-core campus station, writing record reviews and drawing his infamous cartoon—Dr Daw’s Mind Theatre—for the school papers. Degrees kept mounting up—MA, PhD, etc., etc. A dissertation entitled Us and Them: Technological Hierarchies in Fowles and Pynchon came forth. Three novels were written, the last of which was called Gravity’s Well as an homage to Pynchon, and several others were started and left to gather dust at the edge of his mind. Work at the radio station now included forming a production company entitled Lemnischatological Interosculations with the legendary jazz trombonist Herb Bayley to produce a trilogy of radio-plays: “Miles in Heaven,” “Rings of Time,” and “Virgin Beauty.” Displays of computer graphics, stained glass, and paper sculptures followed at local galleries. It was a time of great production values, musical experimentation, and artistic output, a full period of some six years of constant creation!!

But the now the University scene has been lost and work has moved onto the Net. E-mail correspondences and the cultivation of new and better media representations have replaced the paper and pens of yore. Most notably, F.J.L. Daw has been lucky enough to hook up with the Great Quail, and is currently spending a little time lost in the multitudinous Libyrinth of that bird’s devising… What will emerge from therein is anybody’s guess!

The following is my original author’s introduction to Spermatikos Logos. I now wince to read it: a sadder, if not wiser man blushing at the pretentious prolix prose of his post-college youth. But as tempted as I am to simply “select-all DELETE” and replace with a few sentences saying, “Hi! Yeah, so this is my Pynchon site, and Larry helped me make it, and there was also Erik and Tim and Robert and Martin, so enjoy!”—a perverse, masochistic part of me says, “Fuck it, bring on the yods and brutally extended metaphors.” Also, the Wayback Machine knows better: everything lives eternally in the ether. So here’s my original introduction from 1996, a quarter-century ago:

At first, there was the Idea. The unCreated egg dreaming of its futurity, its form already embedded in the uncarved block of the tenebrous future. The works of Pynchon were the source, a shower of Yods falling from the Tower, a scattered rain of divine light that sparked the creative impulse. The Idea thrashed about in the murky dark, waiting for a proper medium to call its own, waiting for that mystical catalyst, the command to grow. The Web would grant an answer to that call, providing a matrix, and the Libyrinth would open its mazes to provide a womb. The Idea would be born, receiving a round slap on the rump on the auspicious day of Friday 13, December 1996, and it would open its eyes to the world.

This site is the alchemical child of Dr Larry Daw and myself, the Great Quail. And, like any child, it is a collaboration, the product of two visions, and without either the site would not exist. Allow me to tell the story of a lazy quail and a most unusual doctor.

I had always had a Pynchon site in mind, but the idea was as hazy and nebulous as it was tenaciously pervasive. All I had was a murky, subterranean swirl of ideas and a potential name. To be called “The White Visitation,” during long nights I could feel it beaming me the dreams of its resident madmen; like a transuranium element buried in the vaults of my subconscious, I was breathing in the percolations of its slow radiation. It wanted to be created. Each dream, each emitted particle, was enacting a subtle change, a scintillation on the dark screens of my sleeping imagination. It was as if each triggered a binary switch too minute to quantify individually, but I knew that in time, the statistical weight of the sum was destined to collapse in a sudden revelation of form. I knew that one day I would uncover the ore surrounding my mysterious isotope; I would strip away the base metal, mercurial, plumbic, plutonian, and force the alchemical transmutation to gold. But I still needed to devour more of Pynchon’s work, and I still needed to navigate the Sephirothic paths to Tiphareth before I could really begin. I needed a catalyst, a brush with the Word.

Then I was contacted by one Dr Larry Daw. Author of strange email epistles, he shared many affinities with me: Robyn Hitchcock, Philip Glass, Aleister Crowley…and Thomas Pynchon. Suddenly the equation balanced, and I saw a way out of my uncertainty. Why bother with the dreams of madmen, when Fate was delivering one right to my door? Foolishly my Canadian friend made a commitment to the Libyrinth: he wanted to create a Pynchon page by the end of 1996. (Here he was—a Pynchon scholar! a professor! a novelist! And most importantly, he was willing to do most of the work!) Larry had an idea—many ideas—and he wanted my help in bringing them to reality. He handed me a ring of keys, a topographic map, and a shovel. With a firm belief that my “madmen” were really psychic visionaries, he sent me deep into my subconscious mine and suggested where to dig. In the habit of any good Nun, he forced my Yod, and I finally brought my creative energies into focus, crystallizing the warm dreaming swirl into a tangible form. Together we spent the Autumn of 1996 brewing up this homunculus you have before you, with Larry providing most of the research and materials, and myself transforming them in the retorts and crucibles of my electric Libyrinth. Besides my gratitude for his ideas and his work, I am forever indebted to him for his inspiration, his assistance, and his guidance.

So, to conclude, you have before you a joint project, a hybrid labor of love. Larry is responsible for most of the actual content; the message, the dominant DNA is his—as are the irritating English spellings. I am responsible for the structure of the message, wrapping the memes in a loopy protective blanket and introducing the site to its brothers and sisters happily at play in the forking gardens of the Libyrinth. I am also to blame for most of the graphics (though the hermetic logo that greets you on the front page springs from Larry’s arcane workshop), the textual connective tissue, the run-on sentences and abuse of semi-colons, the purple prose, and (I guiltily confess) a bit of authorial tinkering.

A few days later I had a reading list on my desk: Robert Heller’s “Catch 22”, Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse 5” and “The Crying of Lot 49” by Thomas Pynchon (writing this now I see that all of the titles end on digits, hmmm). I think she even bought the Pynchon book for me, but I’m not sure.

While I loved all three books she had recommended, world literature’s best strip (not quite) poker scene changed my life forever. All his other works followed, and as this Internet thing came up I eventually stumbled across The Great Quail’s and Dr. Larry Daw’s works that you can find here. In our quest to bring the site back online my part was to do some carving and polishing.

Thank you, guys, I love being part of this!