Thomas Pynchon Wiki - User contributions [en]

Pages 674-700

2010-01-03T16:31:08Z

Bleakhaus: /* Page 675 */

{{GR PbP Text}}

==Page 674==
674.10 '''a City of the Future''' 
Evokes, again, the opening images of Lang’s ''Metropolis''. See [[Pages 482-488#Page 482|482.25]].

==Page 675==
'''Marcel''' 
For an argument that Marcel in some way signifies the great French novelist Marcel Proust, see [http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/paper_proust.html Pynchon Nods: Proust in Gravity’s Rainbow] by Erik Ketzan.

==Page 676==
675.33 '''at best they manage to emerge...''' 
The description of decisions emerging from a chaos of competing forces echoes Pynchon's letter to Jules Siegel in 1965, [http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=The_World_is_at_Fault The World is at Fault], in which Pynchon describes the journey of our souls through "whatever obsolescenses, bigotries, theories of education workable and un, parental wisdom or lack of it, happen to get in its more or less (random) pilgrimage..."

==Page 682==
682.18 '''Ho-zay''' 
Another of Nalline’s transliterations: "Jose," for Joseph.

==Page 684==
[[image:william-bendix.jpg|thumb|William Bendix in ''Lifeboat''|150px|right]]684.31-32 '''William Bendix''' 
An appropriate supporting role for Bendix would be his part in [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeboat_(film) Hitchcock’s ''Lifeboat''] (1944), in which he plays a lindy-hopping sailor whose leg has to be amputated.

==Page 685==
685.21-22 '''"My Prelude to a Kiss," "Tenement Symphony"''' 
The former song (actually titled just "Prelude to a Kiss") is a 1945 composition by Duke Ellington with Irving Gordon and Irving Mills; the latter was composed by Hal Borne, with words by Sid Kullen and Roy Golden, and sung by Tony Martin in the 1941 Marx Brothers movie ''The Big Store''.

685.26 '''sexcrime fantasy''' 
The term "sexcrime" was invented as a Newspeak word by George Orwell in 1984. It refers to sex used for pleasure instead of simple procreation, an offense in the totalitarian state of the book.

685.28 '''MY DOPER’S CADENZA''' 
The ''New World Dictionary'' defines "cadenza" as "an elaborate, often improvised musical passage by played by an unaccompanied instrument in a concerto, usually near the end of the first movement."

==Page 688==
[[image:fay-wray2.jpg|thumb|Fay Wray|120px|right]]688.36-37 '''Fay Wray . . . in her screentest scene with Robert Armstrong''' 
Ann Darrow’s (Fay Wray) screentest is only peripherally "erotic mugging." She is instructed by Carl Denham (played by Armstrong) to look up and react in fear (in anticipation of her first actual view of King Kong, of whom she knows nothing yet). She is so caught up in her performance that she actually faints. It is this scene that Jessica mimics with Roger earlier in the novel.

==Page 689==
689.26 '''a round black iron anarchist bomb''' 
Another reference to the Porky Pig cartoon "The Blow-Out." The Mad Bomber puts such a device, along with a lot of other explosives, into an alarm clock rigged to explode.

==Page 691==
691.34-35 '''Paranoid . . . For The Day!''' 
The TV game show [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_for_a_Day ''Queen for a Day''] debuted as a radio show in 1945 with host Jack Bailey.

==Page 693==
'''MB DRO ROSHI''' 
When discussing GR, the writer Alan Moore recalled this sequence as "the whole point of the novel... It’s just this bit of burnt paper that, if you put it together, talks about America dropping the atom bomb on Hiroshima. Which is of course, the end of the V bomb, which has been made obsolete. Gravity’s got a new rainbow." [http://www.wired.com/underwire/2009/12/alan-moore-dodgem-logic/3/ source]

==Page 695==
695.25-28 '''Dungannon, Virginia . . . or Ellis, Kansas.''' 
[[Weisenburger's Companion to Gravity's Rainbow|Weisenburger]]’s usual attention to geographical detail fails here. He does not find these towns on the borders of time zones in 1988 because the zones had been changed, shifting to the west, in the previous decades. All of the towns Pynchon names were on the borders of time zones in 1945 (and Murdo and Apalachicola still are). Kenosha itself borders Lake Michigan through which the Eastern-Central Time Zone border runs.

==Page 697==
'''American Hotchkisses are the guns that raked through the unarmed Indians at Wounded Knee.'''
Wounded Knee massacre was the last major armed conflict between the Dakota Sioux and the United States, subsequently described as a "massacre" by General Nelson A. Miles in a letter to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs.

On December 29, 1890, five hundred troops of the U.S. 7th Cavalry, supported by four Hotchkiss guns (a lightweight artillery piece capable of rapid fire), surrounded an encampment of Miniconjou Sioux (Lakota) and Hunkpapa Sioux (Lakota)[2] with orders to escort them to the railroad for transport to Omaha, Nebraska. The commander of the 7th had been ordered to disarm the Lakota before proceeding and placed his men in too close proximity to the Dakota, alarming them. Shooting broke out near the end of the disarmament, and accounts differ regarding who fired first and why.

By the time it was over, 25 troopers and 300 Dakota Sioux lay dead, including men, women, and children.

[[Pages 734-760#Page 752|Also, see note for p. 752]]; [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wounded_Knee_Massacre Wikipedia entry for Wounded Knee Massacre]
{{GR PbP}}

Pages 674-700

2010-01-03T16:28:07Z

Bleakhaus:

{{GR PbP Text}}

==Page 674==
674.10 '''a City of the Future''' 
Evokes, again, the opening images of Lang’s ''Metropolis''. See [[Pages 482-488#Page 482|482.25]].

==Page 675==
'''Marcel''' 
For an argument that Marcel in some way signifies the great French novelist Marcel Proust, see: [http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/paper_proust.html Pynchon Nods: Proust in Gravity’s Rainbow] by Erik Ketzan.

==Page 676==
675.33 '''at best they manage to emerge...''' 
The description of decisions emerging from a chaos of competing forces echoes Pynchon's letter to Jules Siegel in 1965, [http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=The_World_is_at_Fault The World is at Fault], in which Pynchon describes the journey of our souls through "whatever obsolescenses, bigotries, theories of education workable and un, parental wisdom or lack of it, happen to get in its more or less (random) pilgrimage..."

==Page 682==
682.18 '''Ho-zay''' 
Another of Nalline’s transliterations: "Jose," for Joseph.

==Page 684==
[[image:william-bendix.jpg|thumb|William Bendix in ''Lifeboat''|150px|right]]684.31-32 '''William Bendix''' 
An appropriate supporting role for Bendix would be his part in [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeboat_(film) Hitchcock’s ''Lifeboat''] (1944), in which he plays a lindy-hopping sailor whose leg has to be amputated.

==Page 685==
685.21-22 '''"My Prelude to a Kiss," "Tenement Symphony"''' 
The former song (actually titled just "Prelude to a Kiss") is a 1945 composition by Duke Ellington with Irving Gordon and Irving Mills; the latter was composed by Hal Borne, with words by Sid Kullen and Roy Golden, and sung by Tony Martin in the 1941 Marx Brothers movie ''The Big Store''.

685.26 '''sexcrime fantasy''' 
The term "sexcrime" was invented as a Newspeak word by George Orwell in 1984. It refers to sex used for pleasure instead of simple procreation, an offense in the totalitarian state of the book.

685.28 '''MY DOPER’S CADENZA''' 
The ''New World Dictionary'' defines "cadenza" as "an elaborate, often improvised musical passage by played by an unaccompanied instrument in a concerto, usually near the end of the first movement."

==Page 688==
[[image:fay-wray2.jpg|thumb|Fay Wray|120px|right]]688.36-37 '''Fay Wray . . . in her screentest scene with Robert Armstrong''' 
Ann Darrow’s (Fay Wray) screentest is only peripherally "erotic mugging." She is instructed by Carl Denham (played by Armstrong) to look up and react in fear (in anticipation of her first actual view of King Kong, of whom she knows nothing yet). She is so caught up in her performance that she actually faints. It is this scene that Jessica mimics with Roger earlier in the novel.

==Page 689==
689.26 '''a round black iron anarchist bomb''' 
Another reference to the Porky Pig cartoon "The Blow-Out." The Mad Bomber puts such a device, along with a lot of other explosives, into an alarm clock rigged to explode.

==Page 691==
691.34-35 '''Paranoid . . . For The Day!''' 
The TV game show [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_for_a_Day ''Queen for a Day''] debuted as a radio show in 1945 with host Jack Bailey.

==Page 693==
'''MB DRO ROSHI''' 
When discussing GR, the writer Alan Moore recalled this sequence as "the whole point of the novel... It’s just this bit of burnt paper that, if you put it together, talks about America dropping the atom bomb on Hiroshima. Which is of course, the end of the V bomb, which has been made obsolete. Gravity’s got a new rainbow." [http://www.wired.com/underwire/2009/12/alan-moore-dodgem-logic/3/ source]

==Page 695==
695.25-28 '''Dungannon, Virginia . . . or Ellis, Kansas.''' 
[[Weisenburger's Companion to Gravity's Rainbow|Weisenburger]]’s usual attention to geographical detail fails here. He does not find these towns on the borders of time zones in 1988 because the zones had been changed, shifting to the west, in the previous decades. All of the towns Pynchon names were on the borders of time zones in 1945 (and Murdo and Apalachicola still are). Kenosha itself borders Lake Michigan through which the Eastern-Central Time Zone border runs.

==Page 697==
'''American Hotchkisses are the guns that raked through the unarmed Indians at Wounded Knee.'''
Wounded Knee massacre was the last major armed conflict between the Dakota Sioux and the United States, subsequently described as a "massacre" by General Nelson A. Miles in a letter to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs.

On December 29, 1890, five hundred troops of the U.S. 7th Cavalry, supported by four Hotchkiss guns (a lightweight artillery piece capable of rapid fire), surrounded an encampment of Miniconjou Sioux (Lakota) and Hunkpapa Sioux (Lakota)[2] with orders to escort them to the railroad for transport to Omaha, Nebraska. The commander of the 7th had been ordered to disarm the Lakota before proceeding and placed his men in too close proximity to the Dakota, alarming them. Shooting broke out near the end of the disarmament, and accounts differ regarding who fired first and why.

By the time it was over, 25 troopers and 300 Dakota Sioux lay dead, including men, women, and children.

[[Pages 734-760#Page 752|Also, see note for p. 752]]; [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wounded_Knee_Massacre Wikipedia entry for Wounded Knee Massacre]
{{GR PbP}}

Pages 674-700

2009-10-16T22:35:20Z

Bleakhaus:

{{GR PbP Text}}

==Page 674==
674.10 '''a City of the Future''' 
Evokes, again, the opening images of Lang’s ''Metropolis''. See [[Pages 482-488#Page 482|482.25]].

==Page 675==
'''Marcel''' 
For an argument that Marcel in some way signifies the great French novelist Marcel Proust, see: [http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/paper_proust.html Pynchon Nods: Proust in Gravity’s Rainbow] by Erik Ketzan.

==Page 676==
675.33 '''at best they manage to emerge...''' 
The description of decisions emerging from a chaos of competing forces echoes Pynchon's letter to Jules Siegel in 1965, [http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=The_World_is_at_Fault The World is at Fault], in which Pynchon describes the journey of our souls through "whatever obsolescenses, bigotries, theories of education workable and un, parental wisdom or lack of it, happen to get in its more or less (random) pilgrimage..."

==Page 682==
682.18 '''Ho-zay''' 
Another of Nalline’s transliterations: "Jose," for Joseph.

==Page 684==
[[image:william-bendix.jpg|thumb|William Bendix in ''Lifeboat''|150px|right]]684.31-32 '''William Bendix''' 
An appropriate supporting role for Bendix would be his part in [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeboat_(film) Hitchcock’s ''Lifeboat''] (1944), in which he plays a lindy-hopping sailor whose leg has to be amputated.

==Page 685==
685.21-22 '''"My Prelude to a Kiss," "Tenement Symphony"''' 
The former song (actually titled just "Prelude to a Kiss") is a 1945 composition by Duke Ellington with Irving Gordon and Irving Mills; the latter was composed by Hal Borne, with words by Sid Kullen and Roy Golden, and sung by Tony Martin in the 1941 Marx Brothers movie ''The Big Store''.

685.26 '''sexcrime fantasy''' 
The term "sexcrime" was invented as a Newspeak word by George Orwell in 1984. It refers to sex used for pleasure instead of simple procreation, an offense in the totalitarian state of the book.

685.28 '''MY DOPER’S CADENZA''' 
The ''New World Dictionary'' defines "cadenza" as "an elaborate, often improvised musical passage by played by an unaccompanied instrument in a concerto, usually near the end of the first movement."

==Page 688==
[[image:fay-wray2.jpg|thumb|Fay Wray|120px|right]]688.36-37 '''Fay Wray . . . in her screentest scene with Robert Armstrong''' 
Ann Darrow’s (Fay Wray) screentest is only peripherally "erotic mugging." She is instructed by Carl Denham (played by Armstrong) to look up and react in fear (in anticipation of her first actual view of King Kong, of whom she knows nothing yet). She is so caught up in her performance that she actually faints. It is this scene that Jessica mimics with Roger earlier in the novel.

==Page 689==
689.26 '''a round black iron anarchist bomb''' 
Another reference to the Porky Pig cartoon "The Blow-Out." The Mad Bomber puts such a device, along with a lot of other explosives, into an alarm clock rigged to explode.

==Page 691==
691.34-35 '''Paranoid . . . For The Day!''' 
The TV game show [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_for_a_Day ''Queen for a Day''] debuted as a radio show in 1945 with host Jack Bailey.

==Page 695==
695.25-28 '''Dungannon, Virginia . . . or Ellis, Kansas.''' 
[[Weisenburger's Companion to Gravity's Rainbow|Weisenburger]]’s usual attention to geographical detail fails here. He does not find these towns on the borders of time zones in 1988 because the zones had been changed, shifting to the west, in the previous decades. All of the towns Pynchon names were on the borders of time zones in 1945 (and Murdo and Apalachicola still are). Kenosha itself borders Lake Michigan through which the Eastern-Central Time Zone border runs.

==Page 697==
'''American Hotchkisses are the guns that raked through the unarmed Indians at Wounded Knee.'''
Wounded Knee massacre was the last major armed conflict between the Dakota Sioux and the United States, subsequently described as a "massacre" by General Nelson A. Miles in a letter to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs.

On December 29, 1890, five hundred troops of the U.S. 7th Cavalry, supported by four Hotchkiss guns (a lightweight artillery piece capable of rapid fire), surrounded an encampment of Miniconjou Sioux (Lakota) and Hunkpapa Sioux (Lakota)[2] with orders to escort them to the railroad for transport to Omaha, Nebraska. The commander of the 7th had been ordered to disarm the Lakota before proceeding and placed his men in too close proximity to the Dakota, alarming them. Shooting broke out near the end of the disarmament, and accounts differ regarding who fired first and why.

By the time it was over, 25 troopers and 300 Dakota Sioux lay dead, including men, women, and children.

[[Pages 734-760#Page 752|Also, see note for p. 752]]; [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wounded_Knee_Massacre Wikipedia entry for Wounded Knee Massacre]
{{GR PbP}}

Pages 674-700

2009-10-04T18:08:58Z

Bleakhaus: /* Page 675 */

{{GR PbP Text}}

==Page 674==
674.10 '''a City of the Future''' 
Evokes, again, the opening images of Lang’s ''Metropolis''. See [[Pages 482-488#Page 482|482.25]].

==Page 675==
675.33 '''at best they manage to emerge...''' 
The description of decisions emerging from a chaos of competing forces echoes Pynchon's letter to Jules Siegel in 1965, [http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=The_World_is_at_Fault The World is at Fault], in which Pynchon describes the journey of our souls through "whatever obsolescenses, bigotries, theories of education workable and un, parental wisdom or lack of it, happen to get in its more or less (random) pilgrimage..."

==Page 682==
682.18 '''Ho-zay''' 
Another of Nalline’s transliterations: "Jose," for Joseph.

==Page 684==
[[image:william-bendix.jpg|thumb|William Bendix in ''Lifeboat''|150px|right]]684.31-32 '''William Bendix''' 
An appropriate supporting role for Bendix would be his part in [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeboat_(film) Hitchcock’s ''Lifeboat''] (1944), in which he plays a lindy-hopping sailor whose leg has to be amputated.

==Page 685==
685.21-22 '''"My Prelude to a Kiss," "Tenement Symphony"''' 
The former song (actually titled just "Prelude to a Kiss") is a 1945 composition by Duke Ellington with Irving Gordon and Irving Mills; the latter was composed by Hal Borne, with words by Sid Kullen and Roy Golden, and sung by Tony Martin in the 1941 Marx Brothers movie ''The Big Store''.

685.26 '''sexcrime fantasy''' 
The term "sexcrime" was invented as a Newspeak word by George Orwell in 1984. It refers to sex used for pleasure instead of simple procreation, an offense in the totalitarian state of the book.

685.28 '''MY DOPER’S CADENZA''' 
The ''New World Dictionary'' defines "cadenza" as "an elaborate, often improvised musical passage by played by an unaccompanied instrument in a concerto, usually near the end of the first movement."

==Page 688==
[[image:fay-wray2.jpg|thumb|Fay Wray|120px|right]]688.36-37 '''Fay Wray . . . in her screentest scene with Robert Armstrong''' 
Ann Darrow’s (Fay Wray) screentest is only peripherally "erotic mugging." She is instructed by Carl Denham (played by Armstrong) to look up and react in fear (in anticipation of her first actual view of King Kong, of whom she knows nothing yet). She is so caught up in her performance that she actually faints. It is this scene that Jessica mimics with Roger earlier in the novel.

==Page 689==
689.26 '''a round black iron anarchist bomb''' 
Another reference to the Porky Pig cartoon "The Blow-Out." The Mad Bomber puts such a device, along with a lot of other explosives, into an alarm clock rigged to explode.

==Page 691==
691.34-35 '''Paranoid . . . For The Day!''' 
The TV game show [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_for_a_Day ''Queen for a Day''] debuted as a radio show in 1945 with host Jack Bailey.

==Page 695==
695.25-28 '''Dungannon, Virginia . . . or Ellis, Kansas.''' 
[[Weisenburger's Companion to Gravity's Rainbow|Weisenburger]]’s usual attention to geographical detail fails here. He does not find these towns on the borders of time zones in 1988 because the zones had been changed, shifting to the west, in the previous decades. All of the towns Pynchon names were on the borders of time zones in 1945 (and Murdo and Apalachicola still are). Kenosha itself borders Lake Michigan through which the Eastern-Central Time Zone border runs.

==Page 697==
'''American Hotchkisses are the guns that raked through the unarmed Indians at Wounded Knee.'''
Wounded Knee massacre was the last major armed conflict between the Dakota Sioux and the United States, subsequently described as a "massacre" by General Nelson A. Miles in a letter to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs.

On December 29, 1890, five hundred troops of the U.S. 7th Cavalry, supported by four Hotchkiss guns (a lightweight artillery piece capable of rapid fire), surrounded an encampment of Miniconjou Sioux (Lakota) and Hunkpapa Sioux (Lakota)[2] with orders to escort them to the railroad for transport to Omaha, Nebraska. The commander of the 7th had been ordered to disarm the Lakota before proceeding and placed his men in too close proximity to the Dakota, alarming them. Shooting broke out near the end of the disarmament, and accounts differ regarding who fired first and why.

By the time it was over, 25 troopers and 300 Dakota Sioux lay dead, including men, women, and children.

[[Pages 734-760#Page 752|Also, see note for p. 752]]; [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wounded_Knee_Massacre Wikipedia entry for Wounded Knee Massacre]
{{GR PbP}}

Pages 674-700

2009-10-04T18:08:30Z

Bleakhaus:

{{GR PbP Text}}

==Page 674==
674.10 '''a City of the Future''' 
Evokes, again, the opening images of Lang’s ''Metropolis''. See [[Pages 482-488#Page 482|482.25]].

==Page 675==
675.33 '''at best they manage to emerge...''' 
The description of decisions emerging from a chaos of competing forces echoes Pynchon's letter to Jules Siegel in 1965, [[http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=The_World_is_at_Fault]], in which Pynchon describes the journey of our souls through "whatever obsolescenses, bigotries, theories of education workable and un, parental wisdom or lack of it, happen to get in its more or less (random) pilgrimage..."

==Page 682==
682.18 '''Ho-zay''' 
Another of Nalline’s transliterations: "Jose," for Joseph.

==Page 684==
[[image:william-bendix.jpg|thumb|William Bendix in ''Lifeboat''|150px|right]]684.31-32 '''William Bendix''' 
An appropriate supporting role for Bendix would be his part in [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeboat_(film) Hitchcock’s ''Lifeboat''] (1944), in which he plays a lindy-hopping sailor whose leg has to be amputated.

==Page 685==
685.21-22 '''"My Prelude to a Kiss," "Tenement Symphony"''' 
The former song (actually titled just "Prelude to a Kiss") is a 1945 composition by Duke Ellington with Irving Gordon and Irving Mills; the latter was composed by Hal Borne, with words by Sid Kullen and Roy Golden, and sung by Tony Martin in the 1941 Marx Brothers movie ''The Big Store''.

685.26 '''sexcrime fantasy''' 
The term "sexcrime" was invented as a Newspeak word by George Orwell in 1984. It refers to sex used for pleasure instead of simple procreation, an offense in the totalitarian state of the book.

685.28 '''MY DOPER’S CADENZA''' 
The ''New World Dictionary'' defines "cadenza" as "an elaborate, often improvised musical passage by played by an unaccompanied instrument in a concerto, usually near the end of the first movement."

==Page 688==
[[image:fay-wray2.jpg|thumb|Fay Wray|120px|right]]688.36-37 '''Fay Wray . . . in her screentest scene with Robert Armstrong''' 
Ann Darrow’s (Fay Wray) screentest is only peripherally "erotic mugging." She is instructed by Carl Denham (played by Armstrong) to look up and react in fear (in anticipation of her first actual view of King Kong, of whom she knows nothing yet). She is so caught up in her performance that she actually faints. It is this scene that Jessica mimics with Roger earlier in the novel.

==Page 689==
689.26 '''a round black iron anarchist bomb''' 
Another reference to the Porky Pig cartoon "The Blow-Out." The Mad Bomber puts such a device, along with a lot of other explosives, into an alarm clock rigged to explode.

==Page 691==
691.34-35 '''Paranoid . . . For The Day!''' 
The TV game show [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_for_a_Day ''Queen for a Day''] debuted as a radio show in 1945 with host Jack Bailey.

==Page 695==
695.25-28 '''Dungannon, Virginia . . . or Ellis, Kansas.''' 
[[Weisenburger's Companion to Gravity's Rainbow|Weisenburger]]’s usual attention to geographical detail fails here. He does not find these towns on the borders of time zones in 1988 because the zones had been changed, shifting to the west, in the previous decades. All of the towns Pynchon names were on the borders of time zones in 1945 (and Murdo and Apalachicola still are). Kenosha itself borders Lake Michigan through which the Eastern-Central Time Zone border runs.

==Page 697==
'''American Hotchkisses are the guns that raked through the unarmed Indians at Wounded Knee.'''
Wounded Knee massacre was the last major armed conflict between the Dakota Sioux and the United States, subsequently described as a "massacre" by General Nelson A. Miles in a letter to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs.

On December 29, 1890, five hundred troops of the U.S. 7th Cavalry, supported by four Hotchkiss guns (a lightweight artillery piece capable of rapid fire), surrounded an encampment of Miniconjou Sioux (Lakota) and Hunkpapa Sioux (Lakota)[2] with orders to escort them to the railroad for transport to Omaha, Nebraska. The commander of the 7th had been ordered to disarm the Lakota before proceeding and placed his men in too close proximity to the Dakota, alarming them. Shooting broke out near the end of the disarmament, and accounts differ regarding who fired first and why.

By the time it was over, 25 troopers and 300 Dakota Sioux lay dead, including men, women, and children.

[[Pages 734-760#Page 752|Also, see note for p. 752]]; [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wounded_Knee_Massacre Wikipedia entry for Wounded Knee Massacre]
{{GR PbP}}

Pages 617-626

2009-07-11T21:12:56Z

Bleakhaus: /* Page 617 */

{{GR PbP Text}}

==Page 617==
'''What? - Richard M. Nixon''' 
The uncorrected galleys of ''Gravity's Rainbow'' sent in advance to book critics featured a different epigraph here. [http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?p=15378 source]. Instead of the Nixon quote, it used the following:

''“She has brought them to her senses, 
''They have laughed inside her laughter, 
''Now she rallies her defenses, 
''For she fears someone will ask her 
''For eternity — 
''And she’s so busy being free….” — Joni Mitchell. ''

These lyrics come from the song "Cactus Tree," from Mitchell's 1968 album, "Song To A Seagull." Full lyrics and sample at (fansite) [http://jonimitchell.com/music/song.cfm?id=84 Jonimitchell.com].

==Page 622==
[[image:shadow-waltz.jpg|thumb|100px|The Shadow Waltz|right]]622.30-31 '''that dreamy Dick Powell song''' 
Is actually titled "The Shadow Waltz," composed by Al Dubin and Harry Warren for [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_diggers_of_1933 ''The Gold Diggers of 1933''] (not [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footlight_Parade ''Footlight Parade'']). The song in the film gives way to a typically bizarre [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busby_Berkeley Busby Berkeley] musical production in which women on roller skates play violins outlined with neon lights.

==Page 625==
625.10 '''gnaedige Frau:''' 
The literal meaning of the usual polite form of address of a lady of a high rank ("merciful" or "benevolent Madam") has got a new value here.

==Page 626==
626.02 '''Chapter 81 work''' 
This obscure reference comes (again) from [[Pages_20-29#Page 27|''The Berkshire Hills'']]. As the authors note:

:" ... the one occupation which survives all depressions in the small Berkshire villages is road work. Regardless of bad financial conditions, citizens sidetrack other appropriations to continue voting to raise and appropriate the sum of --- dollars for Chapter 81 highways..." (p. 214).

:"Chapter 81 work is for road improvement, during which a scraper removes sod and dirt from ditches and shoulders, followed by workers who clean out the ditches and replace culverts and drains" (p. 216).

{{GR PbP}}

Pages 617-626

2009-07-11T21:04:40Z

Bleakhaus: Orinal Joni Mitchell epigraph info added!

{{GR PbP Text}}

==Page 617==
'''What? - Richard M. Nixon''' 
The uncorrected proofs of ''Gravity's Rainbow'' sent in advance to book critics featured a different epigraph here. [http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?p=15378 source]. Instead of the Nixon quote, it used the following:

''“She has brought them to her senses, 
''They have laughed inside her laughter, 
''Now she rallies her defenses, 
''For she fears someone will ask her 
''For eternity — 
''And she’s so busy being free….” — Joni Mitchell. ''

These lyrics come from the song "Cactus Tree," from Mitchell's 1968 album, "Song To A Seagull." Full lyrics and sample at (fansite) [http://jonimitchell.com/music/song.cfm?id=84 Jonimitchell.com].

==Page 622==
[[image:shadow-waltz.jpg|thumb|100px|The Shadow Waltz|right]]622.30-31 '''that dreamy Dick Powell song''' 
Is actually titled "The Shadow Waltz," composed by Al Dubin and Harry Warren for [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_diggers_of_1933 ''The Gold Diggers of 1933''] (not [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footlight_Parade ''Footlight Parade'']). The song in the film gives way to a typically bizarre [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busby_Berkeley Busby Berkeley] musical production in which women on roller skates play violins outlined with neon lights.

==Page 625==
625.10 '''gnaedige Frau:''' 
The literal meaning of the usual polite form of address of a lady of a high rank ("merciful" or "benevolent Madam") has got a new value here.

==Page 626==
626.02 '''Chapter 81 work''' 
This obscure reference comes (again) from [[Pages_20-29#Page 27|''The Berkshire Hills'']]. As the authors note:

:" ... the one occupation which survives all depressions in the small Berkshire villages is road work. Regardless of bad financial conditions, citizens sidetrack other appropriations to continue voting to raise and appropriate the sum of --- dollars for Chapter 81 highways..." (p. 214).

:"Chapter 81 work is for road improvement, during which a scraper removes sod and dirt from ditches and shoulders, followed by workers who clean out the ditches and replace culverts and drains" (p. 216).

{{GR PbP}}

Pages 3-7

2009-07-08T18:34:14Z

Bleakhaus: /* Page 7 */

{{GR PbP Text}}

==Page 3==

3.03 '''The Evacuation''' 
First instance in ''Gravity's Rainbow'' of a lifetime stylistic trait of Pynchon's: unpredictable use of Capitalization. Capitalization is usually applied to nouns, but not uniformly. Often a matter of emphasis. See ''Mason & Dixon'' for the widest use, there imitating the writing of the time in which the book is set. 
The use throughout all his work might indicate how well-read and influenced by works written before capitalization was standardized Pynchon is. 
The full rules of capitalization for English are complicated. The rules have also changed over time, generally to capitalize fewer terms; to the modern reader, an 18th century document seems to use initial capitals excessively. Wikipedia

3.03 '''theatre''' 
Besides the normal meanings, including "theater of war", 'theatre' is the name that fireworks' organizers call a sky display.

3.05 '''iron queen''' 
a queensize bed made of iron. Hardly made after 1900. Queen Victoria had a famous brass (and iron) one in the Crystal Palace! "Beds made of hollow tubes of steel, iron, and brass came to be manufactured in the mid 19th century.
These were to be used both by soldiers and civilians. Their main advantage at that time was that unlike wooden beds, these could not be infested with bedbugs. Queen Victoria's brass bed at the Crystal Palace has been the most famous antique brass bed. 
By the late 19th century, metal beds were nearly out of fashion." Antique beds [[http://www.bestinbeds.com/beds/antique-bed.html]]

Also, In The Odyssey, when Odysseus goes to the Underworld, he refers to Persephone as '''the Iron Queen'''. Of the four gods of Empedocles' elements it is the name of Persephone alone that is taboo, for the Greeks knew another face of Persephone as well. She was also the terrible Queen of the dead, whose name was not safe to speak aloud, who was named simply "The Maiden". Wikipedia
[[http://www.en.wikipedia.org/Persephone]]

3.07 '''crystal palace''' 
See Alpha entry, especially this re cultural meaning: 
The Crystal Palace made a strong impression on visitors coming from all over Europe, including a number of writers. It soon became a symbol of modernity and civilization, hailed by some and decried by others.

In ''What Is to Be Done?'', Russian author and philosopher Nikolai Chernyshevsky pledges to transform the society into a Crystal Palace thanks to a socialist revolution. 
Fyodor Dostoevsky implicitly replied to Chernyshevsky in ''Notes from Underground''. The narrator thinks that human nature will prefer destruction and chaos to the harmony symbolized by the Crystal Palace.

When the first major international exhibition of arts and industries was held in London in 1851, the London Crystal Palace epitomized the achievements of the entire world at a time when progress was racing forward at a speed never before known to mankind. The Great Exhibition marked the beginning of a tradition of world's fairs, which would be held in major cities all across the globe. Following the success of the London fair, it was inevitable that other nations would soon try their hand at organizing their own exhibitions. In fact, the next international fair was held only two years later, in 1853, in New York City. This fair would have its own Crystal Palace to symbolize not only the achievements of the world, but also the nationalistic pride of a relatively young nation and all that she stood for. Walt Whitman, the great American poet, wrote in "The Song of the Exposition": 
http://www.ric.edu/rpotter/cryspal.html

That the Crystal Palace Exhibition "marked the beginning of a tradition of world's fairs" can remind that ''Against the Day'' starts at the Columbian Exhibition of 1893 in Chicago. More international optimism.

3.14 '''second sheep''' 
Compare the narrator’s discussion of William Slothrop’s heretical tract "On Preterition," which argued for the holiness of the preterite, and Weisenburger’s note at [[Pages 549-557#555|555.29-31]].

A wide symbology relates to sheep in ancient art, traditions and culture. Judaism uses many sheep references including the Passover lamb. Christianity uses sheep-related images, such as: Christ as the good shepherd, or as the sacrificed Lamb of God (Agnus Dei); the bishop's Pastoral; the lion lying down with the lamb (a reference to all of creation being at peace, without suffering, predation or otherwise). Greek Easter celebrations traditionally feature a meal of Paschal lamb. Sheep also have considerable importance in Arab culture; Eid ul-Adha is a major annual festival in Islam in which a sheep is sacrificed. 
Herding sheep plays an important historico-symbolic part in the Jewish and Christian faiths, since Abraham, Jacob, Moses, and King David all worked as shepherds. wikipedia
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheep] 

Sheep are often associated with obedience due to the widespread perception that they lack intelligence and their undoubted herd mentality, hence the pejorative connotation of the adjective 'ovine'. In George Orwell's satirical novel ''Animal Farm'', sheep are used to represent the ignorant and uneducated masses of revolutionary Russia. The sheep are unable to be taught the subtleties of revolutionary ideology and can only be taught repetitive slogans such as "Four legs good, two legs bad" which they bleat in unison at rallies. The rock group Pink Floyd wrote a song using sheep as a symbol for ordinary people, that is, everyone who isn't a pig or dog. People who accept overbearing governments have been pejoratively referred to as "sheeple". wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheep] 

3.19 '''half-silvered''' 
adj. (of a mirror) having an incomplete reflective coating, so that half the incident light is reflected and half transmitted: used in optical instruments and two-way mirrors. Collins Dictionary 
See the splitting of light all through ''Against the Day'', Pynchon's 2006
novel.

3.19 '''view finder''' 
as two words, this seems to refer to handheld devices in which slides were slid and viewed in 3-dimensions. Here is a version still being made
[http://porters.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=PCS&Product_Code=520098&Product_Count=&Category_Code= view finder]. "half-silvered" above seems most correct with this kind of device.

3.22 '''They pass in line''' 
A Pynchonian leitmotif. The linearity of lining up has resonances throughout his work, articulated most straightforwardly in ''Against the Day'', which starts with "Single up all Lines!", and perhaps dealt with
most profoundly in ''Mason & Dixon'', a novel about creating the "Mason & Dixon line".

3.25 '''Rain comes down''' 
Pynchon's first published story is called ''The Small Rain''. See his remarks on rain in fiction in ''Slow Learner''.

3.30 '''naptha winters''' 
Naptha is the flammable liquid obtained from the distillation of coal and used to fire gaslights and heaters. ...

3.32 '''rolling-stock absence''' 
Rolling stock is the collective term that describes all the vehicles which move on a railway.

3.35 '''Absolute Zero''' 
Theoretical state when no molecules move. [http://www.pa.msu.edu/sciencet/ask_st/012992.html..Absolute Zero]. State
of entropy, a key concept of Thomas Pynchon's. See early story, ''Entropy'' in ''Slow Learner''.

3.36 '''places whose ''names he has never heard''''' 
'secret cities of poor', deep under these fallen girders. Places
that have never been spoken of, yet exist. Lower than ''Low-lands''. 
Later in Pynchon's world,in other books, ''Mason & Dixon'' and ''Against the Day'', we will travel deeper underground, to places with no names we know, it seems. See a "progressive ''knotting into''", 3.26 in GR.

3.37 '''the walls break down''' 
See "wall of death" later in ''Gravity's Rainbow''. A-and in ''Against the Day''.

===Page 4===
4.01 '''getting narrower...cornering tighter and tighter''' 
Cf. the rationalization of choice and similar phrasing in ''Against the Day'', pynchon wiki p. [http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_1-25 10]

4.05 '''caravan''' 
1) a procession, in single file, of merchants or pilgrims
2) a procession of mules, camels or certain other animals. Sources: Online dictionary and wikipedia. 3) ''Caravan'' is a song by Van Morrison included on his 1970 album, ''Moondance''. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caravan_%28Van_Morrison_song%29 Caravan] 
Pilgrim has Pynchonian resonances, especially in ''Against the Day''. A-And, once again, notice the singleing up of lines.

4.07 '''cockade''' 
1) n. An ornament, such as a rosette or knot of ribbon, usually worn on the hat as a badge. [Alteration of obsolete cockard , from French.] 

2) Operational code name for Allied deception operations intended to draw attention away from Normandy prior to D-Day
[http://www.secondworldwar.co.uk/glossc.html]

Cf. pun: cock aid, esp. as Slothrop's 'condition' within ''Gravity's Rainbow'' is revealed.

4.07 '''the color of lead''' 
cockades are usually brightly colored. Lead is not. 

Lead is a malleable toxic metallic element, bluish-white in color that
tarnishes to a dull gray. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead Lead] 

Lead is the only currency-carrying element which does not absorb nor emit heat. Entropic, so to speak. Another resonance for "toward the zero"? 

Lead is what bullets are made of.

4.12 '''corridors straight and functional''' 
More forced linearity.

4.31 '''But it is already light...light has come percolating in''' 
See also the opening lines of Pynchon's next book, 'Vineland', which begins with someone waking from a (possibly prophetic) dream, with light streaming in.

4.37 '''the different levels of the enormous room''' 
The transition from dream to waking is so subtle, and beautifully done, right down to little details, such as how the dreamer's real and dreamt surroundings cross over: the multi-levelled carriage of the dream becomes, on awaking, the room with many levels; the carriage's evacuees ('second sheep') become the room's 'drunken wastrels', etc.

==Page 5==
5.03 '''His name is Capt. Geoffrey ("Pirate") Prentice.''' 
Pirate’s name derives from Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta ''The Pirates of Penzance'', in which the hero’s nurse has made a fateful error in carrying out her employer’s instructions: Instead of having the boy apprenticed to a (ship’s) '''pilot''', he was apprenticed to a pirate, hence a "'''pirate''' ‘prentice." The name, though, is not simply a fortuitous pun: In her error, the nurse has lost a message, like the hare of Herero myth, and thus guaranteed her young charge’s preterition. (There are also connections here to the theme of "communications entropy," which is central to ''The Crying of Lot 49'' and the short story "Entropy.")

5.03 '''He is wrapped in a thick blanket, a tartan of orange, rust, and scarlet. His skull feels made of metal.''' 

The rust in the tartan goes well with the metal-feeling skull. And there's a lot of metal in the preceding pages - lead, girders, the iron queen, the metal train tracks, etc. So it's appropriate that Prentice wakes feeling metallic.

5.22-24 '''not far from Chelsea Embankment, by Corydon Throsp, an acquaintance of the Rossettis' who wore hair smocks and liked to cultivate pharmaceutical plants up on the roof''' 

This is a pretty posh address for this lot, is it not? Kensington? The area includes the famous Chenye Walk where Keith Richards, not unfamiliar with Osbie Feel's kind of mushrooms, once lived. As did Rossetti, who we're told Throsp is on nodding terms with. Rosetti's wife died of a drug overdose, he took to keeping wombats as pets, one of these wombats used to attend the dinner table, and was said to have provided the inspiration for the Dormouse character in Alice in Wonderland.

That Dormouse's advice - "feed your head" - was used at the end of Jefferson Airplane's mushroom flavoured, Alice-inspired song 'White Rabbit'. Way later on in the book, Slothrop has a dream in which a statue of the White Rabbit in Llandudno is giving him sage advice, but he loses it as he wakes. Oddly enough, the drug that killed Rosetti's wife was laudanum, which isn't very different from 'Llandudno'. Of course that's almost certainly just a coincidence, but all of the foregoing is the sort of stuff you find yourself digging up by chasing after the countless references Pynchon sews into the fabric of the book.

5.32 '''all got scumbled together, eventually, by the knives of the seasons, to an impasto, feet thick, of unbelievable black topsoil''' 

Didn't notice 'scumbled' first time round, I was going too fast. Second
read I looked it up. Scumbled? Isn't that some sort of painting
technique? Pynchon make a mistake there? Mean to say scrambled?
Hmmmmmmmm. Then I thought of the 'knives' bit, wondered if artists might
use a [http://painting.about.com/od/paintingforbeginners/a/Painting_Knife.htm palette knife] to do this scumbling business. A Google search for
"scumble knife palette " found me this:

http://www.messums.com/sub_newsview.ink?nid=11191

"Hard impasto ridges left by the edge of the knife provided the texture
I needed to bring the waves crashing in."

[http://www.thefreedictionary.com/impasto Impasto] eh? I thought that just meant paste. So the knives in "knives of
the seasons" makes perfect sense. And Dictionary.com throws up another
interesting nugget:

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=scumbled

"To blur the outlines of: a writer who scumbled the line that divides
history and fiction."

Apt example!

A-and the wonderful phrase, "knives of the seasons" embodies another lifelong deep theme in Pynchon's work: that the 'wheeling' of time [see later in ''Gravity's Rainbow'' and ''Against the Day''], the cycle of nature, is an ineluctable good thing, even as it knifes us, ravages, us. It thickens us, impasto-like, gives us topsoil in our characters, so to speak.
 

==Page 6==

[[image:dna-molecule.jpg|thumb|100px|right]]6.09 '''a spiral ladder''' 
Suggests the double-helix structure of the DNA molecule that preserves the "living genetic chains" evoked at [[Pages 7-16#10|10.14]]. 
Double-helix structure like a mandala, pervasive in GR: 
"Mandala" is an ancient Sanskrit word meaning "sacred circle that protects the soul." It also refers to the sacred cosmograms that serve as core symbols of all cultures. Westerners have been fascinated for centuries about the mandalas of the Hindu-Buddhist cultures of Asia, most often painted geometric diagrams of great beauty and sophistication, that draw the viewer into a realm of balance, harmony, and calm. But such diagrams are actually architectural blueprints of the purified realm of bliss that we can only realize through enlightenment. They represent three-dimensional spaces of personal and communal exaltation, palaces for the regal confidence of love, compassion, and universal satisfaction of self and other. Understanding their role in anchoring the world-picture of a culture or a person provides a new insight into the "mandalas" of our own culture – the national space anchored by the Washington monument and its environs, or the personal cosmological space anchored by the models of the solar system, '''the DNA double-helix molecule''', and the atom. [http://www.amazon.com/Mandala-Enlightenment-Denise-Patry-Leidy/dp/1585678503 Mandala]
 

A recent scientific magazine also had an essay [citation needed] on the similarity of the double-helix sructure and the structure of the mandala. A-and, GR, containing mandalas, has been argued to be structured like a mandala. SPOILER of upcoming GR tropes: "Slothrop finds mandalas, sees mandalas in the sky and all around him, and becomes a mandala himself".
"mandalas are part of a spiritual or mythic panoply"...
From ''Thomas Pynchon, The Art of Illusion'' by David Cowart, p. 126.

Cf. p. 209, ''Mason & Dixon'': " oblique angles with all meridians and that is a spiral coiling round the poles but never reaching them."...

Cf. ''V.'' where the isle of Malta is also likened to a sort of mandala.

==Page 7==
7.09 '''Pick bananas''' 
Pirate's decision after a paragraph on the inevitablity of the rocket's flight can remind one of a famous Buddhist sutra on picking a strawberry:
The Sweetest Strawberry 
Buddha told a parable in a sutra: 
A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him. Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted! 
-Paul Reps, ''Zen Flesh, Zen Bones'' 
from ''Everyday Mind'', edited by Jean Smith
[[http://www.tricycle.com/issues/2_174/dailydharma/3192-1.html]]

'''seven squares''' 
The use of the squares to separate chapters was suggested by the production department or editors of GR, not by Pynchon himself. See Edward Mendelson, "Gravity's Encyclopedia," fn. 4.

Gerald Howard, [http://www.bookforum.com/archive/sum_05/pynchon.html Bookforum]: ''"It is generally thought that the line of seven squares that serves as a graphic device to separate the unnumbered chapters in the novel is meant to suggest the sprocket holes in film reels, indicating that the book is to be "read" cinematically as a kind of film in prose. Wrong. In one of his letters Kennebeck refers pointedly to the "oblong holes" in censored correspondence from World War II soldiers, then termed V-mail (there's that letter again), and in a letter to Donald Barthelme accompanying a finished copy of the book, Kennebeck makes jocular mention of the sprocket-hole theory, first floated in the Poirier review, and comments, "I little knew what I was contributing to the history of literature." Sometimes a rectangle is just a rectangle—or maybe a censor's mark."''

{{GR PbP}}

Pages 532-536

2007-06-13T04:56:07Z

Bleakhaus:

{{GR PbP Text}}

==Page 534==
[[image:cuddles.jpg|thumb|Cuddles Sakall|100px|right]]534.20 '''S.Z. ("Cuddles") Sakall''' 
The actor played the headwaiter, not (as [[Weisenburger's Companion to Gravity's Rainbow|Weisenburger]] states) a desk clerk, in Casablanca. Rick’s place in the film is a café, not a hotel.

[[image:freaks.jpg|thumb|Cleopatra in ''Freaks''|120px|left]]534.11 '''Freaks''' 
In the film’s unnerving conclusion, the freaks do not merely beat up Cleopatra, as described by [[Weisenburger's Companion to Gravity's Rainbow|Weisenburger]], but chant "One of us!" as they transform her into a human chicken! The final image is one that is still omitted from some prints even after the film was re-released following decades of censorship.

==Page 535==
535.17 '''the element of Greed must be worked into the plot''' 
Possibly a reference to Greed, the mutilated film masterpiece directed by Eric von Stroheim in 1924. An adaptation of Frank Norris’ McTeague, von Stroheim's film originally ran for 10 hours. At the insistence of MGM producer Irving Thalberg, von Stroheim cut it back to four hours but that too was finally cut by the studio again. The remaining footage was destroyed.

535.26 '''It is a message, in code''' 
Related to how all of Pynchon's novels can be interpreted as (big) coded messages from the author.
:This "reading into" or seeing hidden messages in complex or confusing narratives strikes me, at least, as a major influence of drugs on this period of Pynchon's writing. The tripper tends to interpret whatever he sees around him as deeply important, bursting with meaning... coded or hidden messages... [[User:Bleakhaus|Bleakhaus]] 21:56, 12 June 2007 (PDT)

==Page 536==
536.16 '''a cork board... An introduction to Modern Herero, corporate histories''' 
Probably the strongest clue in identifying Osbie Feel as some kind of representation of Pynchon himself. The author must have written Gravity's Rainbow with the aid of such books, notes and clutter.

{{GR PbP}}

K

2006-12-16T20:33:25Z

Bleakhaus: Kenosha Kid

'''Kabbalists''' 
"Tree o' Creation," 411; "you fragment of smashed vessel," 478; "the Real Text," 520; "the holy Text," 521; "coal-tar Kabbalists," 590; Astarte and Lilith, 649; "kabbalist's study in Lyons," 650; "Tree," 694; "like water-mirages at the Sixth Antechamber to the Throne" 717; "Rocket as Torah. . .its text is theirs to permute. . .always unfolding," 727; "the Angels Melchidael, Yahoel, Anafiel, and the great Metatron" 734; "the Messiah gathering in the fallen sparks," 737; "Tree of Life," 747; 749-53; Vessels, 757; See also Metatron; Qlippoth

'''Kaisersbart Expedition''' 
754; German: "Kaiser's beard, mutton-chops"; found the Bodenplatte "the delta-t itself"

'''Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859-1941)''' 
Ninth king of Prussia and third German emperor (1888-1918); by 1914 he was just a figure head with the real power in the hands of the generals. After the collapse of the German armies at the conclusion of WWI, he was forced to abdicate and moved to Holland and lived happily ever after; "Old Kaiser Bill, you're over the hill" 619

'''Kai-shek, Chiang''' 
See Chiang Kai-shek

'''Kalahari''' 
323; 403; 523; 658; [MAP]

'''Kamikaze''' 
Japanese: "divine wind"; "mock Kamikaze attacks," 310; Morituri at Kamikaze school on Formosa, 473; Bulbs' Kamikaze squads, 649; fallen cherry blossoms, 672; The Wisdom of the Great Kamikaze Pilots, 680; "the slogan of a Kamikaze unit," 696; See also Komical Kamikazes

'''Kammler, Maj-Gen''' 
An architect and civil engineer by trade, Dr. Hans Kammler was taken full-time into the Nazi leadership in 1941. He played a prominent role in the building of the death/extermination camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau. In August 1944, Hitler appointed him Special Commissioner for the A-4 program, which program he took over from Dornberger who had been in charge of the program since 1930; in charge of the construction of the Mittlewerk, 282; at Blizna, 424; decision to disburse testing and production sites, 426; 464

'''Kármán, Theodore von (1881-1963)''' 
452; Hungarian-born American physicist and aeronautical engineer, he is sometimes called the father of modern aerodynamics.

'''Karmic Hammer''' 
644; "a '37 Ford, same exemption from"; Karmic wheel, 651;

'''Katje''' 
See [[B#katje|Borgesius, Katje]]

'''Katspiel''' 
584-85; fictional planetoid inhabited by sentient pinballs

'''Katspiel Kid''' 
585;

'''Kazakhs''' 
340; Central Asian people; ex-prisoners-of-war "marching east" 550;

'''KdF ship''' 
453; KdF = Kraft durch Freude = "strength through joy"; KdF was a very popular and successful Nazi program. Cruise-liners were built and priced for the pleasure and leisure of German workers. Another product of the program was the Volkswagen.

'''Kekulé von Stradonitz, Friedrich August (d. 1896)''' 
German chemist; switched from architecture to chemistry, 84; his "dream of 1865" which led to his revolutionizing chemistry and making plastics possible, 410-11; taught by Liebig at Univ. of Glessen, 411

'''Kelvinator-Bostonian dialect''' 
The Kelvinator Corporation, a manufacturer of electric refrigerators and other household appliances, began in 1936 but was sold to the American Motors Corporation in 1968; "folksy old icebox humming along in" 677

'''Kennedy, Joe (1888-1969)''' 
682; Multi-millionaire father of President John F. Kennedy, he held minor administrative posts in Roosevelt's administration and was ambassador to Britain (1938-40); Nalline's letter to;

'''Kennedy, John F. ("Jack") (1917-63)''' 
35th president of the United States and son of Joseph Kennedy. A handsome and charismatic man, he was assassinated in Dallas, Texas in 1963; in Slothrop's class at Harvard, 65; 682; 688

[[image:kenosha-kid.jpg|thumb|200px|"The Kenosha Kid" by Forbes Parkhill (Aug 1931)

"Hatred and dread hung over the town like a pall. Pard turned against pard; every man suspected his neighbor. And to solve that mystery, The Kenosha Kid — Robinhood of straights and flushes — plays his most thrilling game for a desperation jackpot." 

[http://mysite.verizon.net/paul.mackin/kenosha/index.html Thanks to Paul Mackin!] [http://themodernword.com/pynchon/Pynchon_kenosha_kid.html Full text and images at The Modern Word]|right]]'''Kenosha Kid''' 
Kenosha is a city of some 85,000 people in the extreme southeast of Wisconsin, about halfway between Chicago and Milwaukee, and the seat of Kenosha County. It is also the birthplace of filmmaker Orson Welles (May 6, 1915); Kenosha Kid (Sodium Amytal hallucination of Slothrop's while being probed at PISCES about American racial problems), 60-71, 114, 696-97; colonel from Kenosha, WI, 643; Kenosha, WI, 645; "and in Kenosha too!" 645; "Old Kenosho the loony radarman," 691; Kenosha Kid and the Sentimental Surrealist, 696; [http://www.kenosha.org/ Kenosha WI Web Page]; [http://home.sprynet.com/~galligan/bogarts.htm You Never Did the Kenosha Kid?]

'''Kerl''' 
German: "guy" or "fellow"

'''KEZVH''' 
illustrated, 361; 5 positions of the launching switch for the A4 (Klar: "clear"; Entluftung: "discharge fuel"; Zundung: "ignite"; Vorstufe: "first stage"; Hauptstufe: "main stage"); "in the sky over the Alexanderplatz," 446; mandala in Marvy's green Ford, 560; Herero interpretation, 563

'''Khama, Sir Seretse (1921-80)''' 
323; The nephew of the chief regent of the Bamangwato in Bechuanaland, Khama was educated in Africa and Balliol College, Oxford; he fell in love with an Englishwoman and was thus banned from the chieftanship, but was restored to the chieftanship in 1965. He sent help to the Herero on their trek across the Kalahari; "king of the Bechuanas" in South-West Africa

'''Khlaetsch, Minne''' 
683-84; "an astrologer of the Hamburg School" into whose apartment Säure broke; her screams for help sounded like "Helicopter!" instead of "Cute looking robber!" because of her inability to pronounce umlauts. Girlfriend of Wimpe.

'''Kilgour or Curtis''' 
200; tailors in London

'''Kilkenny to Kew''' 
541; Kilkenny is a county in southwestern Ireland; Kew is situated on the south bank of the river Thames near Richmond, South West London, and is the home of the Royal Botanical Gardens

'''Kim''' 
177; son of Sooty, Jessica's cat See also Sooty

<div id="kingkong"></div>
[[image:king-kong.jpg|thumb|Original "King Kong" poster, 1933|left]]'''King Kong & the Like''' 
[[Fay Wray|Fay Wray look]], 57; Fay Wray, 57, 179, 275; "You will have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood," 179; "headlights burning like the eyes of" 247; "the black scapeape we cast down like Lucifer," 275; Mitchell Prettyplace book about, 275; "the Fist of the Ape," 277; "orangutan on wheels," 282; taking a shit, 368; "The figures darkened and deformed, resembling apes" 483; "a troupe of performing chimpanzees" 496; "on the tit with no motor skills," 578; "Negroid apes," 586; "that sacrificial ape," 664; "a gigantic black ape," 688; Carl Denham, 689; poem based on King Kong, 689; See also: actors/directors film/cinema references; [http://www.kongisking.net King Kong Web Page]; [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Kong Wikipedia entry]

'''King's Evil''' 
119; aka, scrofula (caseating [becoming cheese-like] tuberculosis of the lymphatic glands), supposedly cured by the royal touch

'''King Tigers''' 
91; Germany's biggest baddest tanks; 103; 262; "Königstiger tank guards" 433;

'''Kinks''' 
167-68; "And the crowds they swarm in Knightsbridge, and the wireless carols drone, and the Underground's a mob-scene, but Pointsman's all alone" [sung to the tune of "Well-Respected Man"]

'''Kinos''' 
155; German: "cinema houses"

'''Kipling, Rudyard (1865-1936)''' 
This English writer, most famous for the two Jungle Books, was criticized as being an imperialist and jingoist, though he published criticisms and satires on some of the less savory aspects of colonialism; his poem "Fuzzy-Wuzzy"; "it was during [Pirate's] Kipling Period, beastly Fuzzy-Wuzzies as far as the eye could see" 13

'''Kirghiz''' 
"It was a land of drunken nostalgia for the cities, silent Kirghiz riding, endless tremors in the earth" 338; "Young and old Kirghiz came in from the plain, smelling of horses, sour milk and weed-smoke" 338; "Dzaqyp Qulan's father was killed during the 1916 rising [...] one of about 100 fleeing Kirghiz massacred one evening [...] They hunted Sarts, Kazakhs, Kirghiz" 340; "This native uprising was supposed to be the doing of foreigners [...]. How could there be Kazakh, Kirghiz--Eastern--reasons?" 340; "Out into the bones of the backlands ride Tchitcherine and his faithful Kirghiz companion Dzaqyp Qulan." 342; " the Kirghiz pheasants scattering now at the sound of hooves" 343; "That chunky, resinous Turkestan phantasmagoric is fine for Russian, Kirghiz, and other barbaric tastes, but give Chu the tears of the poppy any time" 347; See also Kirghiz Light

'''[[The Kirghiz Light|KIRGHIZ LIGHT]]''' 

'''Kollwitz, Käthe (d. 1945)''' 
578; German artist who did a series of sketches on death [Image 1] [Image 2]

'''Koltushy institute''' 
75; where Porkyevitch worked with Pavlov "back before the purge trials"

'''Komical Kamikazes''' 
690; Takeshi & Ichizo; 697; 738

'''Koran''' 
353; "Tchitcherine transliterates [represents in the characters of another alphabet] the opening sura of"; Koran is "the script in which the word of Allah came down on the Night of Power" 354; See also Islam

'''Kot''' 
German: "shit"

'''KPD''' 
153; Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands: "German Communist Party"; See also Luxemburg, Rosa; Pökler, Leni

'''Krafft-Ebing''' 
232; Richard von Krafft-Ebbing (1840-1902), a German psychiatrist, wrote Psychopathia Sexualis (1876), describing a variety of sexual proclivities

'''Krakatoa''' 
642; Krakatau volcano lies in the Sunda strait between the islands of Java and Sumatra. In about 416 A.D., caldera collapse destroyed the volcano and formed a 4-mile (7-km) wide caldera. The islands of Krakatau, Verlaten, and Lang are remnants of this volcano. The eruption and collapse of the caldera in 1883 produced one of the largest explosions on Earth in recorded time (VEI=6) and destroyed much of Krakatau island, leaving only a remnant.

'''Krasnyy Arkhiv''' 
349; where Tchitcherine inspected the documents related to his father's doomed voyage

'''Kreuss''' 
451; shipfitter on the Toiletship who, with Höpmann (as the Scatotechnic Snipes), routed the waste lines into the ventilation system, and transferred to icebreaker duty, "erected vaguely turd-shaped monoliths of ice and snow all across the Arctic"; See also Höpmann

'''Krodobbly, Missus''' 
741; "drinking her way through the Big Depression" and goes to site of Dillinger murder

'''Kronenhalle''' 
264; where Squalidozzi and Slothrop go, in Zürich; 268

'''Kruppingham-Jones''' 
12; named in Pirate's song about other people's fantasies

'''Krupp works''' 
"No matter if Girly's on my knee--If Kruppingham-Jones is late to tea," 12; "Why do you think we wanted Krupp to sell them agricultural machinery so badly?" 166; "The theory going around at the time was that Stinnes was conspiring with Krupp, Thyssen, and others to ruin the mark and so get Germany out of paying her war debts." 285; "the "Allied" planes all would have been, ultimately, IG built, by way of Director Krupp, through his English interlocks" 520; "what if it's the Krupp works in Essen, what if it's Blohm & Voss right here in Hamburg or another make-believe 'ruin,'" 521; "Russia bought from Krupp, didn't she, from Siemens, the IG..." 566; "the old Krupp works" 591; "Too many tungsten filaments would [...] disturb the arrangement between General Electric and Krupp about how much tungsten carbide would be produced" 654; "KRUPPALOOMA comes this giant explosion" 690; "Utgarthaloki, an ex-member of management at the Krupp works here in Cuxhaven." 709; "the Krupp wingding" 711; "middle-line Kruppsters creak in the bowlegged velvet chairs" 712; "Nalline Slothrop just before her first martini is right here, in spirit, at this Kruppfest." 712; See also Krupp, Gustav; [Sasuly's IG Farben]

'''Krupp, Gustav (d. 1950)''' 
aka Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach; German industrialist and director of Krupp works; "The Night Rog and Beaver Fought Over Jessica While She Cried in Krupp's Arms" 713; See also Krupp works

'''Krypton, Albert''' 
594; "corpsman striker of the U.S.S. John E. Badass"; doper buddy of Bodine's

'''Krypton Blue''' 
595; "a proprietary mixture" of cocaine which Corpsman Krypton is coming on to

'''Kryptosam''' 
71; used to encrypt messages; de-crypted by rubbing cum on it

'''Kummersdorf''' 
416; site of old Raketenflugplatz

'''Kurhaus''' 
458; German: "spa hotel"; the spa on the Sprudelhof in Bad Karma

'''Kuropatkin, Alexei Nikolaievich (1848-1925)''' 
Russian soldier who commanded the Russian armies on the northern front February-August 1916 and was governor of Turkestan until the Revolution of 1917; Russian whose troops Daqyp Qulan's father was trying to get away from during the 1916 uprising in Central Asia, 340

'''Kursaal''' 
477; German: "casino"; "weekly ball in the"

'''Kurzweg, Prof.-Dr. Hermann''' 
Kurzweg came to Peenemünde in 1937 as head of research and chief assistant to engineer Dr. Rudolph Hermann, working in wind-tunnel research; he was instrumental in refining the design for the A4; Achtfaden "always worked out of [his] shop" 455

{{GR Alpha Nav}}

Gravity's Rainbow covers

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Gravity's Rainbow covers

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Main Page

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[[Image:GR_illustration.jpg|right]]<big>'''Welcome to the ''Gravity's Rainbow'' Wiki'''</big>

To become a contributor/editor, [http://pynchonwiki.com/mycaptcha/captcha-page.php '''Create an account.''']

:[http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FGravitys-Rainbow-Classics-Deluxe-Penguin%2Fdp%2F0143039946%2Fsr%3D1-2%2Fqid%3D1165211961%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks&tag=hyperartspynchon&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325'''Order ''Gravity's Rainbow''''']

This is the newly created Wiki for [[Thomas Pynchon]]'s ''Gravity's Rainbow'', which will eventually expand to include the guides to Pynchon's other "big" novels, ''V.'' and ''Mason & Dixon'', currently hosted at [http://www.thomaspynchon.com/ ThomasPynchon.com], as well as ''Vineland'', ''The Crying of Lot 49'' and ''Slow Learner'', so that registered users of this wiki can create pages and make changes for those novels' guides.

You can take a look at [[Gravity's Rainbow covers|''Gravity's Rainbow'' covers]], read the [[Gravity's Rainbow Reviews|reviews]], or [[Gravity's Rainbow Title|entertain some theories on the source of the title]].

==How to Use this Wiki==

There are two major ways to use this wiki. The first is the '''''Gravity's Rainbow'' Alphabetical Index''', used to keep track of the myriad characters, real and imagined, as well as events, arcana, and lots of other stuff. The second is the '''Spoiler-Free Annotations by Page''', which allows the reader to look up and contribute allusions and references while reading the book, in a convenient and spoiler-free manner. These two sections are so far almost entirely different, but we're working on integrating them.

Apart from those, it's up to you!

==Alphabetical Index==
Information on the characters, events, and everything else in ''Gravity's Rainbow'', organized alphabetically:{{GR_Alpha_Nav}}

==Page by Page Annotations==
{{GR PbP}}

== Pynchon Wiki Help and Contributor Guidelines==

[[Help:Contents|'''Click here for help with editing and creating pages.''']]

We have a few conventions we ask that you follow:

* When creating a new page, first check to make sure a page/article about what you want to write about hasn't already been created, by '''[[Special:Allpages|checking the list of all Wiki pages on Pynchon Wiki]]'''. If a page already exists, please modify that one.

* When creating a new page, if its information pertains to one (and only one) specific Pynchon novel, please categorize it with the appropriate identifier. For example, a page pertaining to ''Gravity's Rainbow'', should use the syntax <code><nowiki>[[Category:GR]]</nowiki></code>.

* To open a discussion on an individual listing of the Alpha Index, create one using the [[A|entry on Peter Tait]] as an example. Basically, give it a name that identifies the alpha listing (eg <nowiki>[[Name Discussion|DISCUSSION]]</nowiki>) and notice that the visible name will be "DISCUSSION" in full caps, so it stands out a bit.

* [[Help:Contents|More help for this wiki available here.]]

==External Links==

* [http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/ ThomasPynchon.com]
* [http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/ The Modern Word Pynchon page]
: [http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_gr.html The Modern Word: Gravity's Rainbow]
: [http://z11.invisionfree.com/thefictionalwoods/index.php The Fictional Woods] - a Pynchon forum
: [http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/zak_smith/title.htm Zak Smith's Illustrations for Each Page of Gravity's Rainbow]
* [http://pynchonoid.blogspot.com/ Pynchonoid Blog]
* [http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/gr/index.html Pomona Gravity's Rainbow page]
* [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity's_Rainbow Wikipedia Gravity's Rainbow page]

==Featured Article==

[[image:tesla.tower.jpg|150px|thumb|Tesla's Wardenclyffe laboratory|left]]
'''Was the Tunguska Event Caused by Tesla's Death Ray?''' 
Given that Tesla's inventions generally possessed an element of social conscience, of doing good for humanity, it may seem surprising that he created a number of devices with military applications. And the notion of the Tesla harnessing his mind for purposes of war may seem immensely frightening. After all, this is the man who boasted that with his resonance generator he could split the earth in two... and no one was ever quite sure whether he was joking.

([[Tesla's Death Ray | more...]])

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==Gallery==
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We will be providing more support for using this wiki in the coming weeks. Feel free to contact us (admin at pynchonwiki dot com) with any questions.

Thanks, and enjoy...