Thomas Pynchon Wiki - User contributions [en]

Pages 733-735

2016-07-07T14:06:54Z

C-Melody: /* Page 734 */ Comment on Weisenburger's GENERATOR

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==Page 734==
734.2 '''GE_ _RAT_ _''' 
Weisenburger believes that adding the missing letters in this game of hangman would spell out GENERATOR. This, in fact, appears to be the only German word (or English, for that matter), to fit the description, and it fits the story too. However, since the letters E and R already occur in GE_ _RAT_ _, the incomplete mystery word would have been left as GE_ERAT_R.

734.17 '''May he be blind now to all but me. . . .''' 
Steven C. Weisenburger, in [http://www.amazon.com/Gravitys-Rainbow-Companion-Contexts-Pynchons/dp/0820310263 '''A Gravity's Rainbow Companion'''] notes that Geli Tripping's spell on Tchitcherine is derived from A. E. Waite's [http://tinyurl.com/3cakdj '''Book of Black Magic''']. A. E. Waite is noted several times in [http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page '''Against the Day'''].

734.19 '''by the Angels Melchidael, Yahoel, Anafiel, and the great Metatron... 
This incantation is a variant on many in mystical traditions, invoking various spiritual beings and deities. In [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabbalah Kabbalah], Metatron is the angel that governs the Tree of Life and the teachings of the Kabbalah. Melchidael is one of the top three of the seven archangels; Yahoel was the angel that taught Abraham the ''Torah'' and was his earthly and heavenly guide. Anafiel, "Branch of God," keeper of the keys of heaven, and the angel who looks after birds, and who carried Enoch to heaven.

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Pages 674-700

2016-07-06T08:46:55Z

C-Melody: /* Page 675 */ added speculation on Marcel

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==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]].

'''Travel here gets complicated -- a system of buildings that move, by right angles, along the grooves of the Raketen-Stadt's street-grid. You can also raise or lower the building itself, a dozen floors per second, to desired heights or levels underground, like a submarine skipper with his periscope'''... 
This imagery was appropriated for the set designs and special effects of the 1998 film
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118929/combined Dark City].http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Pages_674-700&action=edit&section=1
Editing Pages 674-700 (section) - Thomas Pynchon Wiki | Gravity's Rainbow

==Page 675==
'''Marcel''' 
It's possible that Marcel signifies the great French novelist Marcel Proust in some way:

:"Am I positive that Marcel indicates Proust? No. But there's a lot of circumstantial evidence: he's named "Marcel," he's French, he's a genius. These three facts alone in a vacuum would point strongly to Marcel Proust. But Pynchon also gives Marcel shiny black hair, links him with the 19th century, and portrays him as extremely long-winded." - Erik Ketzan, [https://www.pynchon.net/owap/article/view/30 Pynchon Nods: Proust in Gravity’s Rainbow]

Since Marcel gets into a "long discourse on the concept of 'give'" and "Man," it could also be a nod to sociologist and anthropologist [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Mauss Marcel Mauss] (1872-1950) whose most famous work is entitled [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gift_(book) ''The Gift''].

'''Myrtle Miraculous...Maximilian...Marcel''' 

The 3 Ms in this Fantastic 4 could allude to the Minnesota-based, multinational conglomerate [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M 3M]. Founded in the early 1900s, the company (formerly known as the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company) was run by one William L. McKNIGHT from 1929 to 1949 and expanded worldwide in the 1950s (to the UK, Germany and others). In the late '60s and early '70s, 3M published a line of board games that were marketed to adults. These games with simple rules but complex game play were ancestors of the German "Eurogames," and included [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ploy_(board_game) Ploy], a space-age strategy game, which is considered to be one of the better chess variations.

==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==
685.7 '''his finest sacramental kif''' 
''Webster's Third International Dictionary'' defines kif, which is a variant of kef, a "smoking material (as hashish) that produces a state of dreamy tranquility."

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]. 

Note also that 'roshi' is Japanese for 'teacher': Rōshi (老師?) (Chinese pinyin: Lǎoshī; Sanskrit: ṛṣi) is a Japanese honorific title used in Zen Buddhism that literally means "old teacher" or "elder master" and sometimes denotes a person who gives spiritual guidance to a Zen sangha or congregation.(Wikipedia)

==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]
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Pages 383-390

2016-06-22T09:00:49Z

C-Melody: /* Page 385 */ added more information on the harmonica

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==Page 383==
'''Entre Rios''' 
Entre Ríos is a province of Argentina, located in the Mesopotamia region, in the northeast of the country. It borders the provinces of Buenos Aires (south), Corrientes (north) and Santa Fe (west), and Uruguay in the east.

==Page 385==
'''a brick labyrinth that had been a harmonica factory''' 
Jorge Louis Borges, who has been mentioned in this section, has one book entitled ''Labyrinths'', 1962 in English.[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labyrinths] 
A harmonica player is a musician. Musicians are favorite artists in Pynchon's vision and harmonicas turn up prominently again in ''Against the Day'' (and briefly in ''Vineland''). 
Weisenburger concludes this must be the [http://www.hohner.eu/index.php?384 Hohner factory] in Trossingen. While Weisenburger's link is the most likely one, Trossingen lies in Baden-Württemberg and not in Bavaria where Squalidozzi comes across the harmonica factory. The other major harmonica (and accordion) manufacturing was in Klingenthal (Saxony), much closer to the Bavarian border than Trossingen. Slothrop's mouth harp is a Hohner, while the company is also a major producer of accordions (accordions/concertinas/bandoneons etc. share the sound-producing principle with harmonicas), the key instrument in Argentinian music. In fact, when tango became the rage all over Europe, accordions were marketed as ''Tangoharmonika'' (''Mundharmonika'' is German for mouth harp). For a detailed account of the harmonica in Pynchon's work, see Hänggi's article "'Harmonica, kazoo--a friend.' Pynchon's lessons in organology" in ''America and the Musical Unconscious'' (eds. Julius Greve & Sascha Pöhlmann).

'''the smell of freshly brewed mate''' 
''Yerba mate'' is the national drink of Argentina. It is also popular in Paraguay, Uruguay and southern Brazil. It reportedly creates a mental state of wakefulness, focus and alertness reminiscent of most stimulants, but lacks the negative effects typically created by other such compounds, such as anxiety, diarrhea, "jitteriness", and heart palpitations. According to the classical Argentine way, the act of drinking yerba mate is a highly stylized, ritualistic process:

:The gourd is filled two-thirds of the way with moistened mate herb. Hot water is then poured into the gourd. The person sucks the mate water out of the gourd with the bombilla, with the strainer holding out the actual mate leaves. When the water is gone, the gourd is refilled by the server with hot water and passed to the next person in the group. When that person finishes, the gourd is handed back to the server for another refill. [http://www.zonalatina.com/Zldata109.htm]

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerba_mate From Wikipedia article]

==Page 386==
'''No destinations. No fixed itinerary.''' 
Like Bennie Profane's yo-yoing that starts ''V.''

'''Gaucho Marx''' 
The pun is obvious enough, but it just might derive from John Frankenheimer’s ''The Manchurian Candidate'' (1961). The main character, the humorless Raymond Shaw (Lawrence Harvey), calls attention to the pun as the first joke he’s deliberately made.

'''Martin Fierro''' 
''Martín Fierro'' is an epic poem by the Argentine writer José Hernández. The poem was originally published in two parts, ''El Gaucho Martín Fierro'' (1872) and ''La Vuelta de Martín Fierro'' (1879). The poem is, in part, a protest against the Europeanizing and modernizing tendencies of Argentine president Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. Wikipedia

==Page 390==
'''390:1.2 It took the Dreyfus affair to get the Zionists out and doing''' 
Theodor Herzl, a secular and highly assimilated Austro-Hungarian Jew [http://www.ccds.charlotte.nc.us/History/MidEast/save/hawthorne/hawthorne.htm covered the Dreyfus trial ] for a Viennese newspaper, and was witness to the anti-Semitic demonstrations in Paris following the judgment. It was this experience which convinced him of the futility of assimilation and combating anti-Semitism is the diaspora, and resulted in the concept of a separate Jewish state. The analogy is followed up with "settlement" in "the Heath".

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Pages 249-269

2016-06-16T19:07:55Z

C-Melody: /* Page 249 */ typos

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==Page 247==
249.30 '''like Tenniel's Alice''' 
Sir John Tenniel drew Alice for the original editions of ''Alice in Wonderland'' and ''Through the Looking Glass''.

==Page 249==
249.5 & 6 '''Anglo vigilantes from Whittier''' 
Whittier High School and Whittier College is where President Richard M. Nixon, President when GR was published, hailed from. [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon]]

This literary device tying Nixon to race riots and social repression works on literary license only, and in reviewing the historic situation it appears that the riots were not so much white vigilantes from Whittier attacking Zoot Suiters, as much as drunken Navy men gone wild and finding an easy target in Mexican American youth.

This seems doubly galling on Pynchon's part:

First, Whittier, CA, was and largely remains a Quaker community, named after the Quaker Abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier. Quakers are among the most pacifistic people. In addition they embody many of the values Pynchon seems to support: egalitarianism, hierarchy-less assembly, the notion of a God available to all people unmediated by a priesthood or the elect, etc. Violence is not part of their program.

Second, Pynchon is throwing the blame for the riots on Whittier (this contributor has never been to Whittier) instead of what appears to be the true cause of the riots -- nasty, drunken sailors -- those guys TRP hung out with for a while -- and then other service branches joining in the race baiting. See the PBS ''American Experience'' website and program for more information: [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/zoot/index.html The Zoot Suit Riots].

Richard Nixon, however, remains at the center of this Navy-Violence-Whittier-Quaker venn diagram. A Quaker from Whittier who in WWII served in the Navy. I, for one, could never figure how a Quaker president could bomb Cambodia or deal in such political slime.

==Page 250==
250.25-26 '''Sandoz (where, as every schoolchild knows, the legendary Dr. Hofmann made his important discovery)'''

That is, Albert Hofmann discovered the psychedelic effects of LSD-25 in 1943.

==Page 251==
251.12 '''Shell Mex House''' 
Shell Mex House, built 1930-31 is situated at number 80, Strand, London. It was for many years the London headquarters of Shell-Mex and BP Ltd for whom it was originally built. During WWII the building became home to the Ministry of Supply which co-ordinated supply of equipment to the national armed forces. It was also the home of the "Petroleum Board" which handled the distribution and rationing of petroleum products during the war.

==Page 252==
252.19-20 '''penis-in-the-popcorn-box routine''' 
Old urban 'legend', known as *Penis Surprise*. Urban Dictionary.

==Page 253==
253.03-4 '''this smile [Slothrop's own] asks from him more grace..''' 
'Grace' is the last word of ''Against the Day'' and a key thematic concept therein.

253.10 '''Corniche''' 
One of Nice's most famous roads, offering spectacular views

253.14 '''Citroën''' 
A French automobile manufacturer, founded in 1919 by André Citroën. It was the one of the world's first mass-production car companies outside of the USA.

253.20-21 '''heads for a bistro on the old-Nice side of La Porte Fausse''' 
[http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:NIKAIA-porteFausseD1.jpg La Porte Fausse] is a passage connecting the glamorous, touristy "modern"(19th century) centre of Nice with the crammed old town, which used to be a working-class district. It is called "The False Gate" because it looks as if it were just a gateway to a house. Passing to the other side seems to be an objective correlative for entering the preterite world.

==Page 254==
254.38 '''Borsalini''' 
Borsalino hats are a quality-made felt hat with broad brim manufactured in Italy. The company has been in existence since 1857. "Borsalini" is Pynchon's plural.

==Page 255==
255.26 '''it's Murray Smile''' 
It would seem that this name is derived from Murray Wilson, Beach Boy Brian Wilson's abusive father, and the LP ''Smile'', the legendary 1967 Beach Boys album that was never completed due to Brian's mental collapse and loss of will; Pynchon hung out with Brian during the legendary "Smile" Period [[Pynchon and Brian Wilson]]

==Page 257==
257.31-32 '''The War has been reconfiguring time and space into its own image. The track runs in different networks now.''' 
Cf. the railway network as a metaphor for parallel worlds or alternative histories in [[http://cl49.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page COL 49]].

==Page 259==
259 '''the mental cases of Switzerland''' 
Zurich's best known psychiatric clinic is [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burghölzli Burghölzli] where, among others, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugen_Bleuler Eugen Bleuler], [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung Carl Gustav Jung], and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Binswanger Ludwig Binswanger] used to work. One of the 'mental cases of Switzerland' at the time, although not at the Burghölzli, was the writer [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Walser_(writer) Robert Walser]. Other famous mental cases of Switzerland Pynchon could be referring to include [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Glauser Friedrich Glauser] and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche Friedrich Nietzsche].

==Page 260==
260.3
'''perpetual motion or as we like to call it Entropy Management''' 
The whole passage reads somewhat like an ultra-condensed version of [[http://cl49.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page COL49]], Chapter Five.

260.9-10
'''ornithopters and robobopsters ... got a little goatee made out of steel wool.''' 
Seems to be a bit anachronistic. After all, bebop was first promoted as "bebop" as late as 1944 (although it was "invented" in 1939, as Pynchon refers to earlier in GR), and its popularity began to grow beyond Harlem in the summer of 1945. "Ornithopters" likely refers to Charlie Parker's ("Bird") composition "Ornithology" of 1946. The much-imitated goatee belonged to Dizzy Gillespie.

260.30
'''"You interested in some L.S.D."''' 
As a man from Sandoz, Mario Schweitar is aware of the hallucinogenic effect of LSD, discovered by Albert Hofmann in 1943. Slothrop, of course, has never head about it. Schweitar's "mournful" remark about the "wrong country" seems to be a complaint about Schwitzerland's neutrality and small market; the CIA and the U.S. Army used LSD in tests before it became a counter-culture fad.

==Page 261==
261.29
'''Gemüse-Brücke''' 
German: vegetable bridge; Gemüsebrücke, or Gmüesbrugg, is the traditional name for the Rathausbrücke (a vegetable market used to be here).

==Page 262==
262.5-6
'''Wilhelm Tell Overture''' 
From the Rossini opera by the same name. Slothrop would know this as the theme music for the ''Lone Ranger'' radio show which ran from 1933-1954 (also a Tube series from 1949-1957)--another 'western' reference. The Rossini thread is picked up here after Rue Rossini in Nice. Another escape from Their gaze.

262.6-7
'''hope nobody was looking through that one-way glass''' 
A recurrence of the "half-silvered images", introduced on the very first page; representing political power, which sees but cannnot be clearly seen. Sounds quite Foucauldian.

262.9
'''King Tiger tank''' 
''Königstiger'' (officially Panzerkampfwagen VI) was the most impressive German heavy tank in World War II, although it had several construction faults. Just like a Rolls, it was a kind of rarity; Porsche produced only 489 such tanks from late 1943 to March 1945. The comparison emphasizes the concept of WW II as a cluster of ambilateral business transactions.

Comparing the noise of the Rolls and the Königstiger, perhaps Pynchon also had the following episode of advertising history in mind: In 1959, David Ogilvy wrote an [http://www.suchradar.de/magazin/archiv/2014/1-2014/linkaufbau-advertorials-ogilvy-rolls-royce-magazine-ad.jpg ad for Rolls Royce]. Its headline ran: "At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls Royce comes from the electric clock." Howard Gossage responded with an [http://swiped.co/file/60-miles-an-hour-land-rover-ad-by-howard-gossage/ ad for Land-Rover], stating: "At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Land-Rover comes from the roar of the engine." (And it goes on with a quote from novelist John Steinbeck.)

==Page 263==
263.20-21
'''The paper is fifteen years old.''' 
Another echo of COL 49, Ch 5, where another Hispanic anarchist, Jesús Arrabal has an issue of ''Regeneración'' from 1904 on his table at a greasy spoon.

==Page 264==
264.40-41
'''In ordinary times ... the center always wins. Its power grows with time, and that can't be reversed''' 
This is a combination of Max Weber's notion of center and periphery with the Second Law of thermodynamics. So "decentralizing" in "extraordinary times" (p. 265.1-2) is an act of "entropy management".

==Page 265==
265.24-25 '''connections of many years' standing with the Republican underground''' 
Meaning the Spanish Republic (1931-39), in which anarchists played a major role.

==Page 266==
266.3 '''corktips''' 
Cigarettes with a cork filter.

266.7 '''Spencer Tracy''' 
An American theatrical and film actor, who appeared in 74 films from 1930 to 1967. This reference is to his role as the African explorer Henry Stanley in the 1939 film ''Stanley and Livingston''.

266.11 '''Richard Halliburton''' 
An American traveler, adventurer, and author. Best known today for having swum the length of the Panama Canal, he was headline news for most of his brief career. His final and fatal adventure, an attempt to sail a Chinese junk, the Sea Dragon, across the Pacific Ocean from Hong Kong to the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, made him legendary.

266.23 '''Lowell Thomas''' 
An American writer, broadcaster, and traveller best known as the man who made Lawrence of Arabia famous. So varied were Thomas's activities that when it came time for the Library of Congress to catalog his memoirs they were forced to put them in "CT" ("biographies of subjects who do not fit into any other category") in their classification.

266.23-24 '''Rover and Motor Boys''' 
The Rover Boys and Motor Boys were two different series of popular adventure books for boys at the turn of the 20th century.

266.31 '''Cointrin''' 
Geneva's airport

266.37 '''City of Peace''' 
Geneva, so called for the number of peace treaties signed there due to Switzerland's status as 'neutral country'.

==Page 267==
267.35-36 '''Reformation country, Zwingli's town''' 
Yes but this only highlights a strange omission: even the narrator fails to notice that Slothrop has just visited the real birthplace of Puritanism, that is, Geneva.

==Page 268==
268.5-6
'''as a mantra... they have been taught to speak inwardly ''oss''''' 
Buddhist mantras start with the syllable ''om'', representing the Universe as inward vibration. ''Oss'', with the voiceless (non-vibrating) sibilant is apparently an anti-mantra meaning bones, representing Nothing, just the escape of air.

268.34-35
'''step by step he, It, the Repressed, approaches''' 
"It, the Repressed" is clearly Freudian terminology. Here, Jamf's "German-scientist mind, battered down by Death to only the most brute reflexes," seems to fade into Infant Tyrone's mind ''conditioned'' to the most brute reflexes by the German scientist; and that is the ambiguous "he" Slothrop is afraid of.
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Pages 249-269

2016-06-16T19:01:29Z

C-Melody: /* Page 262 */ added trivia on Rolls and Königstiger

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==Page 247==
249.30 '''like Tenniel's Alice''' 
Sir John Tenniel drew Alice for the original editions of ''Alice in Wonderland'' and ''Through the Looking Glass''.

==Page 249==
249.5 & 6 '''Anglo vigilantes from Whittier''' 
Whittier High School and Whittier College is where President Richard M. Nixon, President when GR was published, hailed from. [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon]]

This literary device tying Nixon to race riots and social repression works on literary license only, and in reviewing the historic situation it appears that the riots were not so much white vigilantes from Whittier attacking Zoot Suiters, as much as drunken Navy men gone wild and finding an easy target in Mexican American youth.

This seems doubly galling on Pynchon's part:

First, Whittier, CA, was and largely remains a Quaker community, named after the Quaker Abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier. Quakers are among the most pacificistic of peoples. In addition they embody many of the values Pynchon seems to support: egalitarianism, heirarchy-less assembly, the notion of a God available to all people unmediated by a priesthood or the elect, etc. Violence is not part of their program.

Second, Pynchon is throwing the blame for the riots on Whittier (this contributor has never been to Whittier) instead of what appears to be the true cause of the riots -- nasty, drunken, sailors -- those guys TRP hung out with for a while -- and then other service branches joining in the race baiting. Please see the PBS ''American Experience'' website and program for more information: [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/zoot/index.html The Zoot Suit Riots].

Richard Nixon, however, remains at the center of this Navy-Violence-Whittier-Quaker venn diagram. A Quaker from Whittier who in WWII served in the Navy. I, for one, could never figure how a Quaker president could bomb Cambodia or deal in such political slime.

==Page 250==
250.25-26 '''Sandoz (where, as every schoolchild knows, the legendary Dr. Hofmann made his important discovery)'''

That is, Albert Hofmann discovered the psychedelic effects of LSD-25 in 1943.

==Page 251==
251.12 '''Shell Mex House''' 
Shell Mex House, built 1930-31 is situated at number 80, Strand, London. It was for many years the London headquarters of Shell-Mex and BP Ltd for whom it was originally built. During WWII the building became home to the Ministry of Supply which co-ordinated supply of equipment to the national armed forces. It was also the home of the "Petroleum Board" which handled the distribution and rationing of petroleum products during the war.

==Page 252==
252.19-20 '''penis-in-the-popcorn-box routine''' 
Old urban 'legend', known as *Penis Surprise*. Urban Dictionary.

==Page 253==
253.03-4 '''this smile [Slothrop's own] asks from him more grace..''' 
'Grace' is the last word of ''Against the Day'' and a key thematic concept therein.

253.10 '''Corniche''' 
One of Nice's most famous roads, offering spectacular views

253.14 '''Citroën''' 
A French automobile manufacturer, founded in 1919 by André Citroën. It was the one of the world's first mass-production car companies outside of the USA.

253.20-21 '''heads for a bistro on the old-Nice side of La Porte Fausse''' 
[http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:NIKAIA-porteFausseD1.jpg La Porte Fausse] is a passage connecting the glamorous, touristy "modern"(19th century) centre of Nice with the crammed old town, which used to be a working-class district. It is called "The False Gate" because it looks as if it were just a gateway to a house. Passing to the other side seems to be an objective correlative for entering the preterite world.

==Page 254==
254.38 '''Borsalini''' 
Borsalino hats are a quality-made felt hat with broad brim manufactured in Italy. The company has been in existence since 1857. "Borsalini" is Pynchon's plural.

==Page 255==
255.26 '''it's Murray Smile''' 
It would seem that this name is derived from Murray Wilson, Beach Boy Brian Wilson's abusive father, and the LP ''Smile'', the legendary 1967 Beach Boys album that was never completed due to Brian's mental collapse and loss of will; Pynchon hung out with Brian during the legendary "Smile" Period [[Pynchon and Brian Wilson]]

==Page 257==
257.31-32 '''The War has been reconfiguring time and space into its own image. The track runs in different networks now.''' 
Cf. the railway network as a metaphor for parallel worlds or alternative histories in [[http://cl49.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page COL 49]].

==Page 259==
259 '''the mental cases of Switzerland''' 
Zurich's best known psychiatric clinic is [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burghölzli Burghölzli] where, among others, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugen_Bleuler Eugen Bleuler], [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung Carl Gustav Jung], and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Binswanger Ludwig Binswanger] used to work. One of the 'mental cases of Switzerland' at the time, although not at the Burghölzli, was the writer [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Walser_(writer) Robert Walser]. Other famous mental cases of Switzerland Pynchon could be referring to include [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Glauser Friedrich Glauser] and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche Friedrich Nietzsche].

==Page 260==
260.3
'''perpetual motion or as we like to call it Entropy Management''' 
The whole passage reads somewhat like an ultra-condensed version of [[http://cl49.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page COL49]], Chapter Five.

260.9-10
'''ornithopters and robobopsters ... got a little goatee made out of steel wool.''' 
Seems to be a bit anachronistic. After all, bebop was first promoted as "bebop" as late as 1944 (although it was "invented" in 1939, as Pynchon refers to earlier in GR), and its popularity began to grow beyond Harlem in the summer of 1945. "Ornithopters" likely refers to Charlie Parker's ("Bird") composition "Ornithology" of 1946. The much-imitated goatee belonged to Dizzy Gillespie.

260.30
'''"You interested in some L.S.D."''' 
As a man from Sandoz, Mario Schweitar is aware of the hallucinogenic effect of LSD, discovered by Albert Hofmann in 1943. Slothrop, of course, has never head about it. Schweitar's "mournful" remark about the "wrong country" seems to be a complaint about Schwitzerland's neutrality and small market; the CIA and the U.S. Army used LSD in tests before it became a counter-culture fad.

==Page 261==
261.29
'''Gemüse-Brücke''' 
German: vegetable bridge; Gemüsebrücke, or Gmüesbrugg, is the traditional name for the Rathausbrücke (a vegetable market used to be here).

==Page 262==
262.5-6
'''Wilhelm Tell Overture''' 
From the Rossini opera by the same name. Slothrop would know this as the theme music for the ''Lone Ranger'' radio show which ran from 1933-1954 (also a Tube series from 1949-1957)--another 'western' reference. The Rossini thread is picked up here after Rue Rossini in Nice. Another escape from Their gaze.

262.6-7
'''hope nobody was looking through that one-way glass''' 
A recurrence of the "half-silvered images", introduced on the very first page; representing political power, which sees but cannnot be clearly seen. Sounds quite Foucauldian.

262.9
'''King Tiger tank''' 
''Königstiger'' (officially Panzerkampfwagen VI) was the most impressive German heavy tank in World War II, although it had several construction faults. Just like a Rolls, it was a kind of rarity; Porsche produced only 489 such tanks from late 1943 to March 1945. The comparison emphasizes the concept of WW II as a cluster of ambilateral business transactions.

Comparing the noise of the Rolls and the Königstiger, perhaps Pynchon also had the following episode of advertising history in mind: In 1959, David Ogilvy wrote an [http://www.suchradar.de/magazin/archiv/2014/1-2014/linkaufbau-advertorials-ogilvy-rolls-royce-magazine-ad.jpg ad for Rolls Royce]. Its headline ran: "At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls Royce comes from the electric clock." Howard Gossage responded with an [http://swiped.co/file/60-miles-an-hour-land-rover-ad-by-howard-gossage/ ad for Land-Rover], stating: "At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Land-Rover comes from the roar of the engine." (And it goes on with a quote from novelist John Steinbeck.)

==Page 263==
263.20-21
'''The paper is fifteen years old.''' 
Another echo of COL 49, Ch 5, where another Hispanic anarchist, Jesús Arrabal has an issue of ''Regeneración'' from 1904 on his table at a greasy spoon.

==Page 264==
264.40-41
'''In ordinary times ... the center always wins. Its power grows with time, and that can't be reversed''' 
This is a combination of Max Weber's notion of center and periphery with the Second Law of thermodynamics. So "decentralizing" in "extraordinary times" (p. 265.1-2) is an act of "entropy management".

==Page 265==
265.24-25 '''connections of many years' standing with the Republican underground''' 
Meaning the Spanish Republic (1931-39), in which anarchists played a major role.

==Page 266==
266.3 '''corktips''' 
Cigarettes with a cork filter.

266.7 '''Spencer Tracy''' 
An American theatrical and film actor, who appeared in 74 films from 1930 to 1967. This reference is to his role as the African explorer Henry Stanley in the 1939 film ''Stanley and Livingston''.

266.11 '''Richard Halliburton''' 
An American traveler, adventurer, and author. Best known today for having swum the length of the Panama Canal, he was headline news for most of his brief career. His final and fatal adventure, an attempt to sail a Chinese junk, the Sea Dragon, across the Pacific Ocean from Hong Kong to the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, made him legendary.

266.23 '''Lowell Thomas''' 
An American writer, broadcaster, and traveller best known as the man who made Lawrence of Arabia famous. So varied were Thomas's activities that when it came time for the Library of Congress to catalog his memoirs they were forced to put them in "CT" ("biographies of subjects who do not fit into any other category") in their classification.

266.23-24 '''Rover and Motor Boys''' 
The Rover Boys and Motor Boys were two different series of popular adventure books for boys at the turn of the 20th century.

266.31 '''Cointrin''' 
Geneva's airport

266.37 '''City of Peace''' 
Geneva, so called for the number of peace treaties signed there due to Switzerland's status as 'neutral country'.

==Page 267==
267.35-36 '''Reformation country, Zwingli's town''' 
Yes but this only highlights a strange omission: even the narrator fails to notice that Slothrop has just visited the real birthplace of Puritanism, that is, Geneva.

==Page 268==
268.5-6
'''as a mantra... they have been taught to speak inwardly ''oss''''' 
Buddhist mantras start with the syllable ''om'', representing the Universe as inward vibration. ''Oss'', with the voiceless (non-vibrating) sibilant is apparently an anti-mantra meaning bones, representing Nothing, just the escape of air.

268.34-35
'''step by step he, It, the Repressed, approaches''' 
"It, the Repressed" is clearly Freudian terminology. Here, Jamf's "German-scientist mind, battered down by Death to only the most brute reflexes," seems to fade into Infant Tyrone's mind ''conditioned'' to the most brute reflexes by the German scientist; and that is the ambiguous "he" Slothrop is afraid of.
{{GR PbP}}

Pages 249-269

2016-06-16T11:38:31Z

C-Melody: inserted spaces

{{GR PbP Text}}

==Page 247==
249.30 '''like Tenniel's Alice''' 
Sir John Tenniel drew Alice for the original editions of ''Alice in Wonderland'' and ''Through the Looking Glass''.

==Page 249==
249.5 & 6 '''Anglo vigilantes from Whittier''' 
Whittier High School and Whittier College is where President Richard M. Nixon, President when GR was published, hailed from. [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon]]

This literary device tying Nixon to race riots and social repression works on literary license only, and in reviewing the historic situation it appears that the riots were not so much white vigilantes from Whittier attacking Zoot Suiters, as much as drunken Navy men gone wild and finding an easy target in Mexican American youth.

This seems doubly galling on Pynchon's part:

First, Whittier, CA, was and largely remains a Quaker community, named after the Quaker Abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier. Quakers are among the most pacificistic of peoples. In addition they embody many of the values Pynchon seems to support: egalitarianism, heirarchy-less assembly, the notion of a God available to all people unmediated by a priesthood or the elect, etc. Violence is not part of their program.

Second, Pynchon is throwing the blame for the riots on Whittier (this contributor has never been to Whittier) instead of what appears to be the true cause of the riots -- nasty, drunken, sailors -- those guys TRP hung out with for a while -- and then other service branches joining in the race baiting. Please see the PBS ''American Experience'' website and program for more information: [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/zoot/index.html The Zoot Suit Riots].

Richard Nixon, however, remains at the center of this Navy-Violence-Whittier-Quaker venn diagram. A Quaker from Whittier who in WWII served in the Navy. I, for one, could never figure how a Quaker president could bomb Cambodia or deal in such political slime.

==Page 250==
250.25-26 '''Sandoz (where, as every schoolchild knows, the legendary Dr. Hofmann made his important discovery)'''

That is, Albert Hofmann discovered the psychedelic effects of LSD-25 in 1943.

==Page 251==
251.12 '''Shell Mex House''' 
Shell Mex House, built 1930-31 is situated at number 80, Strand, London. It was for many years the London headquarters of Shell-Mex and BP Ltd for whom it was originally built. During WWII the building became home to the Ministry of Supply which co-ordinated supply of equipment to the national armed forces. It was also the home of the "Petroleum Board" which handled the distribution and rationing of petroleum products during the war.

==Page 252==
252.19-20 '''penis-in-the-popcorn-box routine''' 
Old urban 'legend', known as *Penis Surprise*. Urban Dictionary.

==Page 253==
253.03-4 '''this smile [Slothrop's own] asks from him more grace..''' 
'Grace' is the last word of ''Against the Day'' and a key thematic concept therein.

253.10 '''Corniche''' 
One of Nice's most famous roads, offering spectacular views

253.14 '''Citroën''' 
A French automobile manufacturer, founded in 1919 by André Citroën. It was the one of the world's first mass-production car companies outside of the USA.

253.20-21 '''heads for a bistro on the old-Nice side of La Porte Fausse''' 
[http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:NIKAIA-porteFausseD1.jpg La Porte Fausse] is a passage connecting the glamorous, touristy "modern"(19th century) centre of Nice with the crammed old town, which used to be a working-class district. It is called "The False Gate" because it looks as if it were just a gateway to a house. Passing to the other side seems to be an objective correlative for entering the preterite world.

==Page 254==
254.38 '''Borsalini''' 
Borsalino hats are a quality-made felt hat with broad brim manufactured in Italy. The company has been in existence since 1857. "Borsalini" is Pynchon's plural.

==Page 255==
255.26 '''it's Murray Smile''' 
It would seem that this name is derived from Murray Wilson, Beach Boy Brian Wilson's abusive father, and the LP ''Smile'', the legendary 1967 Beach Boys album that was never completed due to Brian's mental collapse and loss of will; Pynchon hung out with Brian during the legendary "Smile" Period [[Pynchon and Brian Wilson]]

==Page 257==
257.31-32 '''The War has been reconfiguring time and space into its own image. The track runs in different networks now.''' 
Cf. the railway network as a metaphor for parallel worlds or alternative histories in [[http://cl49.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page COL 49]].

==Page 259==
259 '''the mental cases of Switzerland''' 
Zurich's best known psychiatric clinic is [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burghölzli Burghölzli] where, among others, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugen_Bleuler Eugen Bleuler], [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung Carl Gustav Jung], and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Binswanger Ludwig Binswanger] used to work. One of the 'mental cases of Switzerland' at the time, although not at the Burghölzli, was the writer [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Walser_(writer) Robert Walser]. Other famous mental cases of Switzerland Pynchon could be referring to include [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Glauser Friedrich Glauser] and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche Friedrich Nietzsche].

==Page 260==
260.3
'''perpetual motion or as we like to call it Entropy Management''' 
The whole passage reads somewhat like an ultra-condensed version of [[http://cl49.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page COL49]], Chapter Five.

260.9-10
'''ornithopters and robobopsters ... got a little goatee made out of steel wool.''' 
Seems to be a bit anachronistic. After all, bebop was first promoted as "bebop" as late as 1944 (although it was "invented" in 1939, as Pynchon refers to earlier in GR), and its popularity began to grow beyond Harlem in the summer of 1945. "Ornithopters" likely refers to Charlie Parker's ("Bird") composition "Ornithology" of 1946. The much-imitated goatee belonged to Dizzy Gillespie.

260.30
'''"You interested in some L.S.D."''' 
As a man from Sandoz, Mario Schweitar is aware of the hallucinogenic effect of LSD, discovered by Albert Hofmann in 1943. Slothrop, of course, has never head about it. Schweitar's "mournful" remark about the "wrong country" seems to be a complaint about Schwitzerland's neutrality and small market; the CIA and the U.S. Army used LSD in tests before it became a counter-culture fad.

==Page 261==
261.29
'''Gemüse-Brücke''' 
German: vegetable bridge; Gemüsebrücke, or Gmüesbrugg, is the traditional name for the Rathausbrücke (a vegetable market used to be here).

==Page 262==
262.5-6
'''Wilhelm Tell Overture''' 
From the Rossini opera by the same name. Slothrop would know this as the theme music for the ''Lone Ranger'' radio show which ran from 1933-1954 (also a Tube series from 1949-1957)--another 'western' reference. The Rossini thread is picked up here after Rue Rossini in Nice. Another escape from Their gaze.

262.6-7
'''hope nobody was looking through that one-way glass''' 
A recurrence of the "half-silvered images", introduced on the very first page; representing political power, which sees but cannnot be clearly seen. Sounds quite Foucauldian.

262.9
'''King Tiger tank''' 
''Königstiger'' (officially Panzerkampfwagen VI) was the most impressive German heavy tank in World War II, although it had several construction faults. Just like a Rolls, it was a kind of rarity; Porsche produced only 489 such tanks from late 1943 to March 1945. The comparison emphasizes the concept of WW II as a cluster of ambilateral business transactions.

==Page 263==
263.20-21
'''The paper is fifteen years old.''' 
Another echo of COL 49, Ch 5, where another Hispanic anarchist, Jesús Arrabal has an issue of ''Regeneración'' from 1904 on his table at a greasy spoon.

==Page 264==
264.40-41
'''In ordinary times ... the center always wins. Its power grows with time, and that can't be reversed''' 
This is a combination of Max Weber's notion of center and periphery with the Second Law of thermodynamics. So "decentralizing" in "extraordinary times" (p. 265.1-2) is an act of "entropy management".

==Page 265==
265.24-25 '''connections of many years' standing with the Republican underground''' 
Meaning the Spanish Republic (1931-39), in which anarchists played a major role.

==Page 266==
266.3 '''corktips''' 
Cigarettes with a cork filter.

266.7 '''Spencer Tracy''' 
An American theatrical and film actor, who appeared in 74 films from 1930 to 1967. This reference is to his role as the African explorer Henry Stanley in the 1939 film ''Stanley and Livingston''.

266.11 '''Richard Halliburton''' 
An American traveler, adventurer, and author. Best known today for having swum the length of the Panama Canal, he was headline news for most of his brief career. His final and fatal adventure, an attempt to sail a Chinese junk, the Sea Dragon, across the Pacific Ocean from Hong Kong to the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, made him legendary.

266.23 '''Lowell Thomas''' 
An American writer, broadcaster, and traveller best known as the man who made Lawrence of Arabia famous. So varied were Thomas's activities that when it came time for the Library of Congress to catalog his memoirs they were forced to put them in "CT" ("biographies of subjects who do not fit into any other category") in their classification.

266.23-24 '''Rover and Motor Boys''' 
The Rover Boys and Motor Boys were two different series of popular adventure books for boys at the turn of the 20th century.

266.31 '''Cointrin''' 
Geneva's airport

266.37 '''City of Peace''' 
Geneva, so called for the number of peace treaties signed there due to Switzerland's status as 'neutral country'.

==Page 267==
267.35-36 '''Reformation country, Zwingli's town''' 
Yes but this only highlights a strange omission: even the narrator fails to notice that Slothrop has just visited the real birthplace of Puritanism, that is, Geneva.

==Page 268==
268.5-6
'''as a mantra... they have been taught to speak inwardly ''oss''''' 
Buddhist mantras start with the syllable ''om'', representing the Universe as inward vibration. ''Oss'', with the voiceless (non-vibrating) sibilant is apparently an anti-mantra meaning bones, representing Nothing, just the escape of air.

268.34-35
'''step by step he, It, the Repressed, approaches''' 
"It, the Repressed" is clearly Freudian terminology. Here, Jamf's "German-scientist mind, battered down by Death to only the most brute reflexes," seems to fade into Infant Tyrone's mind ''conditioned'' to the most brute reflexes by the German scientist; and that is the ambiguous "he" Slothrop is afraid of.
{{GR PbP}}

Pages 249-269

2016-06-16T11:29:24Z

C-Melody: added new entry on mental cases of Switzerland and more details to the bebop part

{{GR PbP Text}}

==Page 247==
249.30 '''like Tenniel's Alice''' 
Sir John Tenniel drew Alice for the original editions of ''Alice in Wonderland'' and ''Through the Looking Glass''.

==Page 249==
249.5 & 6 '''Anglo vigilantes from Whittier''' 
Whittier High School and Whittier College is where President Richard M. Nixon, President when GR was published, hailed from. [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon]]

This literary device tying Nixon to race riots and social repression works on literary license only, and in reviewing the historic situation it appears that the riots were not so much white vigilantes from Whittier attacking Zoot Suiters, as much as drunken Navy men gone wild and finding an easy target in Mexican American youth.

This seems doubly galling on Pynchon's part:

First, Whittier, CA, was and largely remains a Quaker community, named after the Quaker Abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier. Quakers are among the most pacificistic of peoples. In addition they embody many of the values Pynchon seems to support: egalitarianism, heirarchy-less assembly, the notion of a God available to all people unmediated by a priesthood or the elect, etc. Violence is not part of their program.

Second, Pynchon is throwing the blame for the riots on Whittier (this contributor has never been to Whittier) instead of what appears to be the true cause of the riots -- nasty, drunken, sailors -- those guys TRP hung out with for a while -- and then other service branches joining in the race baiting. Please see the PBS ''American Experience'' website and program for more information: [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/zoot/index.html The Zoot Suit Riots].

Richard Nixon, however, remains at the center of this Navy-Violence-Whittier-Quaker venn diagram. A Quaker from Whittier who in WWII served in the Navy. I, for one, could never figure how a Quaker president could bomb Cambodia or deal in such political slime.

==Page 250==
250.25-26 '''Sandoz (where, as every schoolchild knows, the legendary Dr. Hofmann made his important discovery)'''

That is, Albert Hofmann discovered the psychedelic effects of LSD-25 in 1943.

==Page 251==
251.12 '''Shell Mex House''' 
Shell Mex House, built 1930-31 is situated at number 80, Strand, London. It was for many years the London headquarters of Shell-Mex and BP Ltd for whom it was originally built. During WWII the building became home to the Ministry of Supply which co-ordinated supply of equipment to the national armed forces. It was also the home of the "Petroleum Board" which handled the distribution and rationing of petroleum products during the war.

==Page 252==
252.19-20 '''penis-in-the-popcorn-box routine''' 
Old urban 'legend', known as *Penis Surprise*. Urban Dictionary.

==Page 253==
253.03-4 '''this smile [Slothrop's own] asks from him more grace..''' 
'Grace' is the last word of ''Against the Day'' and a key thematic concept therein.

253.10 '''Corniche''' 
One of Nice's most famous roads, offering spectacular views

253.14 '''Citroën''' 
A French automobile manufacturer, founded in 1919 by André Citroën. It was the one of the world's first mass-production car companies outside of the USA.

253.20-21 '''heads for a bistro on the old-Nice side of La Porte Fausse''' 
[http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:NIKAIA-porteFausseD1.jpg La Porte Fausse] is a passage connecting the glamorous, touristy "modern"(19th century) centre of Nice with the crammed old town, which used to be a working-class district. It is called "The False Gate" because it looks as if it were just a gateway to a house. Passing to the other side seems to be an objective correlative for entering the preterite world.

==Page 254==
254.38 '''Borsalini''' 
Borsalino hats are a quality-made felt hat with broad brim manufactured in Italy. The company has been in existence since 1857. "Borsalini" is Pynchon's plural.

==Page 255==
255.26 '''it's Murray Smile''' 
It would seem that this name is derived from Murray Wilson, Beach Boy Brian Wilson's abusive father, and the LP ''Smile'', the legendary 1967 Beach Boys album that was never completed due to Brian's mental collapse and loss of will; Pynchon hung out with Brian during the legendary "Smile" Period [[Pynchon and Brian Wilson]]

==Page 257==
257.31-32 '''The War has been reconfiguring time and space into its own image. The track runs in different networks now.''' 
Cf. the railway network as a metaphor for parallel worlds or alternative histories in [[http://cl49.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page COL 49]].

==Page 259==
259 '''the mental cases of Switzerland''' 
Zurich's best known psychiatric clinic is [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burghölzli Burghölzli] where, among others, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugen_Bleuler Eugen Bleuler], [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung Carl Gustav Jung], and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Binswanger Ludwig Binswanger] used to work. One of the 'mental cases of Switzerland' at the time, although not at the Burghölzli, was the writer [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Walser_(writer) Robert Walser]. Other famous mental cases of Switzerland Pynchon could be referring to include [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Glauser Friedrich Glauser] and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche Friedrich Nietzsche].

==Page 260==
260.3
'''perpetual motion or as we like to call it Entropy Management''' 
The whole passage reads somewhat like an ultra-condensed version of [[http://cl49.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page COL49]], Chapter Five.

260.9-10
'''ornithopters and robobopsters ... got a little goatee made out of steel wool.''' 
Seems to be a bit anachronistic. After all, bebop was first promoted as "bebop" as late as 1944 (although it was "invented" in 1939, as Pynchon refers to earlier in GR), and its popularity began to grow beyond Harlem in the summer of 1945. "Ornithopters" likely refers to Charlie Parker's ("Bird") composition "Ornithology" of 1946. The much-imitated goatee belonged to Dizzy Gillespie.

260.30
'''"You interested in some L.S.D."''' 
As a man from Sandoz, Mario Schweitar is aware of the hallucinogenic effect of LSD, discovered by Albert Hofmann in 1943. Slothrop, of course, has never head about it. Schweitar's "mournful" remark about the "wrong country" seems to be a complaint about Schwitzerland's neutrality and small market; the CIA and the U.S. Army used LSD in tests before it became a counter-culture fad.

==Page 261==
261.29
'''Gemüse-Brücke''' 
German: vegetable bridge; Gemüsebrücke, or Gmüesbrugg, is the traditional name for the Rathausbrücke (a vegetable market used to be here).

==Page 262==
262.5-6
'''Wilhelm Tell Overture''' 
From the Rossini opera by the same name. Slothrop would know this as the theme music for the ''Lone Ranger'' radio show which ran from 1933-1954 (also a Tube series from 1949-1957)--another 'western' reference. The Rossini thread is picked up here after Rue Rossini in Nice. Another escape from Their gaze.

262.6-7
'''hope nobody was looking through that one-way glass''' 
A recurrence of the "half-silvered images", introduced on the very first page; representing political power, which sees but cannnot be clearly seen. Sounds quite Foucauldian.

262.9
'''King Tiger tank''' 
''Königstiger'' (officially Panzerkampfwagen VI) was the most impressive German heavy tank in World War II, although it had several construction faults. Just like a Rolls, it was a kind of rarity; Porsche produced only 489 such tanks from late 1943 to March 1945. The comparison emphasizes the concept of WW II as a cluster of ambilateral business transactions.

==Page 263==
263.20-21
'''The paper is fifteen years old.''' 
Another echo of COL 49, Ch 5, where another Hispanic anarchist, Jesús Arrabal has an issue of ''Regeneración'' from 1904 on his table at a greasy spoon.

==Page 264==
264.40-41
'''In ordinary times ... the center always wins. Its power grows with time, and that can't be reversed''' 
This is a combination of Max Weber's notion of center and periphery with the Second Law of thermodynamics. So "decentralizing" in "extraordinary times" (p. 265.1-2) is an act of "entropy management".

==Page 265==
265.24-25 '''connections of many years' standing with the Republican underground''' 
Meaning the Spanish Republic (1931-39), in which anarchists played a major role.

==Page 266==
266.3 '''corktips''' 
Cigarettes with a cork filter.

266.7 '''Spencer Tracy''' 
An American theatrical and film actor, who appeared in 74 films from 1930 to 1967. This reference is to his role as the African explorer Henry Stanley in the 1939 film ''Stanley and Livingston''.

266.11 '''Richard Halliburton''' 
An American traveler, adventurer, and author. Best known today for having swum the length of the Panama Canal, he was headline news for most of his brief career. His final and fatal adventure, an attempt to sail a Chinese junk, the Sea Dragon, across the Pacific Ocean from Hong Kong to the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, made him legendary.

266.23 '''Lowell Thomas''' 
An American writer, broadcaster, and traveller best known as the man who made Lawrence of Arabia famous. So varied were Thomas's activities that when it came time for the Library of Congress to catalog his memoirs they were forced to put them in "CT" ("biographies of subjects who do not fit into any other category") in their classification.

266.23-24 '''Rover and Motor Boys''' 
The Rover Boys and Motor Boys were two different series of popular adventure books for boys at the turn of the 20th century.

266.31 '''Cointrin''' 
Geneva's airport

266.37 '''City of Peace''' 
Geneva, so called for the number of peace treaties signed there due to Switzerland's status as 'neutral country'.

==Page 267==
267.35-36 '''Reformation country, Zwingli's town''' 
Yes but this only highlights a strange omission: even the narrator fails to notice that Slothrop has just visited the real birthplace of Puritanism, that is, Geneva.

==Page 268==
268.5-6
'''as a mantra... they have been taught to speak inwardly ''oss''''' 
Buddhist mantras start with the syllable ''om'', representing the Universe as inward vibration. ''Oss'', with the voiceless (non-vibrating) sibilant is apparently an anti-mantra meaning bones, representing Nothing, just the escape of air.

268.34-35
'''step by step he, It, the Repressed, approaches''' 
"It, the Repressed" is clearly Freudian terminology. Here, Jamf's "German-scientist mind, battered down by Death to only the most brute reflexes," seems to fade into Infant Tyrone's mind ''conditioned'' to the most brute reflexes by the German scientist; and that is the ambiguous "he" Slothrop is afraid of.
{{GR PbP}}

Pages 205-226

2016-06-15T11:36:24Z

C-Melody: /* Page 219 */ added more corroboration to the "Angelus Novus"

{{GR PbP Text}}

==Page 206==
206.20; '''P.I.D.''' 
Political Intelligence Division

206 '''a circle with a dot in the centre''' 
Dodson-Truck is right about the Old Norse and Old High German runes, but the Gothic letter which he describes is the letter called [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwair hwair], transliterated as "hw", whose name means "cauldron, kettle". The Gothic alphabet is not runic and its letter "S" is identical in form to that of the Latin alphabet.

[[image:plasticman2.jpg|thumb|100px|Plastic Man|right]]206.37 '''A Plasticman comic''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_Man Plastic Man]’s history is a bit different than that given by Weisenburger. The hero first appeared in Police Comics in August 1941. He had his own title starting in 1943 under the Quality Comics label, which ended in 1956. The character was picked up and revived by National Periodicals ("DC" Comics) in 1966, but the new magazine lasted only for ten issues. Since then, some of the original Plastic Man stories have been reprinted from time to time, and the character has appeared in other DC publications. Plastic Man’s costume was mainly red, but also contained yellow and black. His name should be two words, not one as in ''GR''.

==Page 207==
207.8 '''Telefunken radio control. That 'Hawaii I'''' 
Telefunken is a German radio and television company, founded in 1903, in Berlin, as a joint venture of two large companies, Siemens & Halske (S & H) and the Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft (General Electricity Company). By 1941, AEG was the sole owner. During the Second World War Telefunken was a supplier of vacuum tubes, transmitters and radio relay systems, and developed radar facilities and directional finders, aiding the war efforts of the Third Reich. 'Hawaii I' was the surface station for a missile guidance system Telefunken developed.

==Page 208==
208.21 '''Palmolive and Camay''' 
Two American brands of soap.

==Page 209==
209.21 ''''s Gravenhage''' 
aka The Hague

==Page 210==
210.18 '''Johnson Smith''' 
A mail-order company officially established in 1914 that sells novelty and gag gift items such as x-ray goggles, whoopee cushions, fake vomit, and joy buzzers. They often advertised in comic books.

210.18-19 '''Mustache Kit, 20 different shapes ''' 
[[F#fumanchu|Fu Manchu]]: a full, straight mustache that grows downward past the lips and on either side of the chin and extends down toward the toes; [[M#groucho|Groucho Marx]]: a thick greasepaint mustache.

210.28 '''Wyatt Earp''' 
[[E#earp|Earp]] had an extremely long and droopy mustache; see picture [http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ilag7FZtOPc/SLt6hSWtUZI/AAAAAAAAAt8/G3vZJHcumw4/s1600-h/wyatt.jpg here]

210.35 '''John Wilkes Booth's ''' 
[[B#booth|Booth]] also had a droopy mustache, but not as long as Earp

210.30 '''Stuart Lake era''' 
Lake wrote ''Frontier Marshal'', a 1931 biography of Wyatt Earp which the author purported upon publication to be based on actual interviews but later admitted to be highly fictionalized. It served as the basis for several movies (including John Ford's ''My Darling Clementine'') as well as the 1955 to 1961 Tube series ''The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp''.

==Page 211==
211.39; '''...a drinking game, it's called Prince...''' 
A real drinking game, usually called 'Whales Tales'.

==Page 212==
212.27; '''jeroboam of Veuve Clicquot Brut''' 
A 3 liter bottle of a slightly sweet, premium French champagne

212.33; '''trews''' 
Men's clothing for the legs and lower abdomen, a traditional form of Irish and Scottish apparel; plaid trousers rather than a kilt.

212.33; '''''degorgement''''' 
French: process in which sediment is removed from wine

==Page 213==
213.21 '''The Queen of Transylvan-ia''' 
Transylvania is, of course, the mountainous region of Romania that is legendary home to Dracula.
: As well as the real-life birthplace of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Oberth Hermann Oberth], the pioneer of German rocket science, inventor of liquid-fuel propulsion, consultant on [[http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Fritz_Lang Die Frau im Mond]]; the man who turned von Braun on.

213.26 '''Chateaubriand''' 
A recipe for a thick cut of steak from the tenderloin, created for Vicomte François-René de Chateaubriand, (1768–1848)

213.27 '''panatelas''' 
Long, thin cigars

213.36 '''Épernay grapes''' 
Grapes grown in the Épernay region of France; officially designated as Champagne grapes

213.36 '''cuvées''' 
Refers to the best grape juice from gentle pressing of the grapes--the first 2,050 liters of grape juice from 4,000 kg of grapes

==Page 214==
214.02 '''Taittinger''' 
A French sweet sparkling wine, manufactured outside the Champagne region and so unable to use the controlled name - an indication that the real thing has started to run out.

214.04-05 '''Lady of Spain''' 
The song, composed in 1931 by Tolchard Evans, Stanley Demerell and Bob Hargreaves, has become a cliché of accordion music.

==Page 215==
215.29 '''News of the World''' 
A British tabloid known as a purveyor of titillation, shock and criminal news, first published in 1843 and at one time the best-selling newspaper in the UK; closely associated with Conservative political views, it was (pace Weisenberger) a weekly Sunday paper, not a daily. It folded in 2011, after a scandal involving mobile phone hacking of celebrities and a murder victim.

==Page 218==
218.10 '''Zaxa''' 
Anglicized pronunciation of [[S#sachsa|'Sachsa']]

==Page 219==
219 '''debris of their time sweeping in behind''' 
Reminiscent of Walter Benjamin's [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelus_Novus Angelus Novus] from 1940: "a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward."

The following paragraph also contains a reference to one Walter (maybe Walter Asch or Walter Rathenau, the only two Walters in GR, but possibly yet another one): "Will Walter be bringing wine tonight?"

==Page 220==
220.31 '''Schutzmann Joche''' 
The constable’s last name, with an umlaut, would approximate another expression of disgust ("yuck-ey").

==Page 222==
222.02 '''Cagney of the French Riviera''' 
James Cagney, American actor who played tough guys. Called "the professional gangster". In one famous movie scene, he shoves a grapefruit
into a woman's face over the breakfast table.

222.37 '''the bridge music''' 
A cinematic reference; the kind of musical accompaniment in which familiar tunes echoed the theme of particular scenes (especially during montage sequences spanning periods of time) was a common feature of classic Hollywood films (for example, the scores of Max Steiner). In this context, the music is background to a montage of scenes of Slothrop and Katje working together.

==Page 223==
223.11 '''IG and radio methods''' 
IG = INERTIAL guidance, i.e. guidance derived from inertia (Newton's first law)... measuring the forces on a gyroscope, which attempts to maintain the spin and orientation it had before the rocket's flight started. Put those forces (and the time during which they are sensed) through some arithmetic, and you get the current position and velocity of the rocket... leading to the right moment to shut down the engine (Brennschluss). 
Alternately, the guidance system can receive signals from two or more radio sources (a la GPS, today's Global Positioning System) and use trigonometry to calculate its position. This was planned for the V2 and tested, but never became operational AFAIK. Used extensively by bombers. 
Either way, the transition from *powered* and *controlled* flight to *ballistic* trajectory -- governed only by gravity, all its future implicit in this moment, fated and irreversible -- is a central metaphor, arguably *the* central metaphor, of the book.

223.19 '''''Der Pfau''''' 
German: the peacock; interestingly, this word sounds very similar to the pronunciation of the letter 'V', just with a soft plosive 'P' in front, so that ''Pfau Zwei'' could easily be mistaken for 'V-2'

223.36 '''scrim''' 
A gauze used as a screen or backdrop.

==Page 225==
225.32 '''a single clarinet''' 
The instrument, with its evocation of "clowns and circuses," suggests Kurt Weill's score for Brecht's ''Three-Penny Opera'' but also Nino Rota’s scores for several Fellini films, notably ''8½'' (1963 No wonder Slothrop "lacks the European reflexes" to it!)

{{GR PbP}}

Pages 205-226

2016-06-14T14:23:55Z

C-Melody: Inserted speculation about Walter Benjamin

{{GR PbP Text}}

==Page 206==
206.20; '''P.I.D.''' 
Political Intelligence Division

206 '''a circle with a dot in the centre''' 
Dodson-Truck is right about the Old Norse and Old High German runes, but the Gothic letter which he describes is the letter called [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwair hwair], transliterated as "hw", whose name means "cauldron, kettle". The Gothic alphabet is not runic and its letter "S" is identical in form to that of the Latin alphabet.

[[image:plasticman2.jpg|thumb|100px|Plastic Man|right]]206.37 '''A Plasticman comic''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_Man Plastic Man]’s history is a bit different than that given by Weisenburger. The hero first appeared in Police Comics in August 1941. He had his own title starting in 1943 under the Quality Comics label, which ended in 1956. The character was picked up and revived by National Periodicals ("DC" Comics) in 1966, but the new magazine lasted only for ten issues. Since then, some of the original Plastic Man stories have been reprinted from time to time, and the character has appeared in other DC publications. Plastic Man’s costume was mainly red, but also contained yellow and black. His name should be two words, not one as in ''GR''.

==Page 207==
207.8 '''Telefunken radio control. That 'Hawaii I'''' 
Telefunken is a German radio and television company, founded in 1903, in Berlin, as a joint venture of two large companies, Siemens & Halske (S & H) and the Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft (General Electricity Company). By 1941, AEG was the sole owner. During the Second World War Telefunken was a supplier of vacuum tubes, transmitters and radio relay systems, and developed radar facilities and directional finders, aiding the war efforts of the Third Reich. 'Hawaii I' was the surface station for a missile guidance system Telefunken developed.

==Page 208==
208.21 '''Palmolive and Camay''' 
Two American brands of soap.

==Page 209==
209.21 ''''s Gravenhage''' 
aka The Hague

==Page 210==
210.18 '''Johnson Smith''' 
A mail-order company officially established in 1914 that sells novelty and gag gift items such as x-ray goggles, whoopee cushions, fake vomit, and joy buzzers. They often advertised in comic books.

210.18-19 '''Mustache Kit, 20 different shapes ''' 
[[F#fumanchu|Fu Manchu]]: a full, straight mustache that grows downward past the lips and on either side of the chin and extends down toward the toes; [[M#groucho|Groucho Marx]]: a thick greasepaint mustache.

210.28 '''Wyatt Earp''' 
[[E#earp|Earp]] had an extremely long and droopy mustache; see picture [http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ilag7FZtOPc/SLt6hSWtUZI/AAAAAAAAAt8/G3vZJHcumw4/s1600-h/wyatt.jpg here]

210.35 '''John Wilkes Booth's ''' 
[[B#booth|Booth]] also had a droopy mustache, but not as long as Earp

210.30 '''Stuart Lake era''' 
Lake wrote ''Frontier Marshal'', a 1931 biography of Wyatt Earp which the author purported upon publication to be based on actual interviews but later admitted to be highly fictionalized. It served as the basis for several movies (including John Ford's ''My Darling Clementine'') as well as the 1955 to 1961 Tube series ''The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp''.

==Page 211==
211.39; '''...a drinking game, it's called Prince...''' 
A real drinking game, usually called 'Whales Tales'.

==Page 212==
212.27; '''jeroboam of Veuve Clicquot Brut''' 
A 3 liter bottle of a slightly sweet, premium French champagne

212.33; '''trews''' 
Men's clothing for the legs and lower abdomen, a traditional form of Irish and Scottish apparel; plaid trousers rather than a kilt.

212.33; '''''degorgement''''' 
French: process in which sediment is removed from wine

==Page 213==
213.21 '''The Queen of Transylvan-ia''' 
Transylvania is, of course, the mountainous region of Romania that is legendary home to Dracula.
: As well as the real-life birthplace of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Oberth Hermann Oberth], the pioneer of German rocket science, inventor of liquid-fuel propulsion, consultant on [[http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Fritz_Lang Die Frau im Mond]]; the man who turned von Braun on.

213.26 '''Chateaubriand''' 
A recipe for a thick cut of steak from the tenderloin, created for Vicomte François-René de Chateaubriand, (1768–1848)

213.27 '''panatelas''' 
Long, thin cigars

213.36 '''Épernay grapes''' 
Grapes grown in the Épernay region of France; officially designated as Champagne grapes

213.36 '''cuvées''' 
Refers to the best grape juice from gentle pressing of the grapes--the first 2,050 liters of grape juice from 4,000 kg of grapes

==Page 214==
214.02 '''Taittinger''' 
A French sweet sparkling wine, manufactured outside the Champagne region and so unable to use the controlled name - an indication that the real thing has started to run out.

214.04-05 '''Lady of Spain''' 
The song, composed in 1931 by Tolchard Evans, Stanley Demerell and Bob Hargreaves, has become a cliché of accordion music.

==Page 215==
215.29 '''News of the World''' 
A British tabloid known as a purveyor of titillation, shock and criminal news, first published in 1843 and at one time the best-selling newspaper in the UK; closely associated with Conservative political views, it was (pace Weisenberger) a weekly Sunday paper, not a daily. It folded in 2011, after a scandal involving mobile phone hacking of celebrities and a murder victim.

==Page 218==
218.10 '''Zaxa''' 
Anglicized pronunciation of [[S#sachsa|'Sachsa']]

==Page 219==
219 '''debris of their time sweeping in behind''' 
Reminiscent of Walter Benjamin's "[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelus_Novus Angelus Novus]" from 1940: "a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward."

==Page 220==
220.31 '''Schutzmann Joche''' 
The constable’s last name, with an umlaut, would approximate another expression of disgust ("yuck-ey").

==Page 222==
222.02 '''Cagney of the French Riviera''' 
James Cagney, American actor who played tough guys. Called "the professional gangster". In one famous movie scene, he shoves a grapefruit
into a woman's face over the breakfast table.

222.37 '''the bridge music''' 
A cinematic reference; the kind of musical accompaniment in which familiar tunes echoed the theme of particular scenes (especially during montage sequences spanning periods of time) was a common feature of classic Hollywood films (for example, the scores of Max Steiner). In this context, the music is background to a montage of scenes of Slothrop and Katje working together.

==Page 223==
223.11 '''IG and radio methods''' 
IG = INERTIAL guidance, i.e. guidance derived from inertia (Newton's first law)... measuring the forces on a gyroscope, which attempts to maintain the spin and orientation it had before the rocket's flight started. Put those forces (and the time during which they are sensed) through some arithmetic, and you get the current position and velocity of the rocket... leading to the right moment to shut down the engine (Brennschluss). 
Alternately, the guidance system can receive signals from two or more radio sources (a la GPS, today's Global Positioning System) and use trigonometry to calculate its position. This was planned for the V2 and tested, but never became operational AFAIK. Used extensively by bombers. 
Either way, the transition from *powered* and *controlled* flight to *ballistic* trajectory -- governed only by gravity, all its future implicit in this moment, fated and irreversible -- is a central metaphor, arguably *the* central metaphor, of the book.

223.19 '''''Der Pfau''''' 
German: the peacock; interestingly, this word sounds very similar to the pronunciation of the letter 'V', just with a soft plosive 'P' in front, so that ''Pfau Zwei'' could easily be mistaken for 'V-2'

223.36 '''scrim''' 
A gauze used as a screen or backdrop.

==Page 225==
225.32 '''a single clarinet''' 
The instrument, with its evocation of "clowns and circuses," suggests Kurt Weill's score for Brecht's ''Three-Penny Opera'' but also Nino Rota’s scores for several Fellini films, notably ''8½'' (1963 No wonder Slothrop "lacks the European reflexes" to it!)

{{GR PbP}}

Pages 167-174

2016-06-11T14:39:31Z

C-Melody: /* Page 173 */ deleted empty lines

{{GR PbP Text}}

==Page 167==
167.36 '''"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 the Kinks' "A Well-Respected Man" ... "And he gets up in the morning, and he goes to work at 9, etc etc"]

''Comment: interesting observation -- but is there more to corroborate this or is it just a coincidence (if coincidences exist, that is)? Where does the parallels end in this passage?''

==Page 168==
168.22-23 '''"What did the Cockney exclaim to the cowboy from San Antonio?"'''
I think Weisenburger tries way too hard on this one. If you ask me, the punchline to this terrible joke is simply "Cor, Tex!" with the "cor" from the Cockney slang exclamation "Cor blimey!" and the "Tex" from the American cowboy diminutive, indicating a person from Texas.
--[[User:Jpicco|Jpicco]] 12:47, 31 May 2009 (PDT)

==Page 169==
169.7-8 '''...some piece by Ernesto Lecuona, ''Siboney'' perhaps...''' 
Ernesto Lecuona y Casado (1895-1963) was a Cuban composer and pianist. ''Siboney'' (''Canto Siboney'') was from 1929. Siboney is also a town in Cuba.
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPy2_XnsFro 1929 version] on Youtube.

169.30 '''bass part to ''Diadem''''' 
One of several tunes used for the hymn ''All Hail the Power of Jesus' Name''; James Ellor wrote the tune.

169.31 '''Flying Fortress''' 
The Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, a four-engine heavy bomber aircraft developed in the 1930s for the United States Army Air Corps.

169.39 '''Welshman in ''Henry V''''' 
Refers to Fluellen, a comically stereotyped Welsh soldier in Shakespeare's historical play, believed to have been written around 1599. 
[http://nfs.sparknotes.com/henryv/page_242.html Act 5, scene 1,] of ''Henry V'' is the famous leek eating scene, which can be hilarious onstage.

==page 170==
170.4 '''Ashkenazic Jews''' 
also known as Ashkenazi Jews or Ashkenazim; Jews descended from the medieval Jewish communities along the Rhine in Germany from Alsace in the south to the Rhineland in the north. ''Ashkenaz'' is the medieval Hebrew name for this region and thus for Germany. Thus, Ashkenazim or Ashkenazi Jews are literally "German Jews." Later, Jews from Western and Central Europe came to be called "Ashkenaz" because the main centers of Jewish learning were located in Germany.

170.10 '''BMRs''' 
Basal metabolic rate: the amount of energy expended while at rest in a neutrally temperate environment.

170.13 '''Vincentesque invaders''' 
According to Weisenburger, this refers to germs which cause trench-mouth, a disease diagnosed by the French doctor Jean Vincent.

170.29 '''Cymri''' 
The Welsh (also ''Cymry''); ''Cymru'' is the name of the country in Welsh

==page 171==
171.7 '''''Aberystwyth''''' 
A tune composed by Joseph Parry in 1876, often used in hymns; Aberystwyth is a city in Wales.

171.11 '''bubble-and-squeak''' 
A traditional English dish made with the shallow-fried leftover vegetables, usually potato and cabbage, from a roast dinner.

171.12 '''slap-and-tickle''' 
British-English slang: playful kissing, tickling, caressing; foreplay

==page 172==
172.29 '''the white riders''' 
Death. American [Arizonian; some sources say] Folktale. ''The White Rider''[[http://www.americanfolklore.net/folktales/az2.html]]

==Page 173==
[[image:Vat 69.jpeg|120px|right]]
173.21 '''Vat 69''' 
A brand of blended whisky. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vat_69 Wiki.] 

173.26-27 '''babies born...also following a Poisson Distribution''' 
births parallel the rockets of death.

173.39 '''Christmas bugs''' 
Waterbugs... that are "agents of unification". Pynchon likes Christmas and creatures in the 'Low-lands'. These bugs were in History's most famous 'manger'....a tranquil world.

{{GR PbP}}

Pages 167-174

2016-06-11T14:38:54Z

C-Melody: /* page 171 */ inserted year

{{GR PbP Text}}

==Page 167==
167.36 '''"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 the Kinks' "A Well-Respected Man" ... "And he gets up in the morning, and he goes to work at 9, etc etc"]

''Comment: interesting observation -- but is there more to corroborate this or is it just a coincidence (if coincidences exist, that is)? Where does the parallels end in this passage?''

==Page 168==
168.22-23 '''"What did the Cockney exclaim to the cowboy from San Antonio?"'''
I think Weisenburger tries way too hard on this one. If you ask me, the punchline to this terrible joke is simply "Cor, Tex!" with the "cor" from the Cockney slang exclamation "Cor blimey!" and the "Tex" from the American cowboy diminutive, indicating a person from Texas.
--[[User:Jpicco|Jpicco]] 12:47, 31 May 2009 (PDT)

==Page 169==
169.7-8 '''...some piece by Ernesto Lecuona, ''Siboney'' perhaps...''' 
Ernesto Lecuona y Casado (1895-1963) was a Cuban composer and pianist. ''Siboney'' (''Canto Siboney'') was from 1929. Siboney is also a town in Cuba.
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPy2_XnsFro 1929 version] on Youtube.

169.30 '''bass part to ''Diadem''''' 
One of several tunes used for the hymn ''All Hail the Power of Jesus' Name''; James Ellor wrote the tune.

169.31 '''Flying Fortress''' 
The Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, a four-engine heavy bomber aircraft developed in the 1930s for the United States Army Air Corps.

169.39 '''Welshman in ''Henry V''''' 
Refers to Fluellen, a comically stereotyped Welsh soldier in Shakespeare's historical play, believed to have been written around 1599. 
[http://nfs.sparknotes.com/henryv/page_242.html Act 5, scene 1,] of ''Henry V'' is the famous leek eating scene, which can be hilarious onstage.

==page 170==
170.4 '''Ashkenazic Jews''' 
also known as Ashkenazi Jews or Ashkenazim; Jews descended from the medieval Jewish communities along the Rhine in Germany from Alsace in the south to the Rhineland in the north. ''Ashkenaz'' is the medieval Hebrew name for this region and thus for Germany. Thus, Ashkenazim or Ashkenazi Jews are literally "German Jews." Later, Jews from Western and Central Europe came to be called "Ashkenaz" because the main centers of Jewish learning were located in Germany.

170.10 '''BMRs''' 
Basal metabolic rate: the amount of energy expended while at rest in a neutrally temperate environment.

170.13 '''Vincentesque invaders''' 
According to Weisenburger, this refers to germs which cause trench-mouth, a disease diagnosed by the French doctor Jean Vincent.

170.29 '''Cymri''' 
The Welsh (also ''Cymry''); ''Cymru'' is the name of the country in Welsh

==page 171==
171.7 '''''Aberystwyth''''' 
A tune composed by Joseph Parry in 1876, often used in hymns; Aberystwyth is a city in Wales.

171.11 '''bubble-and-squeak''' 
A traditional English dish made with the shallow-fried leftover vegetables, usually potato and cabbage, from a roast dinner.

171.12 '''slap-and-tickle''' 
British-English slang: playful kissing, tickling, caressing; foreplay

==page 172==
172.29 '''the white riders''' 
Death. American [Arizonian; some sources say] Folktale. ''The White Rider''[[http://www.americanfolklore.net/folktales/az2.html]]

==Page 173==
[[image:Vat 69.jpeg|120px|right]]
173.21 '''Vat 69''' 
A brand of blended whisky. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vat_69 Wiki.] 
 
 

173.26-27 '''babies born...also following a Poisson Distribution''' 
births parallel the rockets of death.

173.39 '''Christmas bugs''' 
Waterbugs... that are "agents of unification". Pynchon likes Christmas and creatures in the 'Low-lands'. These bugs were in History's most famous 'manger'....a tranquil world.

{{GR PbP}}

Pages 167-174

2016-06-11T14:36:40Z

C-Melody: /* Page 167 */ Comment inserted

{{GR PbP Text}}

==Page 167==
167.36 '''"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 the Kinks' "A Well-Respected Man" ... "And he gets up in the morning, and he goes to work at 9, etc etc"]

''Comment: interesting observation -- but is there more to corroborate this or is it just a coincidence (if coincidences exist, that is)? Where does the parallels end in this passage?''

==Page 168==
168.22-23 '''"What did the Cockney exclaim to the cowboy from San Antonio?"'''
I think Weisenburger tries way too hard on this one. If you ask me, the punchline to this terrible joke is simply "Cor, Tex!" with the "cor" from the Cockney slang exclamation "Cor blimey!" and the "Tex" from the American cowboy diminutive, indicating a person from Texas.
--[[User:Jpicco|Jpicco]] 12:47, 31 May 2009 (PDT)

==Page 169==
169.7-8 '''...some piece by Ernesto Lecuona, ''Siboney'' perhaps...''' 
Ernesto Lecuona y Casado (1895-1963) was a Cuban composer and pianist. ''Siboney'' (''Canto Siboney'') was from 1929. Siboney is also a town in Cuba.
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPy2_XnsFro 1929 version] on Youtube.

169.30 '''bass part to ''Diadem''''' 
One of several tunes used for the hymn ''All Hail the Power of Jesus' Name''; James Ellor wrote the tune.

169.31 '''Flying Fortress''' 
The Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, a four-engine heavy bomber aircraft developed in the 1930s for the United States Army Air Corps.

169.39 '''Welshman in ''Henry V''''' 
Refers to Fluellen, a comically stereotyped Welsh soldier in Shakespeare's historical play, believed to have been written around 1599. 
[http://nfs.sparknotes.com/henryv/page_242.html Act 5, scene 1,] of ''Henry V'' is the famous leek eating scene, which can be hilarious onstage.

==page 170==
170.4 '''Ashkenazic Jews''' 
also known as Ashkenazi Jews or Ashkenazim; Jews descended from the medieval Jewish communities along the Rhine in Germany from Alsace in the south to the Rhineland in the north. ''Ashkenaz'' is the medieval Hebrew name for this region and thus for Germany. Thus, Ashkenazim or Ashkenazi Jews are literally "German Jews." Later, Jews from Western and Central Europe came to be called "Ashkenaz" because the main centers of Jewish learning were located in Germany.

170.10 '''BMRs''' 
Basal metabolic rate: the amount of energy expended while at rest in a neutrally temperate environment.

170.13 '''Vincentesque invaders''' 
According to Weisenburger, this refers to germs which cause trench-mouth, a disease diagnosed by the French doctor Jean Vincent.

170.29 '''Cymri''' 
The Welsh (also ''Cymry''); ''Cymru'' is the name of the country in Welsh

==page 171==
171.7 '''''Aberystwyth''''' 
A tune composed by Joseph Parry, often used in hymns; Aberystwyth is a city in Wales.

171.11 '''bubble-and-squeak''' 
A traditional English dish made with the shallow-fried leftover vegetables, usually potato and cabbage, from a roast dinner.

171.12 '''slap-and-tickle''' 
British-English slang: playful kissing, tickling, caressing; foreplay

==page 172==
172.29 '''the white riders''' 
Death. American [Arizonian; some sources say] Folktale. ''The White Rider''[[http://www.americanfolklore.net/folktales/az2.html]]

==Page 173==
[[image:Vat 69.jpeg|120px|right]]
173.21 '''Vat 69''' 
A brand of blended whisky. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vat_69 Wiki.] 
 
 

173.26-27 '''babies born...also following a Poisson Distribution''' 
births parallel the rockets of death.

173.39 '''Christmas bugs''' 
Waterbugs... that are "agents of unification". Pynchon likes Christmas and creatures in the 'Low-lands'. These bugs were in History's most famous 'manger'....a tranquil world.

{{GR PbP}}