Thomas Pynchon Wiki - User contributions [en]

Pages 174-177

2022-10-01T05:33:04Z

Hotrats: Added 'come-along'

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==Page 174==
174.19 '''golliwog''' 
The Golliwog or Golliwogg is a blackfaced African American caricature created in the late 1800s. It is relatively unknown in the United States, but was historically very popular in Europe. Since the 1960s, the doll has become the subject of a great deal of controversy, with Europeans attempting to decide whether it is a valuable cultural artifact or a racist insult.online dictionary 

Golliwog was also World War II British naval slang for a Gauloise cigarette, which had tobacco which was nearly black in colour.

The American rock group Creedence Clearwater Revival was known as "The Golliwogs" and under this name they released a number of singles before
the 1970s.

In unofficial military parlance of some countries which has become less common nowadays, the term was used to indicate a piece of equipment that has been tuned, upgraded, and possibly customised to the point where it is no longer similar to the stock item it started as. The term stems from the fact that although the Golliwog itself was black – its standard form was featureless in a sense – it was always represented as decorated smartly with, for example, ribbons and bows. It could be said to be found always dressed up in finery; no Golliwog was ever seen dressed conservatively. 
Golliwog [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/golliwog]]

==Page 175==
175.13-14 '''...the Tommy...the Jerries...''' 
Tommy is a slang reference to British soldiers; Jerries is British slang for German soldiers or Germans in general; the two nouns in the song allude to the famous cartoon series ''Tom & Jerry.''
[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_%26_Jerry]]

175.16<div id="polythene">'''polythene'''</div>
polythene, adj., also known as "polyethelyne" or "polyethene", a common thermoplastic.

175.21 <div id="staccato">'''staccato'''</div>
staccato, n. musical term meaning detached or not connected, with the musical notation being small dots above or below the notes. Staccato is the opposite of slurred. The sound of the crowd's staccato singing possibly mimics the sound of a machine gun, referenced in the lines directly above.

175.35 '''she [Penelope] can see the crocheted shawl''' 
The most famous Penelope, of course, is in ''The Odyssey'', Odysseus' faithful wife who spent his time away weaving a shroud..and unweaving it at night.

==Page 176==
176.1 '''refraction''' 
time-forward allusion to a major element of ''Against the Day''?

176.38-39 '''Quisling molecules''' 
'traitorous molecules'; Quisling refers to Vidkun Quisling (1887–1945), a Norwegian fascist leader who collaborated with the Nazis and is regarded as Norway's most notorious traitor.

==Page 177==
177.9-10 '''come-along''' 
''Jeremy will take her like the angel itself, in his joyless, weasel-worded come-along...''.
A come-along is a hold used to enforce compliance by military police, in which the prisoner's wrist is bent over the crook of the operatives elbow, with the opposite hand using firm downward pressure.
With the hold in place, a much larger and stronger prisoner can be subdued.

177.27-28 '''Hark the herald angels sing: Mrs. Simpson's pinched our King...''' 
A schoolyard reworking of the Christmas carol. The second line refers to Bessie Wallis Warfield, later Spencer, then Simpson (1896-1986), an American who married Prince Edward, Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII. Edward abdicated the throne in order to marry this twice-divorced commoner.

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Pages 205-226

2022-04-17T02:56:49Z

Hotrats: /* Page 223 */ Scrim extended

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==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 216==
216.38 '''The Penis He Thought Was His Own''' 
While we don't know what tune TRP had in mind when he wrote this, the rhyme scheme and phrasing make an excellent match to the chorus of the popular wartime tune 'Bless 'Em All':

''Bless 'em all / Bless 'em all/ The long and the short and the tall/ Bless all those Sergeants and WO1's/ Bless all those Corporals and their bleedin' sons/ Cos' we're saying goodbye to 'em all/ As back to their Billets they crawl/ You'll get no promotion this side of the ocean/ So cheer up my lads, bless 'em all''

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bless_'Em_All Bless_Em_All]

==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, that can be made to theatrically 'vanish' when only lit from behind.

==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

2022-04-17T02:54:09Z

Hotrats: Possible tune for The Penis He Thought etc.

{{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 216==
216.38 '''The Penis He Thought Was His Own''' 
While we don't know what tune TRP had in mind when he wrote this, the rhyme scheme and phrasing make an excellent match to the chorus of the popular wartime tune 'Bless 'Em All':

''Bless 'em all / Bless 'em all/ The long and the short and the tall/ Bless all those Sergeants and WO1's/ Bless all those Corporals and their bleedin' sons/ Cos' we're saying goodbye to 'em all/ As back to their Billets they crawl/ You'll get no promotion this side of the ocean/ So cheer up my lads, bless 'em all''

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bless_'Em_All Bless_Em_All]

==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 29-37

2022-03-13T04:23:43Z

Hotrats: Remved tangential peculation on 'Snoxall's associations

{{GR PbP Text}}

==Page 29==
29.34 '''laminar''' 
Laminar flow, sometimes known as streamline flow, occurs when a fluid flows in parallel layers, with no disruption between the layers. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laminar_flow]

==Page 30==
30.1 '''Camerons officers''' 
Sir Alexander Maurice Cameron: He served in World War II initially as a British General Staff Officer with Anti-Aircraft Command and then as Commander of the Anti-Aircraft Brigade from 1942. He was on the staff of Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force from 1944 to 1945. At this time he started constructing an Allied version of the V2 rocket. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Cameron_(British_Army_officer)]

Or: officers of the Cameron Highlanders. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen%27s_Own_Cameron_Highlanders]

30.37 '''Ouspenskian nonsense''' 
Peter D. Ouspensky (March 4, 1878–October 2, 1947), (Pyotr Demianovich Ouspenskii, also Uspenskii or Uspensky, Пётр Демья́нович Успе́нский), a Russian esoteric philosopher known for his expositions of the early work of the Greek-Armenian teacher of esoteric doctrine George Gurdjieff, whom he met in Moscow in 1915. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouspensky]

30.39 '''Jessica Swanlake''' 
Jessica’s last name, like other musical references in the novel, is suggestive. Like the heroine of the Tchaikovsky ballet, she finds true love and is transformed, but then is abducted back to her former state by an evil magician (in this case, Pointsman).

==Page 31==

31.17 '''tripos at Cambridge''' 
Formal exams at Cambridge University to demonstrate understanding and determine class honors. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Mathematical_Tripos Wikipedia]

[[image:carroll-righter.jpg|thumb|100px|right]]31.28 '''Carroll Eventyr''' 
As Weisenburger notes, "eventyr" is Danish for "adventure" but in the sense of a tale or story ("The Adventures of . . . "). It can signify "folk tales" or "fairy tales," as in Hans Christian Andersen’s stories. The first name evokes '''Lewis''' Carroll but it also suggests the astrologer Carroll '''Righter''', whose face appeared on the cover of Time magazine for a story about growing interest in the occult on March 21, 1969. Righter, nicknamed "The Gregarious Aquarius," later would read charts for Ronald Reagan, among other celebrities. Also see the note at [[Pages 735-760#742|742.29]].

==Page 32==
32.5 '''Zipf's Principle of Least Effort''' 
Zipf's law ( /ˈzɪf/), an empirical law formulated using mathematical statistics, refers to the fact that many types of data studied in the physical and social sciences can be approximated with a Zipfian distribution, one of a family of related discrete power law probability distributions. The law is named after the linguist George Kingsley Zipf who first proposed it (Zipf 1935, 1949), though J.B. Estoup appears to have noticed the regularity before Zipf. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law]

32.20 '''frail as organdy''' 
Organdy or organdie is the sheerest and crispest cotton cloth made. Combed yarns contribute to its appearance. - from Wikipedia

32.23 '''The usual Mysterious Microfilm Drill''' 
The first of several uses of this idiom ("Disgusting English Candy Drill," "them Tamara/Italo drills," "the 'Nature of Freedom' drill," etc.). They break the fourth wall with the suggestion that we and the narrator know this is familiar, stylized "going through the motions."

32.25 '''crown-and-anchor game''' 
Crown and Anchor is a simple dice game, traditionally played for gambling purposes by sailors in the British Royal Navy, and also in the British merchant and fishing fleets. The game originated in the 18th century. It is still popular in the Channel Islands and Bermuda, but is strictly controlled and may be played legally only on certain occasions, such as the Channel Islands' three annual agricultural shows, or Bermuda's annual Cup Match cricket game. Three special dice are used in Crown and Anchor. The dice are equal in size and shape to standard dice, but instead of one through six pips, they are marked with six symbols: crown, anchor, diamond, spade, club and heart. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_and_Anchor]

32.35 '''grin your Dennis Morgan chap goes about''' 
Dennis Morgan (December 20, 1908 – September 7, 1994) was an American actor-singer. Born as Earl Stanley Morner, he used the acting pseudonym Richard Stanley before adopting his professional name. In 1945, he played "Jefferson Jones" in ''Christmas in Connecticut'' opposite Barbara Stanwyck and Sydney Greenstreet. He starred in ''God Is My Co-Pilot'', ''Kitty Foyle'', ''Perfect Strangers'' and ''The Desert Song''. Morgan was a leading man with Warner Bros. in the 1940s, starring with best friend Jack Carson in many movies, several of which were "two guys" buddy pictures. His peak years were 1943 to 1949. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Morgan]

==Page 33==
33.17 '''rattling sitreps''' 
Situation reports. "A command center (often called a war room) is any place that is used to provide centralized command for some purpose." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitrep#Military_and_government]

33.19 '''good-whisky-and-cured-Latakia scent of Their rough love''' 
Latakia tobacco is a specially prepared tobacco originally produced in Syria and named after the port city of Latakia. Now the tobacco is mainly produced in Cyprus. It is initially sun-cured like other Turkish tobaccos and then further cured over a pine or oak wood fire, which gives it an intense smokey-peppery taste and smell. Too strong for most people's tastes to smoke straight, it is used as a "condiment" or "blender" (a basic tobacco mixed with other tobaccos to create a blend), especially in English, Balkan, and some American Classic blends. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latakia_%28tobacco%29]

33.26 '''Witchcraft Act''' 
Correspondent Igor Zabel offers this interesting elaboration on the reference:
"A few years ago, I came upon a short article in our daily newspaper ''Delo'', which could be interesting here. It says: 'The British spiritualists started a campaign to acquit Helen Duncan, sentenced as a witch during the World War II. She was sentenced as a consequence of a séance in 1942. She told she had seen in her trance a dead soldier wearing a cap with the inscription HMS Barham, who had told her: My ship was sunken. The news about this fact (the ship was supposedly sunken on 25 November 1942) was kept secret by the British government for two years, as Winston Churchill wrote in his diary. In 1944, Duncan was arrested since they were afraid that she would reveal also the date of the D-day. Her trial was based on the Witchcraft Act from 1735, and she was sentenced to nine months of prison. Argument: Helen Duncan pretends that she conjures the spirits of the dead.' It seems that Mexico refers to this case; the year and quotation from the Act correspond to the conviction of Helen Duncan." A web search using Helen Duncan's name will reveal several websites devoted to the "medium martyr."

33.31-32 '''the Scrubs''' 
Wormwood Scrubs Prison, in London, was built by convicts in 1874

==Page 34==
34.21 '''"The White Visitation"... devoted to psychological warfare''' 
I have always figured this was a major influence on the White Lodge of ''Twin Peaks''. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Lodge_%28Twin_Peaks%29]

34.28 '''Vichy traitors''' 
Following the armistice signed on June 22, 1940, the zone which was not occupied by the Germans took the name of the French State (État Français) (as opposed to the traditional name, République française or French Republic) and set up its capital in Vichy on July 1, because of the town's relative proximity to Paris (4.5 hours by train) and because it was the city with the second largest hotel capacity at the time. Moreover, the existence of a modern telephone exchange made it possible to reach the whole world via phone. More: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vichy]

34.28-29 '''Lublin Communists drawing beads on Varsovian shadow-ministers''' 
On 24 July 1944, Lublin was taken by the Soviet Army and became the temporary capital of a Soviet-controlled communist Polish Committee of National Liberation established in the city, which was to serve as basis for a puppet government. The capital was moved to Warsaw in January 1945. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lublin]

34.29-30 '''ELAS Greeks stalking royalists''' 
The Greek People's Liberation Army or ELAS (Greek: Ελληνικός Λαϊκός Απελευθερωτικός Στρατός, translit. Ellinikós Laïkós Apeleftherotikós Stratós, ΕΛΑΣ), was the military arm of the left-wing National Liberation Front (EAM) during the period of the Greek Resistance until February 1945. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_People%27s_Liberation_Army]

34.39 '''that stateless lascar...''' 
Lascar: The name lascar was also used to refer to Indian servants, typically engaged by British military officers. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lascar]

Lascars often appear as sinister henchmen in Sax Rohmer's "Fu Manchu" thrillers, which are referenced repeatedly in GR. Perhaps this implies, that though not immediately placeable, Pirate has a bit of an Indian look, outside of the other connotations?

34.41 '''They have euchred Mexico''' 
Euchre is a trick-taking card game most commonly played with four people in two partnerships with a deck of 24 standard playing cards. It is the game responsible for introducing the joker into modern packs; this was invented around 1860 to act as a top trump or best bower (from the German word Bauer, "farmer", denoting also the jack). It is believed to be closely related to the French game Écarté that was popularized in the United States by the Cornish and Pennsylvania Dutch, and to the seventeenth-century game of bad repute Loo. It may be sometimes referred to as Knock Euchre to distinguish it from Bid Euchre. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euchre]

==Page 35==
35.3 '''Behaviorist''' 
Behaviorism, also called the learning perspective (where any physical action is a behavior), is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things that organisms do—including acting, thinking and feeling—can and should be regarded as behaviors, and that psychological disorders are best treated by altering behavior patterns or modifying the environment. The behaviorist school of thought maintains that behaviors as such can be described scientifically without recourse either to internal physiological events or to hypothetical constructs such as the mind. Behaviorism comprises the position that all theories should have observational correlates but that there are no philosophical differences between publicly observable processes (such as actions) and privately observable processes (such as thinking and feeling). [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behaviorist]

35.3 '''Pavlovian''' 
Classical conditioning (also Pavlovian or respondent conditioning, Pavlovian reinforcement) is a form of conditioning that was first demonstrated by Ivan Pavlov (1927). The typical procedure for inducing classical conditioning involves presentations of a neutral stimulus along with a stimulus of some significance, the "unconditional stimulus." The neutral stimulus could be any event that does not result in an overt behavioral response from the organism under investigation. Conversely, presentation of the significant stimulus necessarily evokes an innate, often reflexive, response. Pavlov called these the unconditional stimulus (US) and unconditional response (UR), respectively. If the neutral stimulus is presented along with the unconditional stimulus, it would become a conditional stimulus (CS). Pavlov used the term conditional because he wanted to emphasize that learning required a dependent or conditional relationship between CS and US. If the CS and US always occur together and never alone, this perfect dependent relationship or pairing, causes the two stimuli to become associated and the organism produces a behavioral response to the CS. Pavlov called this the conditional response (CR). [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlovian]

35.21 '''NAAFI''' 
The Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes (NAAFI) is an organization created by the British government in 1921 to run recreational establishments needed by the British Armed Forces, and to sell goods to servicemen and their families. Combining some of the functions of the American USO and PX (post exchange), it runs clubs, bars, shops, supermarkets, launderettes, restaurants, cafés and other facilities on most British military bases and also canteens on board Royal Navy ships. Commissioned officers are not usually supposed to use the NAAFI clubs and bars, since their messes provide these facilities and their entry, except on official business, is considered to be an intrusion into junior ranks' private lives. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAAFI]

35.26 '''"a T.S. Eliot April"''' 
Reference to "The Waste Land" by T.S. Eliot:
''APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain''.

==Page 36==

36.3 '''ICI''' 
Standing for Imperial Chemical Industries. One of the foremost British public companies, known as the bellwether of the British economy before its reconfiguration and relative demise. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Chemical_Industries]

36.11-12 '''what the lyrics to "Dancing in the Dark" are ''really'' about...''' 
Howard Dietz' lyrics to the famous tune, outside of their obvious romantic meaning, can also be read more deeply to empathize with the human condition. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_in_the_Dark_(Howard_Dietz_and_Arthur_Schwartz_song)] 
Dancing in the dark 'til the tune ends/
We're dancing in the dark and it soon ends/
We're waltzing in the wonder of why we're here/
Time hurries by, we're here and we're gone 

Looking for the light of a new love/
To brighten up the night, I have you love/
And we can face the music together/
Dancing in the dark 

What though love is old/
What though the song is old/
Through them we can be young/
Hear this heart of mine/
Wiling all the time/
Dear one, tell me that we're one 

Looking for the light of a new love/
To brighten up the night, I have you love/
And we can face the music together/
Dancing in the dark, dancing in the dark/
Dancing in the dark

[[image:beaver.jpg|thumb|100px|right]]36.27-28 '''the Other Chap in this case being known as Beaver''' 
"Beaver" is the nickname for Jessica’s other and more staid lover, Jeremy. The nickname derives from the ‘40s slang for the beard he sports. (For example, in the "home front" film ''Since You Went Away'' [1944], the bearded character played by Monty Woolley is referred to as "Beaver.") The word also is vulgar slang for a woman’s pubic hair or genitals.

==Page 37==

37.4 '''the cutters are coming''' 
A cutter is a light, fast official vessel used by coast guards, customs officials, etc. -- here carrying on the nautical associations of Pirate & Scorpia's talk.

37.10-11 '''Fred Roper’s Company of Wonder Midgets''' 
[[image:fred-roper.jpg|thumb|100px|right]]This is apparently a real group, although I have no information on them except that a postcard exists captioned "Fred Roper and His Wonderful Midgets" with a tall man in a busby and military greatcoat and a troop of midgets in uniform under the heading "The Toy Soldier Parade." The website for The Princess Theatre Hunstanton (England) notes that the building opened as the Capitol Theatre in 1932. One of the first acts to play there was "Fred Roper and His 20 Wonder Midgets"!

A scan of a vintage program from the Fred Roper troop is available online, and video of the troop can be found on YouTube.
[http://finepixtrix.wordpress.com/2013/10/04/fred-roper-and-his-amazing-midgets/]
[http://youtu.be/KHuzWfat8dM]

37.27-28 '''rendezvous with a certain high-class vivisectionist''' 
A possible play of "cutters" (above) and "vivisectionist" (one who cuts into live animals), hinting at a parallel between Pirate/Scorpia and Roger/Jessica: both relationships are furtive and would be disapproved by Them.

37.39-40 '''whippy as sheets of glass improperly annealed''' 
Annealing is a process of slowly cooling glass to relieve internal stresses after it was formed. The process may be carried out in a temperature-controlled kiln known as a Lehr. Glass which has not been annealed is liable to crack or shatter when subjected to a relatively small temperature change or mechanical shock. Annealing glass is critical to its durability. If glass is not annealed, it will retain many of the thermal stresses caused by quenching and significantly decrease the overall strength of the glass. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annealing_(glass)]

{{GR PbP}}

Pages 20-29

2022-03-13T04:19:20Z

Hotrats: Irrelevant digression on Operation Paperclip replaced

{{GR PbP Text}}

==Page 20==

20.21 '''What it is is a graphite cylinder''' 
The contents wiull be revealed on pp. 71-72.

20.34 '''A-and''' 
Does anyone know how TRP pronounces this? Is it just a stutter? (It will recur in [http://www.google.com/search?tbs=bks:1&tbo=p&q=a-and+inauthor:thomas+inauthor:pynchon&num=10 all] his subsequent books.)

20.36 '''TDY''' 
Not "tour of duty," as in Weisenburger, but "temporary duty."

20.37 '''East End'''
This is the East End of London, particularly heavily bombed by the Germans in the war as London's docks were situated there. It was, and still is, the area where the poorest people of London live. Famously, Queen Elizabeth's mother made a royal visit there during the war where she was enthusiastically received.

==Page 21==

21.03 '''more of that Minnesota Multiphasic shit''' 
The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) is a standardized test of adult personality and psychopathology. It was first published by the University of Minnesota Press in 1943, and quickly adopted by US armed forces.[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Multiphasic_Personality_Inventory]

21.07 '''A lot of stuff prior to 1944 is getting blurry now.''' 
Even this early in the novel, Slothrop has problems with his "temporal bandwidth." His memories of the Blitz (21.08) put him in London no later than May 1941, and possibly as early as September 1940. Note also "I'm four years overdue" (25.17). The US did have military liaison missions in the UK long before entering the war, but we will get no details of Slothrop's role before the V-weapon campaign.

21.32 '''these three years''' 
This puts Slothrop and Tantivy together (presumably at ACHTUNG) since Dec. 1941. What technical intelligence from northern Germany had been targeted that far back? According to the history books, the Allies became aware of the V-weapons programs only in mid-1943.

21.35 '''Tantivy's guest at the Junior Athenaeum''' 
According to the London Encyclopedia the Junior Athenaeum purchased Hope House at 116 Piccadilly in 1868, owning it until the building was demolished in 1936. The JA appears to have closed its doors in 1931, making this a possible anachronism. The Athenaeum Club proper is the most intellectually elite of the gentlemen's clubs; Darwin, Dickens and Trollope were members and Michael Faraday was secretary of the first committee.

21.36 '''86’d''' 
While sources do agree with Weisenburger that the term "86" might originate in rhyming slang (for "nix"), they also agree that it was first used in the restaurant business to indicate menu items that were no longer available. The wider usage here may not have originated until the 1950s.

==Page 22==
22.03 '''a build out of the chorus line at the Windmill'''; also p39 "It's not backstage at the Windmill" 
The Windmill opened in 1932 in a building which had been the Palais de Luxe Cinema and then a theatre. It featured comedy and burlesque revues. The only London theatre to remain open throughout the war, the Windmill continued until 1964 when it became a cinema, reverted to a strip club in 1973, became a theatre/restaurant in 1982 and finally re-opened as a strip club in 1986. From a recent advertisement: "The Windmill International - London's Premier Tableside Dancing Club with 75 Beautiful Dancing Girls who will perform tableside for you - full Nudity - fantastic stage and light show - Dress Smart".

22.04 '''Frick Frack Club''' 
The term "frick and frack" is often used to designate two people or almost any two items closely associated with each other. The term originates from the stage names of a pair of Swiss skaters who starred in ice shows in the 1930s. Pynchon probably chose the name more for its senseless alliteration (like "Kit-Kat Club") than any specific meaning.

22.25 '''Thomas Hooker... wilde Thyme''' 
Thomas Hooker (July 5, 1586 – July 7, 1647) was a prominent Puritan religious and colonial leader, who founded the Colony of Connecticut after dissenting with Puritan leaders in Massachusetts. He was known as an outstanding speaker and a leader of universal Christian suffrage. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hooker]

"wilde Thyme" also brings to mind "Wild Tyme", song by Jefferson Airplane on their 1967 LP ''After Bathing At Baxter's'' [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_bathing_at_baxter%27s]

==Page 23==

23.10 '''Bovril''' 
A beef extract--its main use is as a flavouring for soups, and as a drink when you put a teaspoon of the stuff in a mug of boiling water. The method for making the extract was perfected by Justus von Liebig, who co-founded the eponymous London based company.

23.19 '''Wrens''' 
Women's Royal Naval Service - British non-combatent support group of war effort.

23.25 '''Ike jacket''' 
[[image:Ike_Jacket.jpeg|thumb|75px|Ike jacket|right]]Eisenhower jacket-- officially the M-44; a waist-cropped style jacket designed in 1943 and meant to be worn beneath the standard US field jacket, the M-43, as an added layer of insulation; supposedly made at Eisenhower's request.

==Page 24==
24.14 '''Humber''' 
Humber is a British automobile marque which could date its beginnings to Thomas Humber's bicycle company founded in 1868. Following their involvement in Humber through Hillman in 1928 the Rootes brothers[1] acquired a controlling interest and joined the Humber board in 1932 making Humber part of their Rootes Group. The range focused on luxury models, such as the Humber Super Snipe. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humber_(car)]

24.30 '''Morrison shelter''' 
The Morrison shelter, officially termed ''Table (Morrison) Indoor Shelter'', had a cage-like construction beneath it. It was designed by John Baker and named after Herbert Morrison, the Minister of Home Security at the time. It was the result of the realisation that due to the lack of house cellars it was necessary to develop an effective type of indoor shelter. The shelters came in assembly kits, to be bolted together inside the home. They were approximately 6 ft 6 in (2 m) long, 4 ft (1.2 m) wide and 2 ft 6 in (0.75 m) high, had a solid 1/8 in (3 mm) steel plate “table” top, welded wire mesh sides, and a metal lath “mattress”- type floor. Altogether it had 359 parts and had 3 tools supplied with the pack. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morrison_shelter#Morrison_shelter]

==Page 25==

25.06-07 '''Slothrop’s Progress . . . a parable''' 
"Slothrop’s Progress" echoes John Bunyan’s Puritan allegory ''The Pilgrim’s Progress''. The word "parable," interestingly, comes from the same root as "parabola."

Slothrop's Progress may be Time itself. Sir Arthur Eddington coined the term "time's arrow" to describe entropy's progress and time's irreversibility-- i.e. "as the universe gets older, it becomes more disordered, following the second law of thermodynamics." Entropy's progress defines time. Cf. ''Scientific American'', Jan 2008, p.26 for more.

25. 29 '''Bond Street Underground station'''
This is a station in the wealthier West End of London - also a site on the British version of 'Monopoly'

==Page 26==

26.30 '''back home in Mingeborough, Massachusetts''' 
The Berkshire town was first created by Pynchon in the short story "The Secret Integration," set in the mid-1960s. This story also introduced the Slothrop family, in the person of Hogan Slothrop, who is apparently the son of Tyrone’s brother. Minges (or "midges") are small, biting insects. However, "minge" was originally also a British slang term for a woman's pubic hair, now generalised to the female genitals.

26.33 '''British Double Summer Time''' 
Correspondent Igor Zabel explains this term:
" . . . in Britain they had, during the war, the clocks an hour ahead in the winter time and two hours in the summer time."

26.37-38 '''Death is a debt to nature due . . . so must you.''' 
Weisenburger claims that this epitaph, with its debt to "nature" rather than God, would be heretical to Puritans. That might be so, but the inscription was fairly common on tombstones in the northeast from the mid-1700s until the early 1800s, a range that includes Constant’s 1760 death.

==Page 27==

27.04 '''Variable Slothrop''' 
The son of "Constant": The two names play a mathematical pun and suggest the family’s decline as well. Both names seem to be a pun as well on the name of Puritan minister and Harvard president, the Rev. Increase Mather of Massachusetts Bay Colony and his son, Cotton Mather. Increase attempted to decrease the heat surrounding the Salem Witch Trials through a series of sermons seeking moderation in the use of spectral evidence, even though he defended the trials and the judges. Parallels: Second law of thermodynamics - heated trials cooling. Increase-Cotton-Constant-Variable -- 

27.31-33 '''They began as fur traders, cordwainers, salters and smokers of bacon, went on into glassmaking, became selectmen, builders of tanneries, quarriers of marble.''' 
[[image:berkshire.jpg|thumb|100px|right]]One source listed in Weisenburger but that he did not have time to consult closely is ''The Berkshire Hills'' <ref>''The Berkshire Hills''', Funk & Wagnalls Company, New York, 1939</ref>, a guidebook prepared for this western Massachusetts region by the Federal Writers Project during the Depression. (See Pynchon’s comments in his introduction to ''Slow Learner''.) Although not the sole source, the book provides important background for "The Secret Integration" and the Berkshire segments of ''Gravity’s Rainbow''. Most of the offices and trades listed here (except for "smokers and salters of bacon") are noted at one place or another in the guidebook. Also see my article "From the Berkshires to the Brocken: Transformations of a Source in "The Secret Integration" and Gravity’s Rainbow," Pynchon Notes 22-23 (Spring-Fall 1988): 87-98.[http://www.ham.miamioh.edu/krafftjm/pn/pn022.pdf]

==Page 28==

28.02 '''converted acres at a clip into paper''' 
Nothing to do with paperclips, 'at a clip' is UK idiom for 'very quickly'.

28.02-03 '''paper—toilet paper, banknote stock, newsprint''' 
The Berkshire Hills describes several paper mills in the region and notes the importance of the industry. One producer, Crane and Company, first used the term "bond" for high-quality paper and provided special paper for U.S. currency from 1879 on <ref>Ibid, p. 238</ref>. Another company, in the town of Lee, gave the "first practical demonstration in America of the process of manufacturing paper from wood pulp instead of rags" <ref>Ibid, p. 143</ref>.

28.05 '''Somerset Club''' 
The Somerset Club is a private social club in Boston, Massachusetts, founded perhaps as early as 1826. The original club was informal, without a clubhouse. By the 1830s this had evolved into a group called the Temple. In 1851 the group purchased the home of Benjamin W. Crowninshield, located at the corner of Beacon and Somerset Streets. Originally called the Beacon Club, it was renamed the Somerset Club in 1852. In 1871 the Somerset Club purchased the David Sears townhouse at 42 Beacon Street on Beacon Hill. Originally designed by Alexander Parris and built in 1819, Sears had added to the house in 1832 and had built the adjacent Crowninshield-Amory house at 43 Beacon Street for his daughter. The land on which the house stood was originally part of an 18-acre (73,000 m2) parcel owned by John Singleton Copley, who called it "his farm on Beacon Street." Eventually the Club bought 43 Beacon Street and joined the two houses into one large clubhouse. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerset_Club]

28.29-30 '''dying... but never quite to the zero''' 
The third in a series of zeros: 
Pirate's "idiot chase out to zero longitude" (20.8) 
Slothrop's fear of death by V-2: "the next second, right, just suddenly... shit... just zero, just nothing..."(25.18) 
And now the Slothrop family wealth diminishing towards zero 
The primary referent for the section title "Beyond the Zero" is a concept from Pavlov's theory of reflex conditioning -- but these three may also link it to the East (where the rockets come from), to what lies beyond death, and to negative wealth -- "a debt to nature due" (26.39), or a guilt accumulated by the Slothrops' spoiling of the New World.

28.33-34 '''Harrimans and Whitneys gone''' 
The Harrimans are mentioned in passing several times in The Berkshire Hills as being among the wealthy families who spent their summers in the region. William C. Whitney, President Cleveland’s Secretary of the Navy, is specifically mentioned as the founder of a vacation colony in Lenox in 1886 <ref>Ibid, p. 224</ref>. These decaying vacation homes also appear in "The Secret Integration": "...a miniaturized or toy Venice for the New York candy magnate Ellsworth Baffy, who had caused this place to be built originally. Like many who put castles up among these inland hills, he was a contemporary of Jay Gould and his partner, the jolly Berkshire peddler Jubilee Jim Fisk."

28.40 '''the Great Aspinwall Hotel Fire''' 
More historical fact, also possibly from The Berkshire Hills. [http://lostnewengland.com/2016/02/hotel-aspinwall-lenox-mass-1/]

==Page 29==

29.04 '''Hogan''' 
Tyrone Slothrop’s brother, presumably the father of the Hogan Slothrop of "The Secret Integration," set in the Berkshires a generation later.

==References==
<references/>

{{GR PbP}}

Pages 20-29

2022-03-13T04:13:43Z

Hotrats: Wrens were Naval non-combatents, not civilians.

{{GR PbP Text}}

==Page 20==

20.21 '''What it is is a graphite cylinder''' 
The contents wiull be revealed on pp. 71-72.

20.34 '''A-and''' 
Does anyone know how TRP pronounces this? Is it just a stutter? (It will recur in [http://www.google.com/search?tbs=bks:1&tbo=p&q=a-and+inauthor:thomas+inauthor:pynchon&num=10 all] his subsequent books.)

20.36 '''TDY''' 
Not "tour of duty," as in Weisenburger, but "temporary duty."

20.37 '''East End'''
This is the East End of London, particularly heavily bombed by the Germans in the war as London's docks were situated there. It was, and still is, the area where the poorest people of London live. Famously, Queen Elizabeth's mother made a royal visit there during the war where she was enthusiastically received.

==Page 21==

21.03 '''more of that Minnesota Multiphasic shit''' 
The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) is a standardized test of adult personality and psychopathology. It was first published by the University of Minnesota Press in 1943, and quickly adopted by US armed forces.[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Multiphasic_Personality_Inventory]

21.07 '''A lot of stuff prior to 1944 is getting blurry now.''' 
Even this early in the novel, Slothrop has problems with his "temporal bandwidth." His memories of the Blitz (21.08) put him in London no later than May 1941, and possibly as early as September 1940. Note also "I'm four years overdue" (25.17). The US did have military liaison missions in the UK long before entering the war, but we will get no details of Slothrop's role before the V-weapon campaign.

21.32 '''these three years''' 
This puts Slothrop and Tantivy together (presumably at ACHTUNG) since Dec. 1941. What technical intelligence from northern Germany had been targeted that far back? According to the history books, the Allies became aware of the V-weapons programs only in mid-1943.

21.35 '''Tantivy's guest at the Junior Athenaeum''' 
According to the London Encyclopedia the Junior Athenaeum purchased Hope House at 116 Piccadilly in 1868, owning it until the building was demolished in 1936. The JA appears to have closed its doors in 1931, making this a possible anachronism. The Athenaeum Club proper is the most intellectually elite of the gentlemen's clubs; Darwin, Dickens and Trollope were members and Michael Faraday was secretary of the first committee.

21.36 '''86’d''' 
While sources do agree with Weisenburger that the term "86" might originate in rhyming slang (for "nix"), they also agree that it was first used in the restaurant business to indicate menu items that were no longer available. The wider usage here may not have originated until the 1950s.

==Page 22==
22.03 '''a build out of the chorus line at the Windmill'''; also p39 "It's not backstage at the Windmill" 
The Windmill opened in 1932 in a building which had been the Palais de Luxe Cinema and then a theatre. It featured comedy and burlesque revues. The only London theatre to remain open throughout the war, the Windmill continued until 1964 when it became a cinema, reverted to a strip club in 1973, became a theatre/restaurant in 1982 and finally re-opened as a strip club in 1986. From a recent advertisement: "The Windmill International - London's Premier Tableside Dancing Club with 75 Beautiful Dancing Girls who will perform tableside for you - full Nudity - fantastic stage and light show - Dress Smart".

22.04 '''Frick Frack Club''' 
The term "frick and frack" is often used to designate two people or almost any two items closely associated with each other. The term originates from the stage names of a pair of Swiss skaters who starred in ice shows in the 1930s. Pynchon probably chose the name more for its senseless alliteration (like "Kit-Kat Club") than any specific meaning.

22.25 '''Thomas Hooker... wilde Thyme''' 
Thomas Hooker (July 5, 1586 – July 7, 1647) was a prominent Puritan religious and colonial leader, who founded the Colony of Connecticut after dissenting with Puritan leaders in Massachusetts. He was known as an outstanding speaker and a leader of universal Christian suffrage. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hooker]

"wilde Thyme" also brings to mind "Wild Tyme", song by Jefferson Airplane on their 1967 LP ''After Bathing At Baxter's'' [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_bathing_at_baxter%27s]

==Page 23==

23.10 '''Bovril''' 
A beef extract--its main use is as a flavouring for soups, and as a drink when you put a teaspoon of the stuff in a mug of boiling water. The method for making the extract was perfected by Justus von Liebig, who co-founded the eponymous London based company.

23.19 '''Wrens''' 
Women's Royal Naval Service - British non-combatent support group of war effort.

23.25 '''Ike jacket''' 
[[image:Ike_Jacket.jpeg|thumb|75px|Ike jacket|right]]Eisenhower jacket-- officially the M-44; a waist-cropped style jacket designed in 1943 and meant to be worn beneath the standard US field jacket, the M-43, as an added layer of insulation; supposedly made at Eisenhower's request.

==Page 24==
24.14 '''Humber''' 
Humber is a British automobile marque which could date its beginnings to Thomas Humber's bicycle company founded in 1868. Following their involvement in Humber through Hillman in 1928 the Rootes brothers[1] acquired a controlling interest and joined the Humber board in 1932 making Humber part of their Rootes Group. The range focused on luxury models, such as the Humber Super Snipe. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humber_(car)]

24.30 '''Morrison shelter''' 
The Morrison shelter, officially termed ''Table (Morrison) Indoor Shelter'', had a cage-like construction beneath it. It was designed by John Baker and named after Herbert Morrison, the Minister of Home Security at the time. It was the result of the realisation that due to the lack of house cellars it was necessary to develop an effective type of indoor shelter. The shelters came in assembly kits, to be bolted together inside the home. They were approximately 6 ft 6 in (2 m) long, 4 ft (1.2 m) wide and 2 ft 6 in (0.75 m) high, had a solid 1/8 in (3 mm) steel plate “table” top, welded wire mesh sides, and a metal lath “mattress”- type floor. Altogether it had 359 parts and had 3 tools supplied with the pack. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morrison_shelter#Morrison_shelter]

==Page 25==

25.06-07 '''Slothrop’s Progress . . . a parable''' 
"Slothrop’s Progress" echoes John Bunyan’s Puritan allegory ''The Pilgrim’s Progress''. The word "parable," interestingly, comes from the same root as "parabola."

Slothrop's Progress may be Time itself. Sir Arthur Eddington coined the term "time's arrow" to describe entropy's progress and time's irreversibility-- i.e. "as the universe gets older, it becomes more disordered, following the second law of thermodynamics." Entropy's progress defines time. Cf. ''Scientific American'', Jan 2008, p.26 for more.

25. 29 '''Bond Street Underground station'''
This is a station in the wealthier West End of London - also a site on the British version of 'Monopoly'

==Page 26==

26.30 '''back home in Mingeborough, Massachusetts''' 
The Berkshire town was first created by Pynchon in the short story "The Secret Integration," set in the mid-1960s. This story also introduced the Slothrop family, in the person of Hogan Slothrop, who is apparently the son of Tyrone’s brother. Minges (or "midges") are small, biting insects. However, "minge" was originally also a British slang term for a woman's pubic hair, now generalised to the female genitals.

26.33 '''British Double Summer Time''' 
Correspondent Igor Zabel explains this term:
" . . . in Britain they had, during the war, the clocks an hour ahead in the winter time and two hours in the summer time."

26.37-38 '''Death is a debt to nature due . . . so must you.''' 
Weisenburger claims that this epitaph, with its debt to "nature" rather than God, would be heretical to Puritans. That might be so, but the inscription was fairly common on tombstones in the northeast from the mid-1700s until the early 1800s, a range that includes Constant’s 1760 death.

==Page 27==

27.04 '''Variable Slothrop''' 
The son of "Constant": The two names play a mathematical pun and suggest the family’s decline as well. Both names seem to be a pun as well on the name of Puritan minister and Harvard president, the Rev. Increase Mather of Massachusetts Bay Colony and his son, Cotton Mather. Increase attempted to decrease the heat surrounding the Salem Witch Trials through a series of sermons seeking moderation in the use of spectral evidence, even though he defended the trials and the judges. Parallels: Second law of thermodynamics - heated trials cooling. Increase-Cotton-Constant-Variable -- 

27.31-33 '''They began as fur traders, cordwainers, salters and smokers of bacon, went on into glassmaking, became selectmen, builders of tanneries, quarriers of marble.''' 
[[image:berkshire.jpg|thumb|100px|right]]One source listed in Weisenburger but that he did not have time to consult closely is ''The Berkshire Hills'' <ref>''The Berkshire Hills''', Funk & Wagnalls Company, New York, 1939</ref>, a guidebook prepared for this western Massachusetts region by the Federal Writers Project during the Depression. (See Pynchon’s comments in his introduction to ''Slow Learner''.) Although not the sole source, the book provides important background for "The Secret Integration" and the Berkshire segments of ''Gravity’s Rainbow''. Most of the offices and trades listed here (except for "smokers and salters of bacon") are noted at one place or another in the guidebook. Also see my article "From the Berkshires to the Brocken: Transformations of a Source in "The Secret Integration" and Gravity’s Rainbow," Pynchon Notes 22-23 (Spring-Fall 1988): 87-98.[http://www.ham.miamioh.edu/krafftjm/pn/pn022.pdf]

==Page 28==

28.02 '''converted acres at a clip into paper''' 
A paper clip? A likely reference to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip Operation Paper Clip], the OSS program to recruit Nazi scientists to work for the US and deny them to the Russians. Von Braun was brought to the US under this program.

28.02-03 '''paper—toilet paper, banknote stock, newsprint''' 
The Berkshire Hills describes several paper mills in the region and notes the importance of the industry. One producer, Crane and Company, first used the term "bond" for high-quality paper and provided special paper for U.S. currency from 1879 on <ref>Ibid, p. 238</ref>. Another company, in the town of Lee, gave the "first practical demonstration in America of the process of manufacturing paper from wood pulp instead of rags" <ref>Ibid, p. 143</ref>.

28.05 '''Somerset Club''' 
The Somerset Club is a private social club in Boston, Massachusetts, founded perhaps as early as 1826. The original club was informal, without a clubhouse. By the 1830s this had evolved into a group called the Temple. In 1851 the group purchased the home of Benjamin W. Crowninshield, located at the corner of Beacon and Somerset Streets. Originally called the Beacon Club, it was renamed the Somerset Club in 1852. In 1871 the Somerset Club purchased the David Sears townhouse at 42 Beacon Street on Beacon Hill. Originally designed by Alexander Parris and built in 1819, Sears had added to the house in 1832 and had built the adjacent Crowninshield-Amory house at 43 Beacon Street for his daughter. The land on which the house stood was originally part of an 18-acre (73,000 m2) parcel owned by John Singleton Copley, who called it "his farm on Beacon Street." Eventually the Club bought 43 Beacon Street and joined the two houses into one large clubhouse. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerset_Club]

28.29-30 '''dying... but never quite to the zero''' 
The third in a series of zeros: 
Pirate's "idiot chase out to zero longitude" (20.8) 
Slothrop's fear of death by V-2: "the next second, right, just suddenly... shit... just zero, just nothing..."(25.18) 
And now the Slothrop family wealth diminishing towards zero 
The primary referent for the section title "Beyond the Zero" is a concept from Pavlov's theory of reflex conditioning -- but these three may also link it to the East (where the rockets come from), to what lies beyond death, and to negative wealth -- "a debt to nature due" (26.39), or a guilt accumulated by the Slothrops' spoiling of the New World.

28.33-34 '''Harrimans and Whitneys gone''' 
The Harrimans are mentioned in passing several times in The Berkshire Hills as being among the wealthy families who spent their summers in the region. William C. Whitney, President Cleveland’s Secretary of the Navy, is specifically mentioned as the founder of a vacation colony in Lenox in 1886 <ref>Ibid, p. 224</ref>. These decaying vacation homes also appear in "The Secret Integration": "...a miniaturized or toy Venice for the New York candy magnate Ellsworth Baffy, who had caused this place to be built originally. Like many who put castles up among these inland hills, he was a contemporary of Jay Gould and his partner, the jolly Berkshire peddler Jubilee Jim Fisk."

28.40 '''the Great Aspinwall Hotel Fire''' 
More historical fact, also possibly from The Berkshire Hills. [http://lostnewengland.com/2016/02/hotel-aspinwall-lenox-mass-1/]

==Page 29==

29.04 '''Hogan''' 
Tyrone Slothrop’s brother, presumably the father of the Hogan Slothrop of "The Secret Integration," set in the Berkshires a generation later.

==References==
<references/>

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17.11 '''which Mother had Garrard's make up for him''' 
Garrard & Co. Ltd., the Crown Jewellers since 1843, are at 112 Regent Street W1, where they moved in 1952. Mrs. Bloat however would have visited them at their former location in Albemarle Street, near the Royal Institution. This elite scientists' club is where Michael Faraday did most of his experimenting and today it houses the Faraday Museum.

==Page 18==

18.22-23 '''"Johnny Doughboy Found a Rose in Ireland"''' 
Song by Al Goodhart and Kay Twomey, composed for the 1942 film ''Johnny Doughboy'', starring Jane Withers and Henry Wilcoxon. Apparently a popular tune, it lasted 16 weeks on the 1942 Hit Parade and was recorded by Kay Kyser and Guy Lombardo, among others.

[[image:george-formby.jpg|thumb|50px|right]]18.25 '''George Formby''' 
See note above at [[Pages 7-16#9|9.05]]. Formby was extraordinarily popular in recordings and films in Britain in the 1940s. [[Weisenburger's Companion to Gravity's Rainbow|Weisenburger]] claims that Formby’s voice was a "high screech," but it was actually a not-unpleasant baritone. Weisenburger may be confusing Formby with the ukulele-strumming 1960s singing phenomenon Tiny Tim. On the other hand, his singing voice did have a rather whiny Lancastrian accent, similar to his speaking voice. You might like to judge for yourself from his own song [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSc-e-QffTs "She's Got Two of Everything" on YouTube], taken from his 1945 film [http://www.georgeformby.co.uk/films/do_it/report.htm ''I Didn't Do It!''].

18.26-28 '''lost pieces...jigsaw puzzles...left eye...Weimaraner''' 

TRP mentions the left eye quite a bit. Vera Meroving, in [http://v.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=M#meroving ''V.'', p.237], has an artificial left eye inscribed with a clock and the glyphs of the zodiac; and [http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_57-80#Page_61 in ''AtD''] Blinky Morgan has a damaged left eye that allows him to be a walking interferometer, able to see light polarization unaided.

The left eye here belongs to a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimaraner Weimaraner], a dog which European royalty used to hunt big game like boar and bear. Weimaraner dogs are known for their loyalty to family, sensitivity, high intelligence and problem solving ability and have thus been called the dog with a human brain. Famous owners of the breed include founder of modern Turkey, Attaturk, President Eisenhower, French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, Brad Pitt and Trent Reznor.

Amber left eye of a dog echoes The Beatles' ''I am the Walrus''': "yellow matter custard dripping from a dead dog's eye."

18.30 '''the skin of a Flying Fortress''' 
Correspondent Stephen Remato adds the following comment: "While detailing the debris on Slothrop's desk, Mr. W. suggests that the bomb which explodes over Hiroshima was dropped from a Flying Fortress. While also made by the Boeing company, it was the B29 Super Fortress, not the B17 Flying Fortress, which was the atomic bomber of WW2. The well-known B29 'Enola Gay' dropped the Hiroshima bomb, while the lesser-known B29 'Bock's Car' dropped the Nagasaki bomb. To those unaware, the superficial similarity in name between these types of aircraft is the main similarity only; they are not variations of the same aircraft but quite distinct."

18.31 '''G-2''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_intelligence Military] or ground intelligence. As opposed to N-2, Naval intelligence; A-2 air intelligence, etc.

18.38 '''a News of the World''' 
The ''NOTW'' was not a daily paper but a highly sensationalistic British weekly tabloid published every Sunday from 1843 to 2011, with virtually no serious news. That "Slothrop is a faithful reader" says much about his intellectual pursuits.
[http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk The paper's farewell web page.]
NOTW is mentioned in The Beatles song ''Polythene Pam'' : "She's the kind of a girl to make the News of the World, yes you could say she was attractively built..." and The Smiths ''This Night Has Opened My Eyes'', "Wrap her [a dead baby] up in the News of the World / Dump her on a doorstep" Likely many other songs as well.

==Page 19==

[[image:vixen-pantechnicon.jpg|thumb|100px|right]]19.30 '''the pantechnicon''' 
[[Weisenburger's Companion to Gravity's Rainbow|Weisenburger]] gives this as "a bazaar in Victorian London," but a more fitting setting for Tantivy’s story of "Lorraine and Judy, Charles the homosexual constable and the piano" would be a warehouse or furniture van, with additional cargo space over the driver's cab. See [[Pages 537-548#537|537.16-17.]]

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==Page 3==
3.03 '''The Evacuation''' 
First instance in ''Gravity's Rainbow'' of a lifetime stylistic trait of Pynchon's: unpredictable use of Capitalization.
*In ''Mason & Dixon'', Pynchon employs capitalization of nouns widely in semi-accordance with the style of 18th-century written English.
*All nouns are capitalized in German. Worth noting because the country, language and history loom so large in ''Gravity's Rainbow'' as well as Pynchon's first two novels, so much so that Pynchon scholar David Cowart refers these novels as Pynchon's "German period."

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. 
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 '''a maisonette erected last century, 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''' 

There appears to be no single maisonette near the Chelsea Embankment fitting the description of Pirate's: mullioned windows (p4), French windows, spiral ladder to the roof, parapets and a view of the Thames (p6), mediaeval windows (p93), roof ledges (p111), and of course a roof large and flat enough to hold a bananery, or some pigs. Rossetti, who we're told Throsp is on nodding terms with, and Swinburne lived at No. 16 Cheyne Walk; Rossetti kept a small zoo in the house, including peacocks (die Pfaue). Thomas Carlyle's house is nearby in Cheyne Row. There is a bust of Rossetti in the strip of park separating Cheyne Walk, where Keith Richards, not unfamiliar with Osbie Feel's kind of mushrooms, once lived, from the embankment.

Rossetti's wife died of a drug overdose, and 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 Rossetti'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''' 

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=scumbled "To blur the outlines of: a writer who scumbled the line that divides
history and fiction."

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.
 

Recapitulated later in "...corrode in the busy knives of weather pushing relentlessly into all the rooms." p532

==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.

6 '''The great power station and the gasworks beyond''' Pirate is looking at the Battersea Power Station. Built in 1937, the Station is well known for appearing below a giant inflatable pig on the cover of Pink Floyd's 1977 album Animals. It has been defunct since 1983. At the time GR is set the plant had two smokestacks; today it has four. According to the London Encyclopedia (ed. C. Hibbert and B. Weinreb) a plaque commemorating Michael Faraday hangs on one wall, but it's not possible to confirm this as the entire site is fenced off. "The gasworks beyond" is the still operational British Gas plant just southeast of the power station. Viewed from Pirate's stretch of the Embankment it seems to lie more to the right of the power station than "beyond" it.

==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."''

A further angle on the squares is this: they are ''vignettes''. Regard the etymology and definition of the word (from Wiktionary http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vignette)
:

''Etymology'':
First attested in 1751. From French vignette, diminutive of vigne (“vine”) < Latin vīnea < vīnum (“wine”).

''Definition'':

(architecture) A running ornament consisting of leaves and tendrils, used in Gothic architecture.

(printing) A decorative design, originally representing vine branches or tendrils, at the head of a chapter, of a manuscript or printed book, or in a similar position.

(by extension) Any small borderless picture in a book, especially an engraving, photograph, or the like, which vanishes gradually at the edge.

(by extension) A short story that presents a scene or tableau, or paints a picture.

The small picture on a postage stamp.

Lends new meaning to the line "Tonight they will shoot ''wine''."

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==Page 3==
3.03 '''The Evacuation''' 
First instance in ''Gravity's Rainbow'' of a lifetime stylistic trait of Pynchon's: unpredictable use of Capitalization.
*In ''Mason & Dixon'', Pynchon employs capitalization of nouns widely in semi-accordance with the style of 18th-century written English.
*All nouns are capitalized in German. Worth noting because the country, language and history loom so large in ''Gravity's Rainbow'' as well as Pynchon's first two novels, so much so that Pynchon scholar David Cowart refers these novels as Pynchon's "German period."

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. 
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 '''a maisonette erected last century, 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''' 

There appears to be no single maisonette near the Chelsea Embankment fitting the description of Pirate's: mullioned windows (p4), French windows, spiral ladder to the roof, parapets and a view of the Thames (p6), mediaeval windows (p93), roof ledges (p111), and of course a roof large and flat enough to hold a bananery, or some pigs. Rossetti, who we're told Throsp is on nodding terms with, and Swinburne lived at No. 16 Cheyne Walk; Rossetti kept a small zoo in the house, including peacocks (die Pfaue). Thomas Carlyle's house is nearby in Cheyne Row. There is a bust of Rossetti in the strip of park separating Cheyne Walk, where Keith Richards, not unfamiliar with Osbie Feel's kind of mushrooms, once lived, from the embankment.

Rossetti's wife died of a drug overdose, and 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 Rossetti'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.

6 '''The great power station and the gasworks beyond''' Pirate is looking at the Battersea Power Station. Built in 1937, the Station is well known for appearing below a giant inflatable pig on the cover of Pink Floyd's 1977 album Animals. It has been defunct since 1983. At the time GR is set the plant had two smokestacks; today it has four. According to the London Encyclopedia (ed. C. Hibbert and B. Weinreb) a plaque commemorating Michael Faraday hangs on one wall, but it's not possible to confirm this as the entire site is fenced off. "The gasworks beyond" is the still operational British Gas plant just southeast of the power station. Viewed from Pirate's stretch of the Embankment it seems to lie more to the right of the power station than "beyond" it.

==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."''

A further angle on the squares is this: they are ''vignettes''. Regard the etymology and definition of the word (from Wiktionary http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vignette)
:

''Etymology'':
First attested in 1751. From French vignette, diminutive of vigne (“vine”) < Latin vīnea < vīnum (“wine”).

''Definition'':

(architecture) A running ornament consisting of leaves and tendrils, used in Gothic architecture.

(printing) A decorative design, originally representing vine branches or tendrils, at the head of a chapter, of a manuscript or printed book, or in a similar position.

(by extension) Any small borderless picture in a book, especially an engraving, photograph, or the like, which vanishes gradually at the edge.

(by extension) A short story that presents a scene or tableau, or paints a picture.

The small picture on a postage stamp.

Lends new meaning to the line "Tonight they will shoot ''wine''."

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==Page 47==
'''autoclave''' 
An autoclave is an instrument used to sterilize equipment and supplies by subjecting them to high pressure saturated steam at 121 °C for around 15–20 minutes depending on the size of the load and the contents. It was invented by Charles Chamberland in 1879, although a precursor known as the steam digester was created by Denis Papin in 1679. The name comes from Greek auto-, ultimately meaning self, and Latin clavis meaning key — a self-locking device. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoclave]

'''run three times around the building without thinking of a fox and you can cure anything''' 
Hofstadter says in his book that a cure for hiccups is to run three times around the building without thinking about the word "wolf". His source?

Which book? Probably his most-quoted-from one, ''Godel, Escher, Bach'' [[User:MKOHUT|MKOHUT]] 13:23, 8 July 2007 (PDT)

(Note that an injunction not to think of something is a perfect example of anthropologist Gregory Bateson's 'Double Bind'.)

==Page 48==
'''sybilline cries arriving out of the darkness''' 
The Sibyl, with frenzied mouth uttering things not to be laughed at, unadorned and unperfumed, yet reaches to a thousand years with her voice by aid of the god. - Homer

'''Abreactions of the Lord of the Night''' 
Abreaction is a psychoanalytical term for reliving an experience in order to purge it of its emotional excesses; a type of catharsis. Sometimes it is a method of becoming conscious of repressed traumatic events. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abreaction]

48.25 "''' . . . one of Lazslo Jamf’s subjects . . .''' " 
The name "Jamf" apparently derives from an acronym used by Charlie Parker: "'''J'''ive-'''A'''ss '''M'''other-'''F'''ucker"!

48.38 Transmarginal and Paradoxical phases 
see [[T#Transmarginal|here]]

==Page 49==
'''pain-voices of the... Lord of the Night's children... sooner or later an abreaction''' 
The quick repetition of these ideas within two pages, here, seems to dig at the idea that Pynchon is inferring that the aural psychical effects of the bombing victims come after the fact of death just as the bombs sound come after their delivery. In other words, because of the instantaneous nature of their death there is much psychic energy that is let off which affects the environment afterward, ie. all over the frost & harrowed city.

==Page 50==
'''mummery''' 
Strictly speaking, a mummer is an actor in a traditional seasonal folk play. The term is also humorously (or derogatorily) applied to any actor. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummer_%28disambiguation%29]

'''palimpsests''' 
A palimpsest is a manuscript page from a scroll or book from which the text has been scraped off and which can be used again. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsests]

'''Realpolitik''' 
Realpolitik refers to politics or diplomacy based primarily on power and on practical and material factors and considerations, rather than ideological notions or moralistic or ethical premises... Realpolitik is a theory of politics that focuses on considerations of power, not ideals, morals, or principles. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realpolitik]

==Page 51==
'''you are the Traveler's Aid''' 
Given the emphasis here, a possible reference to Bryan Mullanphy's "Travelers Aid" given to Americans beginning in the 19th century, to aid them in traveling West. In other words, aiding these damaged souls in reaching a new life, though dont forget, we are talking about Pointsman here. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelers_Aid_International]

[[image:lymer.jpg|thumb|150px|Cobb & Beach at Lyme Regis|right]]51.31-32 '''the Ick Regis jetty''' 
The name is Pynchon’s but evokes "The Cobb," the famous jetty at the city of Lyme Regis on the southern coast of England. 

Regis is the Latin genitive of Rex, "the King" thus, "of the king."
As William Safire notes, "The colloquial noun and interjection [http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/25/magazine/25onlanguage.html?_r=1&oref=slogin ick], as well as its adjectival form, icky, are terms of disgust, distaste and revulsion." Oedipa Maas uses the term in [http://cl49.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Chapter_3 CoL49] in response to a grisly play. 

Combining Ick and Regis, could therefore render the anarchic sentiment "sick of the king."

Ick Regis, when spoken aloud, sounds like 'egregious'--perhaps a comment on the programs being run at the White Visitation?

Interestingly, for PISCES and White Visitation to be headquartered in a place named Ick Regis, brings associations with the fish sickness "ick" also known as [http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/FA006 the white spot disease], which is a severe dermatitis of freshwater fish caused by a protozoan of the genus Ichthyophthirius and is especially destructive in aquariums and hatcheries called also ichthyophthiriasis, ichthyophthirius. Hence, the "white visitation" could, again, be a sickness.

'''blastulablob''' 
Apparently a TRP neologism. More about blastulas here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blastula
--[[User:Jpicco|Jpicco]] 10:12, 16 May 2009 (PDT)

==Page 52==
'''Rundstedt offensive''' 
A reference to The Battle of the Bulge.
http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Rundstedt+Offensive
--[[User:Jpicco|Jpicco]] 10:19, 16 May 2009 (PDT)

'''Deptford''' 
Deptford is a district of south London, England, located on the south bank of the River Thames. It is named after a ford of the River Ravensbourne, and from the mid 16th century to the late 19th was home to Deptford Dockyard, the first of the Royal Dockyards... Deptford experienced economic decline in the 20th century with the closing of the docks, and the damage caused by the bombing during the Second World War - one V-2 rocket alone destroyed a Woolworths store outside Deptford Town Hall, killing 160 people. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deptford]

==Page 53==
'''Late lorry motors''' 
Lorry is the British word for a truck. Vehicle for moving cargo.

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