P
Panama Canal Zone
710; where Bodine's zootsuit "in amazing tropical-parrot combinations of yellow, green, lavender, vermilion" is brought from
Panzer
465; The Panzerkampfwagen ("armoured car") was a light tank developed by German in 1933 (disguised as the Krupp (oh yes) "Agricultural Tractor" to circumvent the Versailles Treaty which disallowed German military build-up). It was used extensively in WWII.
paper
"Death's antechamber where all the paperwork's done" 40; money as "desperate paper whispering down the corporate lattice" 75; "paper secrets" 282; "They have stuffed paper illusions and militaryd euphemisms between him and this truth" 234; "the paper cyclone that sweeps them back from Germany" 253; "a number "only derived on paper" 315; "newly invented paperwork" 318; "paper existences" 340; "Rapallo Treaty. . .that weird piece of paper" 352; "print just goes marching on" 355; "among the paper" 406; "paper brain" 421; "the paper has piled too thick" 426; paper cancer (Inflation), 435; papyromancy: "ability to prophesize through contemplating the way people roll reefers" 442; "show us your papers!" 442; murderous typewriters, 453; pencil as weapon, 510; trees/paper, 552; printer union ("the Word made printer's ink"), 571; "the only real fucking is done on paper" 616; "why does he have this obsession with getting papers?" 623; "the shed skin of a beast at large" 632; "paper grasp" 669; "foolish as shields of paper" 728 See also naming; Routinization/Rationalization of Charisma
PARABOLOIDS
See also fingernails;
Parabellum rounds
346; A Parabellum pistol, aka Luger pistol, is a semiautomatic German hand weapon first manufactured in 1900 for both military and commercial use. On recoil after firing, the mechanism opened to receive a new cartridge from an eight-round, removable box magazine in its grip.
PARANOIA/CONNECTEDNESS
See also Proverbs for Paranoids; They
Passchendaele
79; Bloody battle in World War I when the British, led by Haig, attacked the Germans in Ypres in Flanders; "the stink of shit. . .is the smell of" 235; See also Haig, Sir Douglas
Paternal Peril
675; aka "That ol' Broderick [who's] just a murderin' fool"
patterns
"Let their holiness ripple into interference-patterns" 743;
Pavel
519; assistant to Enzian; husband of Maria who is Christian's sister; talked into aborting their pregnancy by Ombindi; high on gasoline fumes, 523-24; in tap-dance routine with Andreas, 657; See also Leunagasolin
Pavlov, Ivan Petrovich (d. 1936)
35; Russian physiologist; "ideas of the opposite"--the brain distinguishing between pleasure and pain, light from dark, u.s.w., 48-49; confuse ideas of the opposite by sending subject into "transmarginal" phases: (1) equivalent phase - all stimuli have same response; (2) paradoxical phase - weak stimulus=strong response - vice versa; (3) ultraparadoxical phase - confuse ideas of opposite, 37, 90; the Book, 47, 75, 87-88, 139, 140, 171, 639 ("the dialectic curse of"); "the cortex of the brain as a mosaic of tiny on/off elements" 55; "extinction of a conditioned reflex" 84-85; "believed that the ideal is the true mechanical explanation" 89; cause of obsessions and paranoid delusions, 49; Janet, 88; Pointsman's dream, 137-38; "the Master's isolated moments of poetry" 140; ideas of the opposite, 144; "English Pavlovian jokes" 168; "Pavlovian's Progress" 169; Pavlovia (Beguine), 229; 294; 396; death of, 752; See also The Book; Opposite, Ideas of the
Peary, Robert Edwin (1856-1920)
589; U.S. Arctic explorer often credited with leading the first expedition to reach the North Pole, in 1909. Peary's claim to have reached the North Pole was almost universally accepted until, in the 1980s, an examination of his 1908-09 expedition diary and other documents cast doubt on whether he had actually reached the pole. Through a combination of navigational mistakes and record-keeping errors, Peary may actually have advanced only to a point 30-60 miles short of the pole. The truth remains uncertain.
Péclet
453; coefficient named after
pédalo
185; French: a small pedal-powered paddleboat
Peenemünde
151; location of German rocket development and production on island of Usedom at mouth of Peene River on the Baltic Sea; [MAP]; 224; taken by Soviets in Spring '45, 273; island of Greifswalder Oie where rockets were fired, 404, 414 [MAP]; British air raid in '43 ("beginning of the end"), 423; described, 501-02
Penelope
See Swanlake, Nancy
Pensiero, Pfc. Eddie
640-41; [Italian: "thought, idea"]; company barber; "connoisseur of shivers" - Name probably derived from The Duke's aria from Act Three of the Giuseppe Verdi's opera Rigoletto - "La Donna é Mobile" ("Woman is Fickle"). The opening verse:
- La donna é mobile
- qual piuma al vento,
- muta d' accento - e di pensiero.
- Woman is fickle,
- a feather to the wind,
- no orator or thinker.
Pentagon
454;
Percheron horse
245; A rugged and powerful carthorse, the Percheron originated in the province of Le Perche, near Normandy in France, perhaps developing from Arabian stock.
Perdoo, Floyd
270; SEZ WHO American hired by Pointsman to check out Slothrop's sexual conquests; See also SEZ WHO; Speed, Harvey
Perkin, William
166; English chemist who discovered the color mauve
Perón, Juan (1895-1974)
Army colonel founded and led the Peronist movement who was president of Argentina 1946-55 and 1973-74. After his election as president, he instituted greater economic and social benefits for the working class (wage increases and fringe benefits) and nationalized the railroads and other utilities, as well as financed large-scale public works. Ideologically, he staked his Third Position between communism and capitalism. His wife was Evita ("don't cry for me, Argentina, &c. &c."); 263
Peterskirche
German: "St. Peter's Church"; according to Baedeker, this 14th century church is located in Rostock, the "lofty tower" of which is 433 feet high (p.205); in "a coastal town near Wismar" where the town's "Roland-statue" is located, 568; "the clock in the "above the statue of Roland, 573
Petritor
692; The Petritor ("Peter's Gate"), aka the Sacktor ("Bag Gate)," is a fortified tower with a gate and a walkway of stone in the ancient town of Warburg in northern Germany (approx. 200 mi. SW of Berlin, near Cassel). This part of the Warburg fortification was built in 1443, a year after the citizens of Warburg had received the ransom money from defeating the Duke of Braunschweig. The city gates of Warburg were permanently guarded by gatekeepers and were closed at night. [Thanks to Felix Bernoully]
Petrova, M.K.
49;
Petty Girl pin-ups
George Petty (1894-1975) was an illustrator who worked for Esquire magazine drawing sexy pictures of scantily clad girls, called "Petty Girls," a series of pin-up paintings of women done for Esquire from the Autumn of 1933 until 1956. Petty frequently depicted these women with the relative lengths of their legs being longer — and the relative sizes of their heads being smaller — than those of his actual models. These illustrations were so popular with US servicemen in WWII that bomber crews would paint copies of them on the sides of their aircraft. Petty was eventually replaced at Esquire with Vargas who worked a similar vein. You can see a Petty Girl peeking out between Marlon Brando and the waxen John Lennon on the cover of the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album, or check this out; "crimson-lipped, sausage-limbed," in office in old Krupp works in Cuxhaven, 592; Wikipedia entry
Pflaumbaum
159-60; German: "plum tree"; "Jewish wolf" who owned the paint factory where Pökler worked briefly--tried to create patterned paint; running Glitherius subsidiary in Berlin, 582
Philippe
546; older man Louis Borgesius was living with in Antwerp
Phoebus
649; international light-bulb cartel headquartered in Switzerland, run by Int'l GE, Osram and Associated Electrical Industries of Britain; determines operational lives of bulbs; "the clear signature of" 745; See also bulbs; Byron the Bulb
photography
Piet
104; perhaps a Dutch underground comrade of Katje's
See also Erdschweinhöhle; Myron Grunton; Innocence; Ombindi; Onguruve; Plechazunga; Porkyevitch, Dr.; St. Blaise, "Basher"; Swinemünde; [Swine Online] [Pigs in Mason & Dixon]
Pirate
See Prentice, Pirate
PISCES
34; Psychological Intelligence Schemes for Expediting Surrender, housed in The White Visitation; "devoted to psychological warfare" 35; "concerned with a rather strictly defined, clinical version of truth" 272; Proceedings of the International Society of Confessors to an Enthusiasm for Albatross Nosology, 712; See also Twelfth House; White Visitation
Pitt, J. Peter
65; friend of Slothrop's who appears in toilet adventure
Pizzini's Store
744; in Mingeborough, MA
Plassy
Plassey, aka Palashi, is a historic village in east-central West Bengal state, northeastern India, and was the scene of the decisive victory of British forces under Robert Clive (1725-74) over those of the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-Dawlah (assisted by French artillery troops), in 1757. Sent to reestablish British trading stations in Bengal, Clive was aided in his mission by the treachery of the nawab's generals. At the Battle of Plassey, Clive's forces included elephants packtrains. The battle helped pave the way for the British acquisition of Bengal and established Clive as its virtual master; "Clive and his elephants stomping the French at" 82
PLASTIC
See also Imipolex G; Plasticman
206; Plastic Man was a cartoon character in the 1940s who, through his ability to stretch himself into any shape, fought crime; 314; 331; 752; More on Plasticman; See also comicbook/cartoon/fictional characters
Plasticity
249; "central canon: that chemists were no longer to be at the mercy of Nature"; "virtuous triad of Strength, Stability and Whiteness" 250;
Plattdeutsch
569; Low-German, the North German dialects
Plechazunga
567; German 10th Century Pig-Hero who saved "a coastal town near Wismar" from the Vikings; Slothrop as, 568-69
Plongette
129; character conjured by the presence of the black man in choir at the Advent service attended by Roger and Jessica--"who loves it between her tits and will do it that way for free"
Plunkitt, Jed
665; member of Iowa chapter of Masons
Poehlmann, Moritz
416; German rocket engineer: "work in devising a cooling system for the propulsion
Pointsman, Dr. Edward W. A. ("Ned")
37; Pavlovian at White Visitation; Slothrop's nemesis; sees Slothrop as his ticket to a Nobel Prize; "F.R.C.S." [Fellow in the Royal College of Surgeons], 42; chasing dogs, 42; pedophilia, 50-51; "can only possess the zero and the one" 55; "thirteen years along the clew, he's beginning to circle back, 88; the "Antimexico" 89; "His decline, creeping on him like the cold" 140; "There are, in his history, so many of these unmade moves" 140-41; fantasizes winning Nobel Prize, 142; "They would deny him the perversity of being in love with his death. . ." 143; begins to lose it by the sea on Whitsun ("White Sunday"), 273; working out of Twelfth House in London, 533; "losing his grip" 592; conducting study of Hund-Stadt, 615; in disgrace, 615; and ICI, 631; his "famous Corner" at Twelfth House, 633; "confronted by Mexico in Mossmoon's office, 636; "the pointsman" 644; no Stockholm, 752; "one who never Made His Move" 752; [Etymological Musings]
Poisson Distribution
54; a probability density function reflected in where the bombs hit London and the locations of Slothrop's (fantasized?) sexual-encounters, 55, 85-86; 171; and babies born during the blitz, 173; "erotic Poisson" 270; See also science/physics/math
153; "a thin freckled man, nearly bald" (575); young German chemical engineer; father of Ilse; "cause-and-effect man"; worked in paint factory; "Piscean" 154; put up fliers for Schlepzig's film, 160; then stumbled on rocket launching and meets Mondaugen, 161; "engineer on the customer end of the Imipolex G contract" 283; came to Nordhausen in '44 and worked in Mittelwerke in factory run by SS, 283; conceiving Ilse, 397; in Zwölfkinder, 398; moved to Peenemünde in '37, 404; sense of drifting away, 405; brooding about Leni, 405; Victim in a Vacuum, 414; "grim phoenix" 415; imagined sex with Ilse, 420; accepting the game, 421; unique destiny of, 423; moved to Blizna, 424; transferred to the Harz, Mittelwerke in '44, 426; dream dialogues with bulb/Weissmann, 426-27; quits the game, 430; hoping Dora prisoners (and Ilse) will be set free, 431; "special destiny" to develop a plastic fairing for the propulsion section of S- gerät 00000, 431; puts wedding ring on dying woman at Dora, 433; with Frieda the pig at Zwölfkinder and meets Slothrop, 575; 687
Pökler, Ilse154; daughter of Franz & Leni Pökler; 220; conceived, 397; shows up, 407, 417; Moon-house, 414; in Dora camp ("call them re-education camps"), 408, 428; last visit to Zwölfkinder, 428; released?, 432; mapped on to Bianca, 576-77; she's okay, 610
Pökler, Leni153-60; married to Franz Pökler; affair with Sachsa; mother of Ilse; active in K.P.D. (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands: "German Communist Party"); prostitute (?), 156-57; "grew up in Lübeck" 162; Sachsa's "refuge from society" 219; Nazi sex slave, 408; separated from Ilse, 417; as "Solange" at Putzi's, 603; dreaming of Ilse, 610: See also Solange
Polschuhen
702; German: "pole piece" (Elec.); "weird-shaped Polschuhen, iron pieces to modify the shape of the magnetic field"
Pollitt, Harry (1890-1960)
135; British Communist, and general secretary (1929-39, 1941-56) and chairman (1956-60) of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). He helped found the CPGB in 1920 and went to Moscow in 1921 to attend a congress of the Third International, where he met Vladimir Lenin. In 1925 he was sentenced to a year's imprisonment for seditious libel and incitement to mutiny. (In 1934 he was acquitted in another sedition trial.) In 1929 he became head of his party as general secretary.
polymorphous perversity
"Crouchfield, doing it with both sexes and all animals except for rattlesnakes [...] but lately seems he's been havin' these fantasies about that rattlesnake, too!" 69; Catherine the Great, 343, 344; "it's an open house here, no favored senses or organs, all are equally at play" 439; "an expansion of music's polymorphous perversity till all notes were truly equal at last" 440; woman at dog show in Slothrop's 3-part dream, 447; on the Anubis, 463, 467; "a megalomaniac master plan of sexual love with every individual one of the People in the World" 547; at Putzi's, 602; in the Zone, 613-14; See also Counterforce; Rocket limericks
Porfirio, Crown Prince
698; "bareass [...] with a giant halo of aluminum shaving curls on his head, his mouth made up with black grease"
Porkyevitch, Dr.
51; works at ARF; in charge of conditioning Grigori the devilfish; worked with Pavlov, 75; after octopus attack, 187
Portales, Graciela Imago
383; the "urban idiot of Buenos Aires"; loved by the literati (including Borges); 613
Potemkin, Prince Grigori A. (1739-91)
343; This Polish-born Russian soldier distinguished himself in Catherine the Great's 1st Turkish War (1768-74) and became her lover in 1774 and directed Russian policy. During the 2nd Turkish War (1787-92) he was head of the army and received the credit for Suvorov's victories. He died a rich man; "Did Prince Potemkin's fake villages survive Catherine's royal progress?" 388; See also Catherine the Great; Suvorov
Potsdam Conference
370; held in Neubabelsberg (old movie capital) near Berlin in August 1945. Post-war Germany was divided up by the Allies represented by U.S. President Harry Truman, British Deputy Prime Minister Clement Attlee and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin; "[Tchitcherine's] in Potsdam right now. [...] Set up a headfquarters in one of the old film studios" 376; likened to a big party/Hollywood premier, 380; [MAP]
Pox, DeCoverley
9; at Pirate's maisonette; with Slothrop at the Junior Anthenaeum, 21
Prandtl, Ludwig
452; 1904 "was the year ~ proposed the boundary layer, which really got aerodynamics into business"; coefficient named after, 453;
prang
228; Slang: crash
5-7; 42 years old in '45; lives in maisonette in Chelsea, works for Special Operations Executive (SOE), aka the "Firm"; works with Teddy Bloat; dreaming, 3-4; message from Katje by V-2, 11; "getting inside the fantasies of others" 11-16; "homeopathic doses of peace" 16; retrieves graphite cylinder ("windburned face, big mean mother"), 20; feels Mexico is being used by Them, 35; affair with Scorpia Mossmoon, 35-36, 638; decodes message from rocket using his semen, 71-72; brought Katje to White Visitation, 106; 274; 536; at Convention/Garden of double agents, 537; "by the time you get any summary, the whole thing will have changed" 541; "This is one of his own in progress." 543; with Katje at double-agent convention, 545-48; "I can repeat patterns" 546; How I Came to Love the People, 547; going to Berlin, 619; hasn't lived other's fantasies since VE Day, 620; visited by Mexico, 637; 657; and James Jello, 698; (Although it seems most likely that his name is connected to Gilbert & Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance, where the hero Frederic is "'prenticed to a pirate," it has been pointed out, by Frank Lynch, that "Pirate Prentice" is an anagram of "Preterite Panic." - In the interests of full disclosure...)
Preterite
Calvinist/Puritan doctrine of the Elect (the chosen) and the Preterite (the passed-over, the damned); "second sheep" 3; "a new preterition abroad in England" 15; Dodoes, 108-11; "But if [the Dutch settlors] were chosen to come to Mauritius, why had they also been chosen to fail, and leave? Is that a choosing, or is it a passing over? Are they Elect, or are they Preterite, and doomed as Dodoes?" 110; "men you have seen on foot and smileless in the cities but forgot" 136; at Rathenau seance, 163; coal-tars as preterite dung, 166; "his poor sheep" 233; "the multitudes who are passed over by God and History" 299; "In preterite line they have pointed her here" 316; "Elite and Preterite, we move through a cosmic design of darkness and light" 495; "they dissolve now into the swarm. . .of this dancing Preterition" 548; "The successful loner was only the other part of it: the last piece to the jigsaw puzzle, whose shape had already been created by the Preterite" 554; Judas, 555; On Preterition, 555; "in their slick persistence and our preterition" 590; "rubbers yellow with preterite seed, Kleenex wadded to brain shapes hiding preterite snot, preterite tears" 626; 667; 668; "the glozing neuters of the world" 677; "the Humility, among the gray and preterite souls" 742; See also Hand of Providence/God; Puritans
Prettyplace, Mitchell
113; "noted film critic"; book about King Kong, 275; See also King Kong
Prigsbury
123; English motorcycle cop behind Roger and bare-breasted Jessica
Principle of Least Effort
See Zipf's Principal of Lease Effort
Principle of Maximizing Risk
659;
Procalowska, Stefania
395; wife of Antoni, 460-61; 481; 530
Procalowski, Antoni
460; owns the Anubis; in storm, 488; 529-30; "down-out-of-the-sky-in-a-machine" 672
Project Hermes
287; from General Electric;
Proudhon, Pierre Joseph (1809-1865)
Proudhon, born into the poverty of the working class, was trained as a printer. He claimed that his three great influences were the Bible, Adam Smith and Hegel. These influenced him in his condemnation of usurious interest (the Bible), the principle of equality of wages (Smith) and the proposition that "[e]very true thought is conceived in time and breaks up in two directions" (the Hegelian dialectic). Quote of the day: "Property is theft"; "19th century European anarchist Mason" 587; See also Friscia and Bakunin
Proverbs for Paranoids
- You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures." 237
- The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master." 241
- If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers." 251
- You hide, they seek." 262
- "Paranoids are not paranoids (Proverb 5) because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations." 292
See also paranoia/connectedness
P.R.S. categories
89; should be "S.P.R.": Society for Psychical Research
Psi Section
"Psi" is a general term which covers all parapsychological phenomena. Originally derived from the use of the greek letter psi to denote the unknown quantity in an equation; paranormal branch of SOE, 40; 54; 76; 80; 91; 128; 138;144; "the freaks of" 146; "Blavatskian wing of" 269; 276
Psychochemie AG
"Jamf at the time was working for a Swiss outfit called Psychochemie AG, originally known as the Grössli Chemical Corporation, a spinoff from Sandoz" 250; "Psychochemie AG is still around, still doing business at the same old address in the Schokoladestrasse, in that Zürich, Switzerland." 250; "Schweitar is very tight indeed with Psychochemie AG" 260; "the Grössli Chemical Corporation (later Psychochemie AG)" 286
Ptomaine Epidemic of 1943
451; during which Höpmann and Kreuss routed waste lines on the Toiletship into the ventilation system
Pudding, Ernest, Old Brigadier
46; 80-ish WWI vet in charge of the White Visitation; "senile little surprise" 48; "old delusions-of-grandeur himself" 52; background, 76; Things That Can Happen in European Politics, 77, 275; "Pudding's Gourd Surprise" 80; doesn't like Pointsman's plans for Slothrop, 83-84; with Katje Borgesius at Casino (?), 190; and Domina Nocturna, 232-36; ill, 273; dies of "massive E.coli infection" 533; 631; "is now a member of the Counterforce" 715
Puke-a-hook-a-look-i Island
635; "actual location" for "another World War II situation comedy" 692; See also Hawaii
Pumm
139; one of the seven original owners of The Book; killed in jeep accident; 140; 167
puns &c.
Joaquin Stick, 9; "his batman, a Corporal Wayne" 11; Constant and Variable Slothrop, 27; "'Treed at last!'" 199; "It suits you" 355; "You look more like Gaucho Marx" 386; "pip, pip, old Jap" 479; "For De Mille, young fur-henchmen can't be rowing!" 559; "Salitieri, Poore, Nash, De Brutus and Short" 591, 652; "Wilhelmets" 664; "I Ching feet" 746;
Purfle, Avery
594; in First International Runcible Spoon Fight; shipmate of Bodine's
Puritans
Calvinist insanity, 57; "a Puritan reflex of seeking other orders behind the visible" 188; "all those word-smitten Puritans dangling off of Slothrop's family tree" 207; "Just a neuter, just a recording eye" 216; "all those earlier Slothrops packing Bibles around the blue hilltops as part of their gear, memorizing chapter and verse the structures of Arks, Temples, Visionary Thrones--all the materials and dimensions." 241-42; "it was vanity, vanity as his Puritan forerunners had known it, bones and heart alert to Nothing" 267; "initiated at Harvard into the Puritan Mysteries" 267; "WASPs in buckled black" 281; "Providence's little pal" 379; "glozing neuters of the world" 510, 677; Providence, 537, 585; "second Sheep" 555; hopes for the Word, 571; and money, 652; Wm. Slothrop's hymn, 760; See also Hand of Providence; Preterite
Purvis, Melvin (1903-1960)
Putzi's
527; club on Dorum Road in Cuxhaven where Springer says Slothrop can pick up his papers; 595; 598; arrival at, 602
PWD
76; Political Warfare Division, Army
PWE
21; Political Warfare Executive; 52; 146; 628; About
