Difference between revisions of "Laszlo Jamf"

Latest revision as of 20:22, 9 December 2006

References in Gravity's Rainbow

"'If he hadn't been one of Laszlo Jamf's subjects, would you be all this keen on him?'" 48

"Prof. Dr. Laszlo Jamf, 'Kryptosam' (advertising brochure), Agfa, Berlin, 1934" 71

"Better behave yourself or we'll send you back to Dr. Jamf! When Jamf conditioned him, he threw away the stimulus. Looks like Dr. Jamf's been by to see your little thing today, hasn't he?" 83

"Dr. Laszlo Jamf opined that if Watson and Rayner could successfully condition their 'Infant Albert' into a reflex horror of everything furry, even of his own Mother in a fur boa, then Jamf could certainly do the same thing for his Infant Tyrone, and the baby's sexual reflex. Jamf was at Harvard that year, visiting from Darmstadt." 84

"Shoestring funding may have been why Jamf, for his target reflex, chose an infant hardon." 84

"Jamf would have, in Pavlovian terms, 'extinguished' the hardon reflex he'd built up" 84

"Did Dr. Jamf extinguish only to zero--wait till the infant showed zero hardons in the presence of stimulus x, and then stop? Did he forget--or ignore--the 'silent extinction beyond the zero'? " 85

"[Pökler's] course in polymer theory was taught by Professor-Doctor Laszlo Jamf, who was latest in the true succession, Liebig to August Wilhelm von Hofmann, to Herbert Ganister to Laszlo Jamf, a direct chain" 161

"human child, grown to manhood [...] a survival, if you will, of a piece of the late Dr. Jamf himself" 168

"a new plastic [...] developed in 1939 [...] by one L. Jamf for IG Farben." 249

"L. Jamf [...] proposed [...] taking the parental polyamide sections of the new chain, and looping them around into rings too [...] Such chains would be known as "aromatic heterocyclic polymers. One hypothetical chain that Jamf came up with, just before the war, was later modified into Imipolex G. Jamf at the time was working for a Swiss outfit called Psychochemie AG" 250

"'I'd sure like anything they got on L. Jamf, a-and on that Imipolex G.'" 260

"the ritual of going out every Sunday to spit on old Jamf's grave." 261

Slothrop at Jamf's grave, 268

"The absence of Jamf surrounds him like an odor," 269

"The Swiss firm's dossier on L. (for Laszlo) Jamf listed all his assets at the time he came to work in Zürich. Apparently he had sat--as token scientist--on the board of directors of the Grössli Chemical Corporation as late as 1924" 284

"Early in '23 [Bland] began to sell off his interests in the Stinnes operations. One of these sales was made through Laszlo Jamf to the Grössli Chemical Corporation" 286

"Oneirine, and Methoneirine. Variations reported by Laszlo Jamf in the ACS Journal, year before last. Jamf was on loan again, this time as a chemist, to the Americans," 348

"'Emulsion J,' invented by Laszlo Jamf," 387

"Seaman Bodine [...] has seeded tonight's grounds with a massive dose of Laszlo Jamf's celebrated intoxicant," 389

"Pökler's old prof, Laszlo Jamf, at this point in the spiel removing from his fob a gold hexagon with the German formée cross in the center, a medal of honor from IG Farben" 413

"of course it wasn't Prof. Dr. Jamf after all, but a colleague from down the hall who had pulled reveille duty that morning." 413

"Slothrop and the S-Gerät and the Jamf/Imipolex mystery have grown to be strangers." 434

"Oneirine Jamf Imipolex A4...." 464

"the pale plastic ubiquity of Laszlo Jamf." 490

"this ex refinery, Jamf Ölfabriken Werke AG, is not a ruin at all." 520

"Yeah! yeah what happened to Imipolex G, all that Jamf a-and that S-Gerät" 561

"if I can find that S-Gerät 'n' how Jamf was hooked in" 561

"Pökler does manage to tell a little about Laszlo Jamf, but keeps getting sidetracked off into talking about the movies" 577

"In the last third of his life, there came over Laszlo Jamf [...] a strangely personal hatred, for the covalent bond [...] That something so mutable, so soft, as a sharing of electrons by atoms of carbon should lie at the core of life, his life, struck Jamf as a cosmic humiliation." 577

"If this be National Socialist chemistry, blame that something-in-the-air, the Zeitgeist. [...] Prof.-Dr. Jamf was not immune." 578: "Pökler and his codisciples under Jamf" 578

"[...] Prof -Dr Laszlo Jamf, all their yearnings aimed the same way, toward a form of death that could be demonstrated to hold joy and defiance" 579

"'You have the two choices," Jamf cried, his last lecture of the year: [...] stay behind with carbon and hydrogen [...] or move beyond. [...] move beyond life, toward the inorganic. Here is no frailty, no mortality--here is Strength, and the Timeless." [...] But Jamf himself, oddly, did not move on. He never synthesized those new inorganic rings or chains he had prophesied so dramatically. [...] He [...] took his lunchbucket to America." 579-80

"the APC had sold Bland a few of Laszlo Jamf's early patents" 581

"Jamf, the coupling of 'Jamf' and 'I' in the primal dream." 623

"The Jamf business was only a front for..." 631

"a Laszlo Jamf variation on polyvinyl chloride, very malleable" 646

"Why, it's Laszlo Jamf himself, grown to a prolonged old age, preserved like a '37 Ford against the World's ups and downs [...] inside Happyville here. Dr. Jamf is wearing a bow tie of a certain limp grayish lavender" 646

"Laszlo Jamf walks away down the canal [...] The pleats in Jamf's suit go weaving away like iris leaves in a backyard wind. The colonel is left alone in Happyville." 655

"There is in Laszlo Jamf's celebrated molecule a particular twist, the so-called 'Pökler singularity,'" 702

"'There never was a Dr. Jamf,' opines world-renowned analyst Mickey Wuxtry-Wuxtry--'Jamf was only a fiction' 738

Etymology of "Jamf"

In May 1995, Alan Westrope posted the following to the Pynchon List regarding the etymology of "Jamf":

As a result of my delightfully dissipated saxophone-playing youth, I have long been aware of the origin of the term "jamf." [...] Earlier today I found this book:

AUTHOR(s): Gold, Robert S., 1924-

TITLE(s): Jazz Talk

New York : Da Capo Press, 1982, c1975.

xii, 322 p. ; 22 cm. --

Bobbs-Merrill Co., Indianapolis, 1975.

While examining the entry for "jive" I found this on page 148:

4. jive, jiver, jive mother-fucker, jive-ass mother-fucker, jamf (oral evidence only for the last three)...jamf is an abbreviation of jive-ass mother-fucker and is said to have originated with Charlie Parker;

This is precisely how I've heard "jamf" used, of course! It's always nice to have it confirmed, though, and I was pleasantly surprised by the level of scholarship in Gold's book — it's far better than most similar endeavors.