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When asked if she were a witch, Geli makes reference to the Brocken, a mountain in northern Germany which Goethe describes in <i>Faust</i> as the center of revelry for witcheson [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walpurgis_Night Walpurgisnacht]. This may again be a reference to Pynchon’s Cornell teacher Vladimir Nabokov and his book <i>Pale Fire</i>. In that book Nabokov indirectly (and humorously) references the Broken when Kinbote talks of "an anthology of poets and a brocken of their wives" as a way of comparing Sybil Shade to a witch. Interestingly, Blodgett Waxwing is mentioned again less than a page later. (See [[Pages_244-249#Page_246|246.35]] for discussion of Nabokov and "waxwing".)