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Chapter 1

2026-02-23T19:04:31Z

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{{V PbP Top}}

9/1 - '''Benny Profane''' 
'''Benny''': Benny is slang for benzedrine, a trademarked amphetamine often prescribed for anxiety. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzedrine]. Also, ''bene'' [Latin] = "well-intentioned", observes Molly Hite, "The structural metaphor for the 'present' seems to be Profane's habit of yo-yoing, and the well-intentioned (''bene'') Benny himself". The complete quote can be found in the discussion, as it has a spoiler. The "present" in the novel refers to this and other chapters that happen between Christmas Eve, 1955-1956. The book citation is in the discussion. The book has an interesting interpretation of Pynchon's post-modernist narrative.

'''Profane''': Since 1912, as defined in ''The Elementary Forms of Religious Life'' by the sociologist Emile Durkheim, 'profane' has had the social meaning of 'everything that is not sacred'. [https://science.jrank.org/pages/11185/Sacred-Profane--MILE-DURKHEIM.html/] 
"The division of the world into two domains, one containing all that is sacred and the other all that is profane—such is the distinctive trait of religious thought."--Durkheim (p. 34). [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11186-020-09396-z#:~:text=A%20hierarchy%20of%20holiness%3A%20Separating%20sacred%20from%20profane&text=The%20division%20of%20the%20world,34)] 
Latin root: ''pro'' "in front of/before"; ''fanum'' "temple", i.e. not within the inner sanctum. Benny is "profane" compared to the almost mystical world of historical fiction Stencil (see below) moves through.

9/1 - '''Schlemihl''' 
A loser or fool; one who is clumsy or hurts others emotionally. [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/schlemiel#English] The different spelling from the more traditional schlemiel alludes to a novel by Adelbert von Chamisso titled ''Peter Schlemihl'', which tells the story of a man who sells his shadow to the Devil for a "bottomless wallet" only to find that his missing shadow occludes him from society and the woman he loves. He rejects another offer from the Devil to exchange his shadow for his soul and travels the earth in scientific pursuit. A 1953 television version appeared in "Favorite Story" starring DeForest Kelley, aka Dr. McCoy of the Starship Enterprise. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Schlemihl] 

9/1 - '''Christmas Eve 1955''' 
The first time that the Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD) received a call concerning Santa's whereabouts. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NORAD_Tracks_Santa]
 
Pynchon worked on aspects of NORAD [later acronym] when he was at Boeing.

9/1 - '''Norfolk, Virginia''' 
Port city.[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norfolk%2C_Virginia/ wikipedia]
The city has a long history as a strategic military and transportation point. Norfolk is home to the Norfolk Naval Base, the world's largest naval base. Urban renewal, starting
in the 1970s included the demolition of many prominent city buildings, and large swaths of urban fabric including the East Main Street district (where the current civic complex is located), and where Benny starts yo-yoing. 

9/1 - '''his old tin can's''' 
His particular naval ship. The informal usage of "tin can" refers to a naval destroyer, notorious for relatively light armor.

9/1 - '''Sailor's Grave''' 
Profane's destoyer, the USS Scaffold, considered this tavern theirs. The name of the tavern comes from a poem written by Edwin Hubbell Chapin and set to music by George N. Allen. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Hubbell_Chapin] It is also known as "The Ocean Burial". [https://www.musicanet.org/robokopp/usa/oceanbur.htm] Chapin later reworked the poem into a cowboy lament called "Bury me not on the Lone Prairie" which has been covered by many C&W artists including Johnny Cash and Moe Bandy and more recently by The Residents. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bury_Me_Not_on_the_Lone_Prairie] 

9/1 - '''Sterno can''' 
Sterno Canned Heat is a fuel made from denatured and jellied alcohol. It is designed to be burned directly from its can.[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterno/ wikipedia]

9/1 - '''Chief Yeoman''' 
A chief yeoman (E-7) would be in charge of administrative and logistical duties aboard a destroyer during WWII. Yeoman is one of the oldest rates in the Navy. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeoman_(United_States_Navy)]

[[image:Packard-Patrician-1954.jpg|thumb|right|150px| 1954 Packard Patrician]]9/1 - '''54 Packard Patrician''' 
The Packard Patrician was an automobile built by the Studebaker-Packard Corporation of Detroit, Michigan, from model years 1951 through the 1956 model. There was even an eight-passenger model.1958 was the last year of
Packard production.
The Packard had a high reputation for quality, for value that would last and Packards are highly-prized by collectors today. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packard_Patrician]

10/2 - '''seaman deuce''' 
A seaman apprentice [seaman second class].

10/2 - '''like a yo-yo...maybe a year and a half''' 
"One year of those times [Fifties] was much like another...there was a lot of aimlessness going around". Introduction to ''Slow Learner'', p.14, by Thomas Pynchon.

10/2 - '''Drunken Sailors...Do With''' 
Lyrics to a sea shanty: "What shall we DO WITH a DRUNKEN SAILOR?"

Here, actually beginning on the first page, appears Pynchon's lifelong stylistic use of capitalization--for a certain kind of emphasis?, for a kind of reification?, and for much, much more certainly. It also has to do with Pynchon's preoccupation with Germanic history--in German, all nouns are capitalized. See Pynchon's 1997 novel, [http://masondixon.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ ''Mason & Dixon''] for the most extensive use of capitalization.

10/2 - '''one potential berserk...the glass breaks?''' 
Cf. Zoyd Wheeler's annual "act of televised insanity" in Pynchon's 1990 novel, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vineland ''Vineland'']

10/2 - '''SP''' 
Shore Patrol, the naval 'police'.

10/2 - '''Hey Rube''' 
Carnies'--circus folk--call to come together when in a dispute with townspeople. Reviewer, writer, Michael Moorcock, who published an early Pynchon story when he was a young magazine editor, has pointed to circuses as motifs in Pynchon, calling [http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ ''Against the Day''], a massive "circus" novel.

10/2 - '''V''' 
This is the first appearance of the letter that is the title. It describes
ugly green mercury-vapor lamps. Not positive associations--to say the least-- in Pynchon's world. See [http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ ''Against the Day''], passim, especially in the Telluride sections. The V of the lamps recedes to the east, usually a positive association in Pynchon, especially in intellectual connotations.

10/2 - '''doggo''' 
in hiding used chiefly in the phrase ''to lie doggo''

11/3 - '''Beatrice''' 
Probable allusion see 'all barmaids' coming up to Beatrice, [Beatrice Poltinari] guide through 'Paradise' of Dante's [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_Comedy ''The Divine Comedy''],
whom Dante loves.

11/3 - '''DesDiv 22''' 
Destroyer Division 22. Possible allusion to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch22 ''Catch 22''] ?, another now-classic comic, famously anti-war, novel, published in 1961, but sections were published even earlier in magazines.

<div id="singleup"> 11/3 - '''single up all lines'''</div>
"Single up all lines" is a common nautical term. Ships are docked with lines doubled -- that is, with two sets of ropes or chains holding the vessel to the dock. To "single up all lines" is to remove the redundant second lines in preparation to make way. This phrase, used as either a nautical term or metaphorically appears in [http://cl49.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Chapter_2#single_up_all_lines ''The Crying of Lot 49'', p.31]; [http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Pages_488-491#single_up_all_lines ''Gravity's Rainbow'', p.489]; [http://masondixon.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Chapter_26:_257-265#Page_258 ''Mason & Dixon'', pp.258 and 260]; [http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_1-25#Page_3 ''Against the Day'', p.3]; and [http://inherent-vice.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Chapter_8 ''Inherent Vice'', p. 119].

11/3 - '''N.O.B.''' 
Naval Operations Base. On 17 September, 1943, an accident occurred which bears a lot of resemblance to the potential accidents Pynchon describes in "Togetherness," written while at Boeing: "A NAS [Naval Station] ordnance department truck was pulling four trailers loaded with depth charges on the taxiway between NAS and the NOB piers. Each trailer was designed to carry four aerial depth charges. To save time, two additional charges were loaded on top of each trailer. Compounding the problem, the charges on top were not properly chained down. One of the charges slipped loose and became wedged between the trailer and the ground. The friction of being dragged against the road caused the charge to begin smoking." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Station_Norfolk Wikipedia]

NAS refers to Naval Air Station, likely Oceana NAS in nearby Virginia Beach. It makes sense that they would send ammo from the NAS where the jets train to the NOB to go on the carriers.

11/3 - '''Ploy''' 
'ploi'..Function: noun 
Etymology: probably from employ..Date: 1722 
1 : ESCAPADE, FROLIC 
2 a : a tactic intended to embarrass or frustrate an opponent b : a devised or contrived move : STRATAGEM (a ploy to get her to open the door -- Robert B. Parker)

11/3 - '''Pentothal injection''' 
Known as truth serum. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_thiopental Wikipedia]

12/4 - '''Negro''' 
Negro is a racial term applied to people of Sub Saharan African origin; The word is now largely seen as archaic, usually neutral and, depending on the user, occasionally offensive. However, prior to the shift in the "lexicon" of American and worldwide classification of race and ethnicity in the late 1960s, the appellation was accepted as a normal formal term both by those of African descent as well as non-blacks. Negro means black in Spanish and Portuguese, and the Italian nero is similar (Latin: niger = "black"). [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negro Wikipedia] 
''V.'' is early sixties, before the word shift in the late sixties.

12/4 - '''Dahoud''' 
"Dahoud" is the Arabic name for David.
Name of an inquisitive youth who tended to the camels in El-Jaziri. [?]

12/4 - '''"life is the most precious possession you have?"..."without it, you'd be dead."''' 
The 'meaning' of life reduced to this? Somehow seems akin to Profane's yo-yoing, or later randomness. Satire of existentialism?

12/4 - '''Lights Out''' 
lights out at 2200 (10:00 PM)---Navy Boot Camp.

12/4 - '''snipes'''
A snipe is naval slang for a member of the engineering crew on a ship. Historically, there was always tension between snipes and the deck crew.
http://oldsnipe.com/SnipeBegin.html

12/4 - '''bastard file''' 
Mill Files (Bastard Cut) are two-sided flat files featuring a single bastard cut pattern as well as a rectangular tapered point for detail work (Two square edges). Bastard cut is a term used to describe the coarseness of the file. A Bastard cut file will be between the coarsest and second cut meaning the teeth are quite coarse and ideal for rapid material removal while still leaving a smooth finish. The Single Cut means that the file has one set of diagonal rows of teeth. [https://www.empireabrasives.com/8-mill-file-bastard-cut/]

12/4 - '''DesLant''' 
Destroyer Force, Atlantic Fleet. Established in February 1941. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commander,_Naval_Surface_Forces_Atlantic]

13/5 - '''Mrs. Buffo'''...'''also named Beatrice''' 
A basso buffo, a comic bass, a staple of nearly every classic Italian comic opera. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bass_(voice_type)#Basso_buffo]

13/5 - '''dragon-embroidered kimono''' 
The Kimono (着物, Kimono? literally "something worn", i.e., "clothes") is the national costume of Japan. Originally kimono indicated all types of clothing, but it has come to mean specifically the full-length traditional garment worn by women, men, and children. Kimonos are T-shaped, straight-lined robes that fall to the ankle, with collars and full-length sleeves. The sleeves are commonly very wide at the wrist, as much as a half meter. Traditionally, on special occasions unmarried women wear kimonos (furisode) with extremely long sleeves that extend almost to the floor. Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimonos 
Kimonos were originally worn only by the nobility.

After World War II, as Japan's economy gradually recovered, kimono became even more affordable and were produced in greater quantities. Europe and America fashion ideas affected the kimono designs and motifs. japanesekimono http://www.japanesekimono.com/kimono_history.htm

13/5 - '''Seventh Fleet''' 
The United States 7th Fleet is a naval military formation based in Yokosuka, Japan, with units positioned near South Korea and Japan. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Seventh_Fleet]

13/5 - '''Dewey Gland''' 
Spelled "Dewy", it means moist, wet--from dew. "Dewy-eyed" means innocent, naive.-M-W Dictionary.
Musicians, often guitar and ukelele players, are positive characters in Pynchon's oeuvre. Since music is a great joy in Pynchon's world, musicians seem often to be his archetypal artist figures. See, as context, the myth of Orpheus,"the music of [whose] lyre was so beautiful that when he played, wild beasts were soothed, trees danced, and rivers stood still." [http://education.yahoo.com/reference/encyclopedia/entry/Orpheus]

14/6 - '''goat hole''' 
The goat is the naval mascot. 
Goat Locker - Chiefs' Quarters and Mess. The term originated during the era of wooden ships, when Chiefs were given charge of the milk goats on board. Nowadays more a term of respect for the age of its denizens.

14/6 - '''wardroom''' 
wardroom n : military quarters for dining and recreation for officers of a warship. [http://www.dict.die.net/wardroom]

14/6 - '''X.O.''' 
Executive Officer. 2nd in command to the Captain.

14/6 - '''Pappy Hod''' 
pap·py2 (păp'ē)
n. Informal., pl. -pies.---
Father 
Of or resembling pap; mushy. 

hod n. A trough carried over the shoulder for transporting loads, as of bricks or mortar. A coal scuttle.
[http://www.answers.com/topic/hod]

14/6 - '''boatswain''' 
n : a petty officer on a merchant ship who controls the work of other seamen ...
[http://dict.die.net/boatswain/]
More commonly written [and pronounced as] "bosun".

14/6 - '''riggish''' 
wanton: said of Cleopatra whom the holy priests praise when she is riggish' (i.e. wanton) ... Anthony & Cleopatra, Shakespeare.

14/6 - '''Pig Bodine''' 
Notice immaturity and other relevant meanings to simple 'pig'
1 a : a young domesticated swine not yet sexually mature; broadly : a wild or domestic swine.
3 : a dirty, gluttonous, or repulsive person.--Merriam-Webster Dictionary 

Pigs in ''Gravity's Rainbow'' [http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/gravity/extra/pigs.html]

See terrific ''Bodine'' entry at AtD wiki: [http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_489-524#Page_517 Bodine]

15/8 - '''jarhead(s)''' 
Marine Corps slang for a Marine, perhaps for the shape of the hat/helmet they wore.
The term was well-established by the fifties. Answers.com. Actually, jarhead refers to the high & tight regulation haircut. [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/jarhead]

16/9 - '''Trumpeter of Cracow''' 
This references the St. Mary's Trumpet Call, which is a traditional, five-note Polish bugle call closely bound to the history and traditions of Kraków. It is played every hour on the hour, four times in succession in each of the four cardinal directions, by a trumpeter on the highest tower of the city's Saint Mary's Basilica. The noon performance is broadcast via radio to all of Poland and the world. The five note bugle call is based on the trumpeter in 1241 whose playing of the song was cut off after the 5th note by a Tartar arrow, much like Ms. Beatrice Buffo's playing
"It Came Upon a Midnight Clear" is ended by the rush to "suck hour".[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Mary%27s_Trumpet_Call].

It is also a reference to a 20th century children's novel titled ''The Trumpeter of Krakow'', which might have been a book read by the men and women who served in WWII and Korea. The story is of a trumpeter who leaves his home to go to Kraków, escaping with a crystal that seems to have alchemist and hypnotic powers. He is given the job of Trumpeter. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trumpeter_of_Krakow]

17/10 - '''"Where we going," Profane said. "The way we're heading," said
Pig.''' 
Notice the tie-in with yo-yoing, immediacy and goallessness. Also notice that Profane's question is presented as a statement and Pig's answer is all part of the same paragraph. (Unlike almost all dialogue in novels.)

17/10 - '''Newport News''' 
Newport News sits across the James River from Norfolk on the northern shore where in 1881, fifteen years of rapid development began under the leadership of Collis P. Huntington, whose new Peninsula Extension of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway from Richmond opened up means of transportation along the Peninsula and provided a new pathway for the railroad to bring West Virginia bituminous coal to port for coastal shipping and worldwide export. This is probably where Morris Teflon works. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newport_News,_Virginia]

17/10 - '''WAVE lieutenants''' 
WAVES, or "Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service". In the decades since the last of the Yeomen left active duty, only a relatively small corps of Navy Nurses represented their gender in the Naval service, and they had never had formal officer status. Now, the Navy was preparing to accept not just a large number of enlisted women, as it had done during World War I, but female Commissioned Officers to supervise them. It was a development of lasting significance, notwithstanding the WAVES' name, which indicated that they would only be around during the wartime "Emergency". Department of the Navy historical bulletin. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAVES]

17/10 - '''Morris Teflon''' 
Teflon, patented in 1941 and trademarked in 1944 by the Dupont company == Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), a synthetic fluoropolymer which finds numerous applications. PTFE has an extremely low coefficient of friction and is used as a non-stick coating for pans and other cookware. It is very non-reactive, and so is often used in containers and pipework for reactive and corrosive chemicals. Where used as a lubricant, PTFE significantly reduces friction, wear and energy consumption of machinery. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytetrafluoroethylene]

The word "teflon" is often used as a pejorative for someone who evades responsibility. While John Gotti, the Teflon Don came much later, he is an example of this.

17/10 - '''switchman''' 
switchman - a man who operates railroad switches. Pynchon does not like railroads. See [http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ ''Against the Day''].

18/11 - '''wire-brushed''' 
naval slang for a merciless chewing out.

18/11 - '''She taught them all a song. Learned from a para on French leave from the fighting in Algeria''' 
The song the paratrooper taught Paola is a French anti-war song, "Le Déserteur" ("The Deserter"), recorded in 1954 by [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Vian Boris Vian] and written by Vian and Harold Berg:

:Early tomorrow morning 
:I will shut my door 
:on these dead years 
:I will take to the road. 
:I will beg my way along 
:on the land and on the waves 
:the old and the new world ...

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYpLHRQV7sQ Have a listen & look]; [http://www.swans.com/library/art7/xxx071.html Lyrics (with a variation)]

18/11 - '''Piraeus''' 
Piraeus is a city in the periphery of Attica, Greece, located to the south of the city of Athens. It is the capital of the Piraeus Prefecture and belongs to the Athens urban area. It was the port of the ancient city of Athens and it was chosen to serve as the modern port when Athens was re-founded in 1834. Piraeus is the largest port in Europe (and third largest in the world) in terms of passenger transportation. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piraeus Wikikpedia]

19/12 - '''F.L.N.''' 
The National Liberation Front (French: ''Front de Libération nationale'', hence FLN) is a socialist political party in Algeria. It was set up on November 1, 1954 as a merger of other smaller groups, to obtain independence for Algeria from France. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Liberation_Front(Algeria) Wikipedia]

19/12 - '''Miraculous Medal''' 
The Miraculous Medal is a devotional medal, designed to help the faithful receive grace and to dispose them to cooperate with it. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miraculous_Medal]

19/12 - '''WAVY''' 
WAVY-TV is the NBC affiliate serving the Norfolk-Portsmouth-Newport News, Virginia market. It is not a radio station. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAVY-TV Wikipedia]

19/12 - '''Pat Boone''' 
A very popular 'smooth' singer of the 50s, famous for doing covers of African-American hit songs. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Boone Wikipedia]

19/12 - '''"No", she said. "Meaning Yes"''' 
Foreshadowing of the chapter "In which Esther Gets a Nose Job."

19/12 - '''Click, went Teflon's Leica''' 
Reminds of Pynchon's legendary aversion to being photographed. Although, as the narrator notes, "Outraged privacy was not so important; but the interruption had come just before the Big Moment."

Leica Camera AG had progressive labor policies which encouraged the retention of skilled workers, many of whom were Jewish. Ernst Leitz II, who began managing the company in 1920, responded to the election of Hitler in 1933 by helping Jews to leave Germany, by "assigning" hundreds (even if they were not actually employees) to overseas sales offices where they were helped to find jobs. The effort intensified after Kristallnacht in 1938, until the borders were closed in September 1939. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leica_Camera]

20/13 - '''Navy greatcoat''' 
Navy Bridge Coat. This would be an officer's coat, knee-length. The enlisted coat would be called a pea coat and is cut waist-length. See section on coats. Either cut would make Paola a petit woman. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniforms_of_the_United_States_Navy]

20/13 - '''topside''' 
the top portion of the outer surface of a ship on each side above the waterline

20/13 - '''Madonna, he thought''' 
aka Mother Mary, aka the Virgin Mary, used blasphemously.

20/13 - '''roads''' 
A sheltered body of water where vessels can safely anchor. Often an estuary on the approaches to a port. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadstead]

<div id="inanimate">20/13 - '''inanimate'''</div>
52 uses of the word inanimate in ''V.''; 13 of animate. Thematic: Life vs. Non-Life/Death.

21/14 - '''turn a corner in the street'''...'''where nothing else lived but himself''' 
As Benny did "rounding the corner' onto East Main [p.2]. Cf. animate/inanimate above.

21/14 - '''mental eye''' 
Consciousness, of course; also a perceptual theory. A-and here is a use by Charles Dickens: "gilding with refulgent light our dreamy moments, and laying open a new and magic world before the mental eye, the drama is gone, perfectly gone,' said Mr Curdle." from ''The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickelby''.

Further reading again indicates that "mental eye" is an older use which has faded, being largely replaced by 'mind's eye".

Cf. '''Third eye''':The third eye (also known as the inner eye) is a metaphysical and esoteric concept referring in part to the ajna (brow) chakra in certain Eastern and Western spiritual traditions. It is also spoken of as the gate that leads within to inner realms and spaces of higher consciousness. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_eye Third eye]
Cf. third eye in [http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_119-148 ''Against the Day'', p. 125]

21/14 - '''''Susanna Squaducci'', an Italian luxury liner''' 
Ex-''Scaffold'' sailors hold their 'reunion' here. See Pynchon's later
'linking' of a military ship and a luxury liner, the ''Stupendica'', in [http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ ''Against the Day'']

:Susanna: name of a young woman who is the subject of a famous Biblical story
in the ''Book of Daniel''. Known as 'Susanna and/among the Elders', Susanna is viewed bathing by a group of elders and they attempt to blackmail her into performing sexual favors. There have been paintings and a poem by Wallace Stevens. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susanna_%28Book_of_Daniel%29 Wikipedia]

:Squaducci: need an expert in Italian slang perhaps, but a related word seems to be: sgualdrina f. (pejorative) trollop, strumpet, harlot, tart. Squa(l)might add the negative meaning to whatever 'ducci' [pl. of duchess?] means, since 'drina' can be a girl's name and, in fact, was what young Queen Victoria was called. See ''Queen Victoria'' by Lytton Strachey.

Somehow the meanings seem to fit Pynchonian themes: from the sound, to the
Biblical sexual allusion (of saved purity) reduced to lack of such purity.

21/14 - '''dancing the dirty boogie''' 
a voluptuous dance (with varying lyrics) originating within the African-American tradition. "The “Dirty Boogie,” which was made famous by another film, “Dirty Dancing.” As you may recall, this film takes place in the 1960’s in a small Catskill resort where a dance instructor taught a young seventeen year-old varius types of sexy dance moves: one being the “Dirty Boogie.” Of course there was a scene in the movie showing all the teenagers and young adults doing the “Dirty Boogie.” Many of the dance moves in the “Dirty Boogie,” resembled movements featured in the movie, “Lambada.” These movements were acting out sexual pleasure on the dance floor. The Rolling Stones do a "Dirty Boogie" on their ''Black & Blue'' album.

21/15 - '''clown's motley''' 
Motley refers to the traditional costume of the Court jester or the Harlequin character in ''Commedia dell'arte''.[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motley]

22/15 - '''Rachel Owlglass''' 
"Rachel" means "ewe" in Hebrew; the name of Jacob's wife, who, after long infertility, gave birth to Joseph. Jacob was tricked by her father into working for him for 7 years only to be given Leah instead of Rachel. He agreed to 7 more years of labor to have Rachel too. Ahh polygamy! She dies giving birth to Benjamin. [https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rachel-biblical-figure] "Owlglass" is the Anglicization of "Eulenspiegel"; Till Eulenspiegel was a trickster/fool in German folklore and protagonist of "Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks", a tone poem by Richard Wagner. "Eule"="owl", "Spiegel"="mirror". [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Till_Eulenspiegel%27s_Merry_Pranks]

22/15 - '''the Catskills''' 
Catskill Mountains, an area northwest of New York City, famous as a vacation resort area. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catskill_Mountains Wikipedia].

22/15 - '''shakedown cruise''' 
Shakedown cruise is a nautical term in which the performance of a ship is tested. Shakedown cruises are also used to familiarize the ship's crew with operation of the craft. The term can also refer in a generic sense to the process of testing out any new technology or systems. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakedown_cruise]

22/15 - '''gee and haw''' 
To haw and gee To haw and gee about, to go from one thing to another without good reason; to have no settled purpose; to be irresolute or unstable. [Colloq.] Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.

The phrase derives from "Hey and Go" - turn right and turn left, and was originally used in leading oxen and cattle by teamsters.[http://www.takeourword.com/TOW144/page2.html]

<div id="trocadero">22/15 - '''Schlozhauer's Trocadero'''</div>
The word ''trocadero'', which in Spanish means "place of barter" (from trocar: "to barter"), goes back to a fortified site near Cadiz, Spain, that was the stronghold of the Constititutionalists in the revolution of 1820 and that fell to the French in 1823. During the International Exhibition of 1878 an ornate palace was built to commemorate the French victory. "Trocadero" became a popular name for public places in Europe, one being the Trocadero Palace of Varieties in London, known as "The Troc," which opened as a music hall in 1882 on the corner of Shaftsbury Avenue and Windmill Street.

22/15 - '''Liberty''' 
Liberty, New York: [http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=41.797792,-74.742829&spn=0.10,0.10 Google Map]

22/15 - '''Da Conho''' translates from Brazilian Portuguese as "from/of I know" according to Google and Bing translate, which matches the description on 23/16 that he "knew no more than that he was a Zionist, suffered was confused, was daft to stand rooted sock-top deep in the loam of any kibbutz".

22/15 - '''fight Arabs in Israel''' 
Of the 950,000 estimated Arabs in Israel before Israel became a state in 1948, an estimated 156,000 remained after. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_citizens_of_Israel Wikipedia]

23/16 - '''Parris Island''' 
Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island is an 8,095 acre (32.9 km²) military installation near Beaufort, South Carolina, tasked with the training of enlisted Marines. Male recruits living east of the Mississippi River and female recruits from all over the USA report here to receive their initial training. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parris_Island Wikipedia]

23/16 - '''Haganah''' 
The Haganah (Hebrew: "The Defense") was a Jewish paramilitary organization in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine from 1920 to 1948. This paramilitary became the core of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) that would have been what Da Conho would have joined to fight the Arabs. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haganah Wikipedia]

23/16 - '''mezuzah''' 
A mezuzah (Hebrew: "doorpost") is a piece of parchment (usually contained in a decorative case) inscribed with specified Hebrew verses from the Torah (Deuteronomy 6:4-9 and 11:13-21). These verses comprise the Jewish prayer "Shema Yisrael," and begin with the phrase "Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is One." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mezuzah Wikipedia]

23/16 - '''iceberg lettuce''' 
The Iceberg lettuce industry exploded during WWII as salads were seen as a real morale booster. After the war, its popularity continued as soldiers came home wanting the same assortment of fresh produce procured by the military. [http://www.taproduce.com/About/PressReleases07-4.html] California producers of iceberg lettuce were the targets of protests by Cesar Chavez's National Farm Workers Association, beginning in the very early sixties.

23/16 - '''watercress''' 
The capital growing city of this leaf vegetable ''was'' Huntsville, Alabama until:
:"The city's transformation began with the arrival of Wernher von Braun, Hitler's chief missile designer, whose V-2 rocket terrorized London and other British cities. An SS major who headed rocket research at the Peenemunde complex, where slave laborers were starved, beaten, and worked to death, von Braun could have ended up in the docket at Nuremberg like other leading Nazis. But at war's end, the Pentagon was anxious to plumb German scientific know-how in order to improve America's weaponry. Under the top-secret Operation Paperclip, the Army smuggled von Braun and his team of 118 Peenemunde scientists out of Germany and brought them to the United States. After first going to a military base near El Paso, they were taken to Huntsville in 1950 and put to work at Redstone Arsenal." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntsville%2C_Alabama]

23/16 - '''Belgian Endive''' 
A leaf vegetable grown completely underground or indoors in the absence of sunlight, a process that prevents the leaves from turning green and opening up. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicory#Cultivated]

23/16 - '''Abdul Sayid''' 
Abdul (also transliterated Abdel, `Abd al-, and other ways) means "servant of the", and is the first part of many Arabic names. It is combined with one of the 99 Names of God in the Qur'an to form a two-word Arabic theophoric name. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul] ''Sayid'' or ''Sayyid'' is an honorific title given to males who are thereby said to be descendants of the prophet Muhammed, founder of Islam.

24/17 - '''pedestrian girls''' 
notice double meaning.

The 1913 edition of ''Webster's Dictionary'' seems to be, from this and other citations, one of Pynchon's major linguistic resources or, at least, gives some of the most resonant meanings from a Pynchon Perspective.

24/7 - '''drained-nervous''' 
With the hyphen, this shows another older archaic usage. Cf. Snow-shroud and the loss of hyphens between words above.

<div id="bravo">27/21 - '''a pimpled bravo'''</div>
A "bravo" is a villain, desperado; esp. a hired assassin

32/26 - '''Dewey, now astride a lifeline on the bridge, gave a bass string intro and began to sing Blue Suede Shoes, after Elvis Presley.''' 
A slight anachronism. We know the date is 1st January 1956. Carl Perkins wrote [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Suede_Shoes "Blues Suede Shoes"] in on 4/5 December 1955, and released the record on 1st January 1956. Elvis recorded it on 30th January 1956 and first played it on television on the 11th February. It was the first track on his first album, released March. So Dewey couldn’t have played "Blue Suede Shoes" after Elvis Presley.

An anachronism, but "after" here means "in the manner of".

37/32 - '''horniness''' 
a state of sexual excitement. Pynchon is the first citation in the ''Oxford English Dictionary'' for use of this word in print, in ''V.''.

39/34 - '''screw where his navel should have been...''' 
The navel is where the umbilical cord attaches. When the boy unscrews it, his body falls apart. This is a repeated reference that bodily traits are passed on through genetics and the umbilical cord attaches you to a parent. If you try to undo it, you will undo yourself.

41/37 - '''Luis Aparicio''' 
Venezuelan major-league baseball player; American League Rookie of the year in 1956, playing for the Chicago White Sox.

42/38 - '''Geronimo broke off the song to say “Coño” and wobble his fingers.''' 
"Coño" is Spanish for "cunt"

43/39 - '''now [the alligators] moved big, blind albino, all over the sewer system...''' 
The urban legend of alligators living in the sewers of New York was given the some credence when, in the 1950s, Edward P. "Teddy" May, the superintendent of sewers in New York City, went down into the sewers to investigate and told a journalist that he'd seen "Alligators serenely paddling around in his sewers. The beam of his own flashlight had spotlighted alligators whose length, on the average, was about two feet. Some may have been longer." (''The World Beneath The City'', Robert Daley, 1959). However, Mr. May's credibility has been questioned and, in truth, the sewers are an environment inhospitable to alligators or caimons, and reports of their subterranean existence have been greatly exaggerated. [http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/23/the-book-behind-the-sewer-alligator-legend/ ''New York Times'' article about this...]
: However, a Nile crocodile was captured in the sewers of Paris, albeit in 1984, after the book was published. See for example [https://www.ouest-france.fr/bretagne/vannes-56000/lhistoire-le-croco-des-egouts-de-paris-flemmarde-vannes-2759140 this article] or [https://www.francetvinfo.fr/decouverte/bizarre/video-y-a-t-il-un-crocodile-dans-les-egouts-de-paris_385997.html this one].

<div id="Zeitsuss">43/39 -'''Zeitsuss'''</div>
'Zeit' [German] = Time. "suss" = Sweet. Mr. Zeitsuss is head of the Alligator Patrol.

{{V PbP}}

V Alpha Nav

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* navigation
** mainpage|Home Page
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* wikis
** http://bleedingedge.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page|Bleeding Edge
** http://inherent-vice.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page|Inherent Vice
** http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page|Against the Day
** http://masondixon.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page|MDsidebar
** http://vineland.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page|Vineland
** http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page|Gravity's Rainbow
** http://cl49.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page|The Crying of Lot 49

Main Page

2013-09-02T18:56:24Z

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[[Image:V_cover_sm.jpg|right]]<big>'''Welcome to ''V.'' Wiki'''</big>

To become a contributor/editor, [http://pynchonwiki.com/mycaptcha/captcha-page.php '''Create an account.''']

:[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060930217/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0060930217&linkCode=as2&tag=pyncwiki-20'''Order ''V.''''']

<likebutton>http%3A%2F%2Fv.pynchonwiki.com%2Fwiki%2Findex.php%3Ftitle%3DMain_Page</likebutton>

This is the Wiki for [[Thomas Pynchon]]'s ''V.''. Besides using the Alphabetical Index and the page-by-page annotation, you can also take a look at [[V. covers|''V.'' covers]], read the [[Reviews of V.|reviews]], or [[V. Obs|provide insights or observations]].

==How to Use this Wiki==

'''Pagination:''' We are using the 492-page pagination of the original editions of ''V.'' and the 547-page later editions. There are other paginations out there (why do they do this???), but these are the two we've chosen. Page numbers referred to as xx/xx are indicating first the 492-page edition page number and, after the slash, the 547-page edition page number.

There are two major ways to use this wiki. The first is the '''''V.'' Alphabetical Index''', used to keep track of the myriad characters, real and imagined, as well as events, arcana, and lots of other stuff. The second is the '''Spoiler-Free Annotations by Page''', which allows the reader to look up and contribute allusions and references while reading the book, in a convenient and spoiler-free manner. These two sections are so far almost entirely different, but we're working on integrating them.

Apart from those, it's up to you.

==Alphabetical Index==
Information on the characters, events, and everything else in ''V.'', organized alphabetically:{{V_Alpha_Nav}}

==Page by Page Annotations==
An alternate form of commentary on the text. The guiding principle of these annotations is to remain spoiler-free, so that readers can follow along without the fear that later parts of the book will be revealed.
{{V PbP}}
 

== Pynchon Wiki Help and Contributor Guidelines==

[[Help:Contents|'''Click here for help with editing and creating pages.''']]

We have a few conventions we ask that you follow:

* When creating a new page, first check to make sure a page/article about what you want to write about hasn't already been created, by '''[[Special:Allpages|checking the list of all Wiki pages on Pynchon Wiki]]'''. If a page already exists, please modify that one.

* To open a discussion on an individual listing of the Alpha Index or Page by Page Annotations, give it a name that identifies the alpha listing (eg <nowiki>[[Discussion Subject|'''DISCUSSION''']]</nowiki>) and notice that the visible name will be "'''DISCUSSION'''" in bold and full caps, so it stands out a bit.

* [[Help:Contents|More help for this wiki available here.]]

==External Links==

* [http://www.thomaspynchon.com/ ThomasPynchon.com]
* [http://fortunaty.net/text/textz/textz/pynchon_thomas_v.txt Full Text of ''V.'']
* [http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/ The Modern Word Pynchon page]
: [http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_v.html The Modern Word: ''V.'']
: [http://z11.invisionfree.com/thefictionalwoods/index.php The Fictional Woods] - a Pynchon forum
* [http://www.newpartisan.com/home/literature-for-the-age-of-unease-reading-pynchon-today.html "Reading Pynchon Today" in the ''New Partisan'']
* [http://www.bookforum.com/archive/sum_05/pynchon.html "Pynchon From A to V" - Excellent!]
* [http://pynchonoid.blogspot.com/ Pynchonoid Blog]
* [http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/v/index.html Pomona ''V.'' page]
* [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V. Wikipedia: ''V.'']
* [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_WWII_German_military_terms Glossary of German Military Terms]
* [http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/V. Uncyclopedia's Entry for ''V.'' (Fantastic!)]
* [http://www.en8848.com.cn/fiction/Fiction/Gerneral/2007-12-14/58934.html Chinese page on ''V.'' that includes the full text of the novel!]

==Featured Article==

[[image:logo_NYT.gif|left|200px]]This article from the June 25, 2008 ''New York Times'' Travel section has a video of Malta's history, photographs, and is a pretty good read (but check out the comments!):

Malta’s historical significance, however, outweighs its tiny weirdness. For 2,000 years, it was one of the most important strategic locations in the Mediterranean, a key to controlling naval traffic between the sea’s east and west. More recently, Malta has occupied a strategic spot in the American imagination, from [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Maltese_Falcon ''The Maltese Falcon''] to Thomas Pynchon’s ''V.'' and Joseph Heller’s [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch_22 ''Catch-22''], both of which had significant scenes set here. And Hollywood has gotten into Malta, too: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy_(film) ''Troy''], [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladiator_(film) ''Gladiator''] and even [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popeye_(film) ''Popeye''] were shot here.

[http://frugaltraveler.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/25/mopeds-horsemeat-and-pynchon-on-malta/?scp=10&sq=Frugal%20Traveler%20Grand%20Tour&st=cse Read the ''New York Times'' article...]

<div style="clear:both;"></div>

==Image Gallery==
Below are some of the images you will find on Pynchon Wiki. {{Special:Newimages}}

Thanks, and enjoy...

V.

2013-07-18T19:18:48Z

WikiAdmin:

{{Infobox Book
| name = V.
| title_orig =
| translator =
| image = [[Image:V_cover2_sm.jpg|200px|]]
| image_caption =
| author = [[Thomas Pynchon]]
| illustrator =
| cover_artist =
| country = United States
| language = English
| series =
| genre = Novel
| publisher = J. B. Lippincott Company
| release_date = March 1963
| media_type = Print (Hardback & Paperback)
| pages = 492 pp
| isbn = [http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fo%2FASIN%2F0060930217%3Fpf%5Frd%5Fm%3DATVPDKIKX0DER%26pf%5Frd%5Fs%3Dcenter-1%26pf%5Frd%5Fr%3D0JJMT6PGPA21VWH31FQ4%26pf%5Frd%5Ft%3D101%26pf%5Frd%5Fp%3D269487101%26pf%5Frd%5Fi%3D507846&tag=hyperartspynchon&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325 ISBN 0-397-00301-3]
| preceded_by =
| followed_by = [http://cl49.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ ''The Crying of Lot 49'']
}}

'''''V.''''' is the debut novel of [[Thomas Pynchon]], published in March, 1963. It describes the exploits of a discharged U.S. Navy sailor named Benny Profane, his reconnection in New York with a group of [[pseudo-bohemianism|bohemian]] artists and hangers-on known as the Whole Sick Crew, and the quest of an aging traveller named Herbert Stencil to identify and locate the mysterious entity he knows only as "V.".

==Original Dust Jacket Blurb==

This will almost certainly be the most original novel published in 1963. It is a wild, macabre tale of the twentieth century and of two men. One of them is looking for something he has lost; the other never had much to lose and so isn't looking for it. But no two readers will agree about this book because, like life itself, it is big, mysterious, and absolutely fascinating.

Thomas Pynchon's creative imagination appears to be boundless. Set in various and wonderful places (New York, Alexandria, Cairo, Paris, Florence, Malta, Africa), peopled with vivid characters, V. is indescribably original. In a madcap, sometimes sad, frequently hilarious way, it captures the ruthlessness and multiplicity of the modern world. Incident piles on incident until, in what amounts almost to a revelation, the pattern of the book and the century it describes emerge with a terrible beauty.

As for "V.," the unknown lady of the title, she is somebody's mother, somebody's mistress, and a world gone mad with despair. Neither the reader nor the American novel will remain unchallenged and unchanged by this astonishing book.

==Dust Jacket Design==
[[image:ismar-david.jpg|left|thumb|125px|Ismar David]]The dust jacket for the original hardback edition of ''V.'' was designed by [http://www.shunammite.com/idea/ Ismar David] (1910-1996). David was born in Germany and, in 1932, after winning an international design competition, moved to Jerusalem where he worked as a designer. In 1953, David moved to New York and set up his graphic design studio. During his career, he designed over 200 book jackets and covers.


==Editions==
In 2012 it emerged that there were multiple versions of V. in circulation. This was due to the fact that Pynchon's final modifications were made after the first edition was printed and thus were only implemented in the British, or Jonathan Cape, edition and the Bantam paperback. The fact was forgotten soon after in the U.S., so most US editions, including the newly released eBook, follow the first printing and are therefore unauthorized versions of the text, while the British editions, which follow the first edition printed by Jonathan Cape, contain Pynchon's final revisions.

==Plot summary==
{{spoiler}}
The novel alternates between episodes featuring Benny, Stencil and other members of the Whole Sick Crew (including Profane's sidekick Pig Bodine) in 1956 (with a few minor flashbacks), and a generation-spanning plot which comprises Stencil's attempts to unravel the clues he believes will lead him to "V." (or to the various incarnations thereof). Each of these "Stencilised" chapters is set at a different moment of international historical crisis, however, the framing narrative involving Stencil, "V.", and the journals of Stencil's British spy/diplomat father threads the sequences together. The novel's two storylines increasingly converge in the last chapters (the intersecting lines forming a V-shape, as it were), as Stencil hires Benny to travel with him to Malta.

'''The Stencil chapters are:'''

''chapter three'' 
In which Stencil, a quick-change artist, does eight impersonations

This chapter, set among the British community in Egypt toward the end of the 19th century, consists of an introduction and a series of eight relatively short sections, each of them from the point of view of a different person. The eight sections come together to tell a story of murder and intrigue, intersecting the life of a young woman, Victoria Wren, the first incarnation of V. The title is a hint as to how this chapter is to be understood: Stencil imagines each of the eight viewpoints as he reconstructs — we do not know on how much knowledge and how much conjecture — this episode. This chapter is a reworking of Pynchon's short story "Under the Rose", which was first published in 1961 and is collected in ''Slow Learner'' (1984). In the ''Slow Learner'' introduction, Pynchon admits he took the details of the setting ("right down the names of the diplomatic corps") from Karl Baedeker's 1899 travel guide for Egypt. Stencil's reconstruction follows the same basic conflict as "Under the Rose", but it gives the non-European characters much more personality.

''chapter five'' 
In which Stencil nearly goes West with an alligator

Only marginally part of the Stencil/V. material, this chapter follows Benny and others, as Benny has a job hunting alligators in the sewers under Manhattan. It figures in the Stencil/V. story in that there is a rat named "Veronica" who figures in a subplot about a mad priest — Father Linus Fairing, S.J. — some decades back, living in the sewers and preaching to the rats; we hear from him in the form of his diary. Stencil himself makes a brief appearance toward the end of the chapter.

''chapter seven'' 
She hangs on the western wall

In Florence in 1899, Victoria appears again, briefly, but so does the placename "Vheissu", which may or may not stand for Vesuvius, Venezuela, or even (one character jokes) Venus.

''chapter nine'' 
Mondaugen's story

Kurt Mondaugen, who will appear again in ''[http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ Gravity's Rainbow]'', is the central character in a story set in South-West Africa (now Namibia) partly during a siege in 1922 at which one Vera Meroving is present, but most notably in 1904, during the Herero Wars, when South-West Africa was a German colony; in ''V.'', Pynchon clearly sees the German treatment of the Herero at that time as prefiguring the Holocaust of the Jews in the Nazi era.

At the same time, this part of the novel is a haunting indictment of Western colonialism and racism; later, in ''[http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ Gravity's Rainbow]'', Pynchon would emphasize this latter aspect, acknowledging the facile identification made between the Herero genocide and the Nazi Holocaust in his earlier novel as "superficial". In a letter to Thomas F. Hirsch, reprinted in David Seed's book ''The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon'', London, MacMillan, 1988, pp. 240-3), Pynchon wrote, "…When I wrote ''V.'' I was thinking of the 1904 campaign as a sort of dress rehearsal for what later happened to the Jews in the 30s and 40s. Which is hardly profound; it must occur to anybody who gets into it even as superficially as I did. But since reading McLuhan especially, and stuff here and there on comparative religion, I feel now the thing goes much deeper. […] I feel that the number done on the Herero head by the Germans is the same number done on the American Indian head by our own colonists and what is now being done on the Buddhist head in Vietnam by the Christian minority in Saigon and their advisors: the imposition of a culture valuing analysis and differentiation on a culture that valued unity and integration."

''chapter eleven'' 
Confessions of Fausto Maijstral

Fausto Maijstral, Maltese civilian suffering under the German bombardment and working to clear the rubble during World War II writes a long letter to his daughter Paola, who figures in the Benny Profane story; the letter comes into Stencil's hands. The letter includes copious quotations from Fausto's diary. Besides the place name Valletta, V. figures in the story as an old — or possibly not-so-old — woman crushed by a beam of a fallen building while children play around her.

''chapter fourteen'' 
V. in love

In this chapter V. — if V. it is — is entranced with a young ballerina, Mélanie l'Heuremaudit. The story centers on a riotous ballet performance, almost certainly modeled in part on the premiere of Igor Stravinsky's ''Rite of Spring''. The performance centers on a virgin sacrifice by impalement. The young ballerina fails to wear her protective equipment, and actually dies by impalement in the course of the performance; everyone assumes her death throes simply to be an uncharacteristically emotional performance.

''chapter sixteen'' 
Valletta

[[Image:killroy.gif|right|"Kilroy"]]
As the British Navy mass on Malta in the early stages of the Suez Crisis, Stencil arrives with Benny in tow, searching for Fausto Maijstral. (As always, Kilroy was here first, and Pynchon proposes a novel origin for the face: that Kilroy was originally part of a schematic for a band-pass filter.)

Chapter 18
The last chapter is a flashback to Valleta when Stencil sr. was still alive. He becomes entangled in an incident involving a Maltese couple.

At the end of the chapter he leaves in a ship and a water spout throws into the air then plunges into the depths of the Mediterranean.

The paths of Stencil and Profane through the novel form a sort of metaphorical V. The incident of the boat sinking on the last page could be seen as the dotting of the apex on the v, the final plunge into nothingness.

{{endspoiler}}

==External links==
*[http://www.thomaspynchon.com/v/ ''V.'' Web Guide & Concordance at ThomasPynchon.com]
*[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V. Wikipedia Entry]

==References to ''V.'' in other works==
*The title of the American post-hardcore band [http://en.wikipedia.com/wiki/Thrice Thrice's] album ''[http://en.wikipedia.com/wiki/Vheissu Vheissu]'', released in October 2005, refers to Pynchon's book ''V.''
*In congruence with his V.-themed speech and surroundings, the main character in the comic book series ''[http://en.wikipedia.com/wiki/V_for_Vendetta V for Vendetta ]'' reads Pynchon's ''V.''
*Los Angeles based porn actor/director Benny Profane takes his stage name from Pynchon's character.

Does McClintic Sphere in V. stand for Thelonious Monk?

2013-06-17T03:12:26Z

WikiAdmin: Created page with "by Charles Hollander 1990, Baltimore, MD rightWily coyote that he is in ''V.''(1963), Thomas Pynchon adorns McClintic Sphere with a "hand-carved i..."

by Charles Hollander 
1990, Baltimore, MD

[[file:ornette2.jpg|right]]Wily coyote that he is in ''V.''(1963), Thomas Pynchon adorns McClintic Sphere with a "hand-carved ivory saxophone," getting us to think Sphere is somehow a stand-in for jazz great Ornette Coleman. There was, in the civil-rights era of the '60s, much ado about Coleman's "new sound" and his "new" white plastic sax. Like Coleman's group, Sphere's group in ''V.'' features "no piano," plays music vaguely expressive of "African nationalism," but (the narrator tells us) Sphere is wrongly viewed as a "kind of reincarnation" of Bird (Charlie Parker). A minor figure who drifts in and out of the narrative of ''V.'', Sphere is often led by Paola Maijstral's maieutic (O.E.D.; maieutic = Socratic) intellectual midwifery, through some laborious dialogue, until he delivers what has come to be taken as the novel's motto: "Keep cool, but care." (''V.''; 366) To whom does he speak? For whom does he speak? To properly answer these questions, we should figure out who he is.

Arguably the musician McClintic Sphere most recalls is another esteemed figure in jazz history, pianist Thelonious Monk. I've demonstrated elsewhere that one of Pynchon's favorite methods of allusion is to use a half name of a famous person with a humorous connecting name; Wendell "Mucho" Maas, Clayton "Bloody" Chiclitz, for but two examples. In ''The Crying of Lot 49'', Pynchon means for us to summon political figures Wendell Willkie and Henry De Lamar Clayton, on the subtextual level. Also in ''Lot 49'', Pynchon half-names "Secretaries James and Foster and Senator Joseph," and similarly means for us to decrypt them as Secretary of Defense James V. Forrestal, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. By naming his jazzman McClintic Sphere, Pynchon signifies he wants us to decode to Thelonious Sphere Monk in the subtext. If for Gertrude Stein, "a rose is a rose is a rose"; for Pynchon, a Sphere is a Sphere.

Thomas Fitterling, in ''Thelonious Monk: His Life and Music'' (1997), points out that Monk's middle name, "Sphere," derives from his maternal grandmother, Sphere Batts. Not a hipster's cool affectation, "Sphere" was part of Monk's given name according to family documents. Monk didn't learn his middle name until the 1940s, when those documents made their way from North Carolina to New York, and: "From then on he used it as a hip accessory. He would joke that owing to his middle name he could never be called a 'square'." (Fitterling, 20.)

Another telltale touch is Pynchon's use of disguises and aliases in the text, like the various identities Slothrop dons during ''Gravity's Rainbow''. Slothrop poses as British correspondent Ian Scuffling, and as a nameless Russian soldier; he masquerades as a pig, becomes known as Rocketman, Raketemensch, and finally Rocky. "Ruby" is the alias Pynchon gives the disguised Paola Maijstral while she is entertaining and instructing Sphere. Not coincidentally, one signature tune in the Monk oeuvre is titled, "Ruby, My Dear."

[[file:nica2.jpg|left|caption|Thelonious & Nica]]In ''Thelonious & The Baroness'' Fitterling documents the widely known and long-standing relationship between Thelonious Sphere Monk and the Baroness Kathleen Annie Pannonica de Koenigswarter, called "Nica" for short. They were often seen together in public. Monk wrote songs using her name or that of her apartment building, The Bolivar, in the titles; "Pannonica", and "Ba-lue Bolivar Ba-lues-are". Being born into the English line of the Rothschild family, growing up in Paris, and attending a strict religious boarding school, seem to have stimulated some rebellious streak in Nica. Being free of the usual financial concerns allowed Nica to express her discomfort with traditional women's roles. She became an aviator, a then-glamorous and adventurous calling in the era of Amelia Earhart, "America's First Lady of the Air." Soon she married fellow pilot Jules de Koenigswarter, a French diplomat and later resistance fighter. During World War II, Nica went on various missions for De Gaulle, which was not surprising if one knew her brother served as Churchill's courier to the White House. (Fitterling, 54) No ordinary woman, in the middle 1950s Nica chose to become Monk's mistress and muse. In 1982 Monk died in the arms of his wife Nellie, at Nica's New Jersey estate.

What, one might ask, does this have to do with Pynchon scholarship? It is an early example of Pynchon's indicative naming. As a literary ironist, Pynchon was likely drawn to Monk as an extraordinary musician, a humorist, and a musical ironist (as Ronald Gray so ably demonstrates in his article "Something in Blue-Thelonious Monk and Henry Adams," on The Thelonious Monk Website: ). Probably Pynchon recognized and appreciated Monk's use of irony. But Dizzy Gillespie obviously had a humorous, ironic way about his music and his on-stage persona. Why then did Pynchon choose Monk, not another, say Dizzy, on which to pattern his jazzman? Pynchon chose Monk because his well-known affair with Nica, The Baroness, suited his literary purpose.

First, indicative naming is the use of a half-name where a fictional character leads us to a real historical person. Second, the textual reference leads to something extra-textual that is important for understanding the work at hand - what I term Pynchon's misdirection. Finally, this misdirection leads to a historical situation - though never mentioning it in the text.

In this case, McClintic Sphere leads us to Thelonious Sphere Monk, and Monk leads us to Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter and her life. There are some notable parallels between Nica and the woman Stencil knows as V., who started her career with "'...a young crude Mata Hari act.'" (V.; 386) Stencil remembers that somewhere along the line V. "'stole an airplane: an old Spad...God what a flight it must have been: from le Havre over the Bay of Biscay to somewhere in the back country of Spain.'" (''V.''; 387) Not that V. is Nica in any roman a clef sense: she is not. But the resonances are powerful at the level of the subtext. Nica is a Rothschild whose life reflects the issues Pynchon wants us to attend in ''V.'': disinheritance, old dynasty vs. new dynasty, secret agents and couriers, plots and counter-plots, "The Big One, the century's master cabal," and "the ultimate Plot Which Has No Name," (V.; 226) and the effect of World War II on the old-money crowd.

If McClintic Sphere somehow allusively stands for Monk, who connects to The Baroness, then Pynchon has him speaking for the victims, the noble remnant of the old dynasty (J.P. Morgan, The Rothschilds, etc.); and has him speaking to those who view themselves as the disinherited, the preterite, the passed-over in American society.

We see, then, that McClintic Sphere is not a one-to-one stand-in for Ornette Coleman, and how and why Pynchon means Sphere to signify Thelonious Monk and his mistress, the Baroness. We see how Pynchon's use of irony and camouflage will mislead readers lacking the trained, or magic, eye.

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McClintic Sphere

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[[image:Monk-Gottlieb.jpg|thumb|200px|Monk by Gottlieb|right]]I suppose "sphere" would be the opposite of "cube" (i.e., an unhip person), placing Mr. Sphere in the realm of the very hip. Also, Thelonious Monk's middle name was "Sphere" and Pynchon reputedly is/was a big Monk fan. But why McClintic?

In his ''The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon'' David Seed writes:

:"Sphere is closely modelled on Ornette Coleman, not to parody him as Stanley Edgar Hyman suggests, but to develop his stature. His origin in Fort Worth, method and line-up all parallel Coleman's, as does the fact that he is playing at the V-note (modelled on the Five-Spot where Coleman began performing in 1959)." <ref>Seed, David, ''The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon'', University of Iowa Press, 1988, p.81</ref>

==References==
<references />

Chapter 1

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{{V PbP Top}}

9/1 - '''Benny Profane''' 
'''Benny''': Benny is slang for benzedrine, a trademarked amphetamine often prescribed for anxiety. First discovered serendipitously in 1954. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzedrine]. Also, ''bene'' [Latin] = "well-intentioned", observes Molly Hite.

'''Profane''': Since 1912, as defined in ''The Elementary Forms of Religious Life'' by the sociologist Emile Durkheim, profane has had the social meaning of 'everything that is not sacred'. 
"The division of the world into two domains, one containing all that is sacred and the other all that is profane—such is the distinctive trait of religious thought."--Durkheim (p. 34).[http://science.jrank.org/pages/11185/Sacred-Profane--MILE-DURKHEIM.html/''Science Encyclopedia: History of Ideas'', Vol. 5] 
Latin root: pro "in front of/before"; fanum "temple", i.e. not within the inner sanctum. Benny is "profane" compared to the almost mystical world of historical fiction Stencil (see below) moves through.

9/1 - '''Christmas Eve 1955''' 
The first time that the Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD) received a call concerning Santa's whereabouts. [http://www.classbrain.com/artholiday/publish/tracking_santa.shtml]
 
Pynchon worked on aspects of NORAD [later acronym] when he was at Boeing.
[http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_biography.html]

9/1 - '''Norfolk, Virginia''' 
Port city.[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norfolk%2C_Virginia/ wikipedia]
The city has a long history as a strategic military and transportation point. Norfolk is home to both the Norfolk Naval Base, the world's largest naval base and was in 1955. Urban renewal, starting
in the 1970s also included the demolition of many prominent city buildings, and large swaths of urban fabric that, were they still in existence today, might be the source of additional historic urban character, a-and including the East Main Street district (where the current civic complex is located), and where Benny starts yo-yoing. 

9/1 - '''his old tin can's''' 
His particular naval ship. The informal usage of "tin can" refers to a naval destroyer, notorious for relatively light armor.

9/1 - '''Sterno can''' 
Sterno Canned Heat is a fuel made from denatured and jellied alcohol. It is designed to be burned directly from its can.[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterno/ wikipedia]

[[image:Packard-Patrician-1954.jpg|thumb|right|150px| 1954 Packard Patrician]]9/1 - '''54 Packard Patrician''' 
The Packard Patrician was an automobile built by the Studebaker-Packard Corporation of Detroit, Michigan, from model years 1951 through the 1956 model. There was even an eight-passenger model.1958 was the last year of
Packard production.
The Packard had a high reputation for quality, for value that would last and Packards are highly-prized by collectors today.

10/2 - '''seaman deuce''' 
A seaman apprentice. See "Deuce Kindred," a character in Pynchon's [http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ ''Against the Day''], his 2006
novel.

10/2 - '''like a yo-yo...maybe a year and a half''' 
"One year of those times [Fifties] was much like another...there was a lot of aimlessness going around". Introduction to ''Slow Learner'', p.14, by Thomas Pynchon.

10/2 - '''Drunken Sailors...Do With''' 
Here, actually beginning on the first page, appears Pynchon's lifelong stylistic use of capitalization--for a certain kind of emphasis?, for a kind of reification?, and for much, much more certainly. See Pynchon's 1997 novel, [http://masondixon.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ ''Mason & Dixon''] for the most extensive use of capitalization.

10/2 - '''one potential berserk...the glass breaks?''' 
Cf. Zoyd Wheeler's annual "act of televised insanity" in Pynchon's 1990 novel, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vineland ''Vineland'']

10/2 - '''SP''' 
Shore Patrol, the naval 'police'.

10/2 - '''Hey Rube''' 
Carnies'--circus folk--call to come together when in a dispute with townspeople. Reviewer, writer, Michael Moorcock, who published an early Pynchon story when he was a young magazine editor, has pointed to circuses as motifs in Pynchon, calling [http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ ''Against the Day''], a massive "circus" novel.

10/2 - '''V''' 
This is the first appearance of the letter that is the title. It describes
ugly green mercury-vapor lamps. Not positive associations--to say the least-- in Pynchon's world. See [http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ ''Against the Day''], passim, especially in the Telluride sections. The V of the lamps recedes to the east, usually a positive association in Pynchon, especially in intellectual connotations.

10/2 - '''doggo''' 
in hiding used chiefly in the phrase ''to lie doggo''

11/3 - '''Beatrice''' 
Probable allusion see 'all barmaids' coming up to Beatrice, [Beatrice Poltinari] guide through 'Paradise' of Dante's [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_comedy/ ''The Divine Comedy''],
whom Dante loves.

11/3 - '''DesDiv 22''' 
Destroyer Division 22. Possible allusion to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch22 ''Catch 22''] ?, another now-classic comic, famously anti-war, novel, published in 1961, but sections were published even earlier in magazines.

<div id="singleup"> 11/3 - '''single up all lines'''</div>
"Single up all lines" is a common nautical term. Ships are docked with lines doubled -- that is, with two sets of ropes or chains holding the vessel to the dock. To "single up all lines" is to remove the redundant second lines in preparation to make way. This phrase, used as either a nautical term or metaphorically appears in [http://cl49.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Chapter_2#single_up_all_lines ''The Crying of Lot 49'', p.31]; [http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Pages_488-491#single_up_all_lines ''Gravity's Rainbow'', p.489]; [http://masondixon.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Chapter_26:_257-265#Page_258 ''Mason & Dixon'', pp.258 and 260]; [http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_1-25#Page_3 ''Against the Day'', p.3]; and [http://inherent-vice.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Chapter_8 ''Inherent Vice'', p. 119]. Perhaps we can understand this "line" as a text-string linking Pynchon's novels together (all but [http://vineland.pynchonwiki.com/wiki ''Vineland'']?). Of course, the fact that ''Vineland'' ''doesn't'' include the phrase sort of throws a spanner in the works, as far as assigning ''meaning''!

11/3 - '''N.O.B.''' 
Naval Operations Base.

11/3 - '''Ploy''' 
'ploi'..Function: noun 
Etymology: probably from employ..Date: 1722 
1 : ESCAPADE, FROLIC 
2 a : a tactic intended to embarrass or frustrate an opponent b : a devised or contrived move : STRATAGEM (a ploy to get her to open the door -- Robert B. Parker)

11/3 - '''Pentothal injection''' 
Known as truth serum. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_thiopental/ wikipedia]

12/4 '''Negro''' 
Negro is a racial term applied to people of Sub Saharan African origin; The word is now largely seen as archaic, usually neutral and, depending on the user, occasionally offensive. However, prior to the shift in the "lexicon" of American and worldwide classification of race and ethnicity in the late 1960s, the appellation was accepted as a normal formal term both by those of African descent as well as non-blacks. Negro means black in Spanish and Portuguese, and the Italian nero is similar (Latin: niger = "black").Wikipedia 
''V.'' is early sixties, before the word shift in the late sixties.

12/4 '''Dahoud''' 
Name of an inquisitive youth who tended to the camels in El-Jaziri.

12/4 '''"life is the most precious possession you have?"..."without it, you'd be dead."''' 
The 'meaning' of life reduced to this? Somehow seems akin to Profane's yo-yoing, or later randomness. Satire of existentialism?

12/4 '''Lights Out''' 
lights out at 2200 (10:00 PM)---Navy Boot Camp.

12/4 '''snipes'''
A snipe is naval slang for a member of the engineering crew on a ship. Historically, there was always tension between snipes and the deck crew.
http://oldsnipe.com/SnipeBegin.html

12/4 - '''DesLant''' 
Destroyer Force, North Atlantic Fleet.

13/5 '''Mrs. Buffo'''...'''also named Beatrice''' 
A basso buffo, a comic bass, a staple of nearly every classic Italian comic opera.

13/5 '''dragon-embroidered kimono''' 
The Kimono (着物, Kimono? literally "something worn", i.e., "clothes") is the national costume of Japan. Originally kimono indicated all types of clothing, but it has come to mean specifically the full-length traditional garment worn by women, men, and children. Kimonos are T-shaped, straight-lined robes that fall to the ankle, with collars and full-length sleeves. The sleeves are commonly very wide at the wrist, as much as a half meter. Traditionally, on special occasions unmarried women wear kimonos (furisode) with extremely long sleeves that extend almost to the floor. Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimonos 
Kimonos were originally worn only by the nobility.

After World War II, as Japan's economy gradually recovered, kimono became even more affordable and were produced in greater quantities. Europe and America fashion ideas affected the kimono designs and motifs. japanesekimono http://www.japanesekimono.com/kimono_history.htm

Souvenir kimonos collected in great numbers by returning GIs (after WW 2) rekindled interest [in kimonos]. This postwar interest in Japan combined with a rekindled interest in the craft aesthetic created a new wave of kimono influence in America during the late 1960s and 1970s. page 18,
''Kimono Inspiration: Art and Art-to-Wear in America'' Pomegranate Books,
Textile Museum, Washington, D.C. 1996, the book of an exhibit in 1997.

13/5 '''Seventh Fleet''' 
The United States 7th Fleet is a naval military formation based in Yokosuka, Japan, with units positioned near South Korea and Japan.

13/5 '''Dewey Gland''' 
Spelled "Dewy", it means moist, wet--from dew. "Dewy-eyed" means innocent, naive.-M-W Dictionary. The dewy glands of mountian elk are sought for medicinal purposes. Dros"e*ra (?), n. [NL., fr. Gr. dewy.] Bot. A genus of low perennial or biennial plants, the leaves of which are beset with gland-tipped bristles.http://www.everything2.com/index.pl? 
Musicians, often guitar and ukelele players, are positive characters in Pynchon's oeuvre. Since music is a great joy in Pynchon's world, musicians seem often to be his archetypal artist figures. See, as context, the myth of Orpheus,"the music of [whose] lyre was so beautiful that when he played, wild beasts were soothed, trees danced, and rivers stood still." http://education.yahoo.com/reference/encyclopedia/entry/Orpheus

14/6 '''goat hole''' 
The goat is the naval mascot. 
Goat Locker - Chiefs' Quarters and Mess. The term originated during the era of wooden ships, when Chiefs were given charge of the milk goats on board. Nowadays more a term of respect for the age of its denizens.

14/6 '''wardroom''' 
wardroom n : military quarters for dining and recreation for officers of a warship. http://www.dict.die.net/wardroom

14/6 '''X.O.''' 
Executive Officer.

14/6 '''Pappy Hod''' 
Of or resembling pap; mushy. 
pap·py2 (păp'ē)
n. Informal., pl. -pies.---
Father 

hod n. A trough carried over the shoulder for transporting loads, as of bricks or mortar. A coal scuttle.
http://www.answers.com/topic/hod

14/6 '''boatswain''' 
n : a petty officer on a merchant ship who controls the work of other seamen ...
http://dict.die.net/boatswain/

14/6 '''riggish''' 
wanton: said of Cleopatra whom the holy priests praise when she is riggish' (i.e. wanton) ... Anthony & Cleopatra, Shakespeare.

14/6 '''Pig Bodine''' 
Notice immaturity and other relevant meanings to simple 'pig'
1 a : a young domesticated swine not yet sexually mature; broadly : a wild or domestic swine.
3 : a dirty, gluttonous, or repulsive person.--Merriam-Webster Dictionary 

Pigs in ''Gravity's Rainbow'' [http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/gravity/extra/pigs.html]

Bodine: In 1905, two years after the Wright brothers powered flight, the Bodine brothers produced their first electric motor for a dental drill manufacturer.http://www.bodine-electric.com/Asp/AboutUs.asp

See terrific ''Bodine'' entry at AtD wiki: [http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_489-524#Page_517 Bodine]

15/8 '''jarhead(s)''' 
Marine Corps slang for a Marine, perhaps for the shape of the hat/helmet they wore.
The term was well-established by the fifties. Answers.com.

17/10 '''"Where we going," Profane said. "The way we're heading," said
Pig.''' 
Notice the tie-in with yo-yoing, immediacy and goallessness. Also notice that Profane's question is presented as a statement and Pig's answer is all part of the same paragraph. (Unlike almost all dialogue in novels.)

17/10 '''WAVE lieutenants''' 
WAVES, or "Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service". In the decades since the last of the Yeomen left active duty, only a relatively small corps of Navy Nurses represented their gender in the Naval service, and they had never had formal officer status. Now, the Navy was preparing to accept not just a large number of enlisted women, as it had done during World War I, but female Commissioned Officers to supervise them. It was a development of lasting significance, notwithstanding the WAVES' name, which indicated that they would only be around during the wartime "Emergency". Department of the Navy historical bulletin.

17/10 '''Morris Teflon''' 
Teflon, patented in 1941 and trademarked in 1944 by the Dupont company == Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), a synthetic fluoropolymer which finds numerous applications. PTFE has an extremely low coefficient of friction and is used as a non-stick coating for pans and other cookware. It is very non-reactive, and so is often used in containers and pipework for reactive and corrosive chemicals. Where used as a lubricant, PTFE significantly reduces friction, wear and energy consumption of machinery.

17/10 '''switchman''' 
switchman - a man who operates railroad switches. Pynchon does not like railroads. See [http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ ''Against the Day''].

18/11 '''wire-brushed''' 
naval slang for a merciless chewing out.

18/11 - '''She taught them all a song. Learned from a para on French leave from the fighting in Algeria''' 
The song the paratrooper taught Paola is a French anti-war song, "Le Déserteur" ("The Deserter"), recorded in 1954 by [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Vian Boris Vian] and written by Vian and Harold Berg:

:Early tomorrow morning 
:I will shut my door 
:on these dead years 
:I will take to the road. 
:I will beg my way along 
:on the land and on the waves 
:the old and the new world ...

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYpLHRQV7sQ Have a listen & look]; [http://www.swans.com/library/art7/xxx071.html Lyrics (with a variation)]

18/11 '''Piraeus''' 
Piraeus is a city in the periphery of Attica, Greece, located to the south of the city of Athens. It is the capital of the Piraeus Prefecture and belongs to the Athens urban area. It was the port of the ancient city of Athens and it was chosen to serve as the modern port when Athens was re-founded in 1834. Piraeus is the largest port in Europe (and third largest in the world) in terms of passenger transportation. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piraeus Wikikpedia]

19/12 '''F.L.N.''' 
The National Liberation Front (French: ''Front de Libération nationale'', hence FLN) is a socialist political party in Algeria. It was set up on November 1, 1954 as a merger of other smaller groups, to obtain independence for Algeria from France. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Liberation_Front(Algeria) Wikipedia]

19/12 '''WAVY''' 
WAVY is the NBC affiliate serving the Norfolk-Portsmouth-Newport News, Virginia market.

19/12 '''Pat Boone''' 
A very popular 'smooth' singer of the 50s, famous for doing covers of African-American hit songs. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Boone Wikipedia]

19/12 '''"No", she said. "Meaning Yes"''' 
Foreshadowing of the chapter "In which Esther Gets a Nose Job."

19/12 '''Click, went Teflon's Leica''' 
Reminds of Pynchon's legendary aversion to being photographed. Although, as the narrator notes, "Outraged privacy was not so important; but the interruption had come just before the Big Moment."

20/13 '''Navy greatcoat''' 
Beautiful pictures from all sides here: [http://cgi.ebay.com/Mid-20th-Century-Royal-Navy-Captains-Greatcoat-VXE_W0QQitemZ110167682561QQihZ001QQcategoryZ586QQrdZ1QQssPageNameZWD2VQQcmdZViewItem#ebayphotohosting Navy greatcoat]

20/13 '''topside''' 
the top portion of the outer surface of a ship on each side above the waterline

20/13 '''Madonna, he thought''' 
aka Mother Mary, aka the Virgin Mary, used blasphemously.

[[image:snow-shroud.jpg|right|thumb|Snow Shroud|150px]]
20/13 '''snow-shroud''' 
A coating or "shroud" of snow on the branches of trees.

<div id="inanimate">20/13 - '''inanimate'''</div>
52 uses of the word inanimate in ''V.''; 13 of animate. Thematic: Life vs. Non-Life/Death.

21/14 '''turn a corner in the street'''...'''where nothing else lived but himself''' 
As Benny did "rounding the corner' onto East Main [p.2]. Cf. animate/inanimate above.

21/14 '''mental eye''' 
Consciousness, of course; also a perceptual theory. A-and here is a use by Charles Dickens: "gilding with refulgent light our dreamy moments, and laying open a new and magic world before the mental eye, the drama is gone, perfectly gone,' said Mr Curdle." from ''The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickelby''.

Further reading again indicates that "mental eye" is an older use which has faded, being largely replaced by 'mind's eye".

Cf. '''Third eye''':The third eye (also known as the inner eye) is a metaphysical and esoteric concept referring in part to the ajna (brow) chakra in certain Eastern and Western spiritual traditions. It is also spoken of as the gate that leads within to inner realms and spaces of higher consciousness. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_eye Third eye]
Cf. third eye in [http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_119-148 ''Against the Day'', p. 125]

21/14 '''''Susanna Squaducci'', an Italian luxury liner''' 
Ex-''Scaffold'' sailors hold their 'reunion' here. See Pynchon's later
'linking' of a military ship and a luxury liner, the ''Stupendica'', in [http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ ''Against the Day'']

:Susanna: name of a young woman who is the subject of a famous Biblical story
in the ''Book of Daniel''. Known as 'Susanna and/among the Elders', Susanna is viewed bathing by a group of elders and they attempt to blackmail her into performing sexual favors. There have been paintings and a poem by Wallace Stevens. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susanna_%28Book_of_Daniel%29 Wikipedia]

:Squaducci: need an expert in Italian slang perhaps, but a related word seems to be: sgualdrina f. (pejorative) trollop, strumpet, harlot, tart. Squa(l)might add the negative meaning to whatever 'ducci' [pl. of duchess?] means, since 'drina' can be a girl's name and, in fact, was what young Queen Victoria was called. See ''Queen Victoria'' by Lytton Strachey.

Somehow the meanings seem to fit Pynchonian themes: from the sound, to the
Biblical sexual allusion (of saved purity) reduced to lack of such purity.

21/14 '''dancing the dirty boogie''' 
a voluptuous dance (with varying lyrics) originating within the African-American tradition. "The “Dirty Boogie,” which was made famous by another film, “Dirty Dancing.” As you may recall, this film takes place in the 1960’s in a small Catskill resort where a dance instructor taught a young seventeen year-old varius types of sexy dance moves: one being the “Dirty Boogie.” Of course there was a scene in the movie showing all the teenagers and young adults doing the “Dirty Boogie.” Many of the dance moves in the “Dirty Boogie,” resembled movements featured in the movie, “Lambada.” These movements were acting out sexual pleasure on the dance floor. The Rolling Stones do a "Dirty Boogie" on their ''Black & Blue'' album.

22/15 '''clown's motley''' 
Motley refers to the traditional costume of the Court jester or the Harlequin character in ''Commedia dell'arte''.[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motley]

22/15 '''the Catskills''' 
Catskill Mountains, an area northwest of New York City, famous as a vacation resort area. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catskill_Mountains Wikipedia].

22/15 '''shakedown cruise''' 
Shakedown cruise is a nautical term in which the performance of a ship is tested. Shakedown cruises are also used to familiarize the ship's crew with operation of the craft. The term can also refer in a generic sense to the process of testing out any new technology or systems.

22/15 '''gee and haw''' 
To haw and gee To haw and gee about, to go from one thing to another without good reason; to have no settled purpose; to be irresolute or unstable. [Colloq.] Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.

The phrase derives from "Hey and Go" - turn right and turn left, and was originally used in leading oxen and cattle by teamsters.[http://www.takeourword.com/TOW144/page2.html]

<div id="trocadero">22/15 - '''Schlozhauer's Trocadero'''</div>
The word ''trocadero'', which in Spanish means "place of barter" (from trocar: "to barter"), goes back to a fortified site near Cadiz, Spain, that was the stronghold of the Constititutionalists in the revolution of 1820 and that fell to the French in 1823. During the International Exhibition of 1878 an ornate palace was built to commemorate the French victory. "Trocadero" became a popular name for public places in Europe, one being the Trocadero Palace of Varieties in London, known as "The Troc," which opened as a music hall in 1882 on the corner of Shaftsbury Avenue and Windmill Street.

22/15 '''Liberty''' 
Liberty, New York: [http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=41.797792,-74.742829&spn=0.10,0.10 Google Map]

22/15 '''fight Arabs in Israel''' 
Of the 950,000 estimated Arabs in Israel before Israel became a state in 1948, an estimated 156,000 remained after. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_citizens_of_Israel Wikipedia]

23/16 '''Parris Island''' 
Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island is an 8,095 acre (32.9 km²) military installation near Beaufort, South Carolina, tasked with the training of enlisted Marines. Male recruits living east of the Mississippi River and female recruits from all over the USA report here to receive their initial training. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parris_Island Wikipedia]

23/16 '''Haganah''' 
The Haganah (Hebrew: "The Defense") was a Jewish paramilitary organization in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine from 1920 to 1948. [http://en.wikipedia.org.wiki/Haganah Wikipedia]

23/16 '''mezuzah''' 
A mezuzah (Hebrew: "doorpost") is a piece of parchment (usually contained in a decorative case) inscribed with specified Hebrew verses from the Torah (Deuteronomy 6:4-9 and 11:13-21). These verses comprise the Jewish prayer "Shema Yisrael," and begin with the phrase "Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is One." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mezuzah Wikipedia]

23/16 '''iceberg lettuce''' 
The Iceberg lettuce industry exploded during WWII as salads were seen as a real morale booster. After the war, its popularity continued as soldiers came home wanting the same assortment of fresh produce procured by the military. [http://www.taproduce.com/About/PressReleases07-4.html] California producers of iceberg lettuce were the targets of protests by Cesar Chavez's National Farm Workers Association, beginning in the very early sixties.

23/16 '''watercress''' 
The capital growing city of this leaf vegetable ''was'' Huntsville, Alabama until:
:"The city's transformation began with the arrival of Wernher von Braun, Hitler's chief missile designer, whose V-2 rocket terrorized London and other British cities. An SS major who headed rocket research at the Peenemunde complex, where slave laborers were starved, beaten, and worked to death, von Braun could have ended up in the docket at Nuremberg like other leading Nazis. But at war's end, the Pentagon was anxious to plumb German scientific know-how in order to improve America's weaponry. Under the top-secret Operation Paperclip, the Army smuggled von Braun and his team of 118 Peenemunde scientists out of Germany and brought them to the United States. After first going to a military base near El Paso, they were taken to Huntsville in 1950 and put to work at Redstone Arsenal." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntsville%2C_Alabama]

23/16 '''Belgian Endive''' 
A leaf vegetable grown completely underground or indoors in the absence of sunlight, a process that prevents the leaves from turning green and opening up .

23/16 '''Abdul Sayid''' 
Abdul (also transliterated Abdel, `Abd al-, and other ways) means "servant of the", and is the first part of many Arabic names. It is combined with one of the 99 Names of God in the Qur'an to form a two-word Arabic theophoric name. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul] ''Sayid'' or ''Sayyid'' is an honorific title given to males who are thereby said to be descendants of the prophet Muhammed, founder of Islam.

24/17 '''pedestrian girls''' 
notice double meaning.

The 1913 edition of ''Webster's Dictionary'' seems to be, from this and other citations, one of Pynchon's major linguistic resources or, at least, gives some of the most resonant meanings from a Pynchon Perspective.

24/7 - '''drained-nervous''' 
With the hyphen, this shows another older archaic usage. Cf. Snow-shroud and the loss of hyphens between words above.

<div id="bravo">27/21 - '''a pimpled bravo'''</div>
A "bravo" is a villain, desperado; esp. a hired assassin

32/? - '''Dewey, now astride a lifeline on the bridge, gave a bass string intro and began to sing Blue Suede Shoes, after Elvis Presley.''' 
A slight anachronism. We know the date is 1st January 1956. Carl Perkins wrote [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Suede_Shoes "Blues Suede Shoes"] in on 4/5 December 1955, and released the record on 1st January 1956. Elvis recorded it on 30th January 1956 and first played it on television on the 11th February. It was the first track on his first album, released March. So Dewey couldn’t have played "Blue Suede Shoes" after Elvis Presley.

37/32 - '''horniness''' 
a state of sexual excitement. Pynchon is the first citation in the ''Oxford English Dictionary'' for use of this word in print, in ''V.''.

39/34 - '''screw where his navel should have been...''' 
The navel is where the umbilical cord attaches. When the boy unscrews it, his body falls apart. This is a repeated reference that bodily traits are passed on through genetics and the umbilical cord attaches you to a parent. If you try to undo it, you will undo yourself.

42/38 - '''Geronimo broke off the song to say “Coño” and wobble his fingers.''' 
"Coño" is Spanish for "cunt"

43/39 - '''now [the alligators] moved big, blind albino, all over the sewer system...''' 
The urban legend of alligators living in the sewers of New York was given the some credence when, in the 1950s, Edward P. "Teddy" May, the superintendent of sewers in New York City, went down into the sewers to investigate and told a journalist that he'd seen "Alligators serenely paddling around in his sewers. The beam of his own flashlight had spotlighted alligators whose length, on the average, was about two feet. Some may have been longer." (''The World Beneath The City'', Robert Daley, 1959). However, Mr. May's credibility has been questioned and, in truth, the sewers are an environment inhospitable to alligators or caimons, and reports of their subterranean existence have been greatly exaggerated. [http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/23/the-book-behind-the-sewer-alligator-legend/ ''New York Times'' article about this...]

<div id="Zeitsuss">43/39 -'''Zeitsuss'''</div>
'Zeit' [German] = Time. "suss" = Sweet. Mr. Zeitsuss is head of the Alligator Patrol.

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Chapter 7

2012-07-14T18:44:08Z

WikiAdmin: Add Savonarol info and pic; add Birth of Venus pic

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156/165 - '''entrenchat deux''' 
Classical ballet term for a jump in which the individual switches the legs alternately forward and backward very quickly. I think the deux implies 2 switches, or 4 kicks altogether. Prissy, energetic jump.

156/165 - '''Captain Hugh, F.R.G.S''' 
Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society.

157/166 - '''. . .author of ''The Renaissance''''' 
Walter Pater. Young Godolphin (Godot + Dolphin?) is among a literary elite, clearly evinced by his love of obscure in-jokes.

159/168 - '''Mazzini''' 
19th century politician & Italian nationalist who was instrumental in the creation of modern Italy from divided monarchies & states.

<div id="mantissa">159/168 - '''Signor Mantissa''' 
''Mantissa'' = Latin: "makeweight": something thrown onto a scale to bring the weight to a desired value; In mathematics: the decimal part of a logarithm; [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantissa Wikipedia]

[[image:machiavelli.jpg|thumb|150px|Machiavelli by Santi di Tito|right]]<div id="machiavelli">160/169 - '''Like Machiavelli he was in exile''' 
In a famous letter to his friend Francesco Vettori, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niccol%C3%B2_Machiavelli Machiavelli] described how he spent his days in exile:

:When evening comes, I return home [from work and from the local tavern] and go to my study. On the threshold I strip naked, taking off my muddy, sweaty workday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born. And there I make bold to speak to them and ask the motives of their actions, and they, in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I forget the world, remember no vexation, fear poverty no more, tremble no more at death; I pass indeed into their world.

<div id="pessimism">From Pynchon's short story ''Entropy'':</div>

:His had always been a vigorous, Italian sort of pessimism: like Machiavelli, he allowed the forces of virtù and fortuna to be about 50/50; but the equations now introduced a random factor which pushed the odds to some unutterable and indeterminate ratio which he found himself afraid to calculate. <ref>Pynchon, Thomas, ''Slow Learner'', Jonathan Cape, 1985, pp. 87-88</ref>

<div id="minghe">164/174 - '''"Capo di minghe!"'''</div>
"Minghe" stands for "minchia" (a very common expression, like the American "shit" and quite vulgar). "Minghe" is how "minchia" is spelled (pronounced) by southern Italians. "Minchia" means "dick", so "minghe morte" means "your dick is dead" (i.e, "impotent"), and "capo di minghe" means "dickhead", "dick-headed" &c. "Minghe" by itself would be like saying "shit" or any sort of profane exclamation."

From Pynchon's short story ''Entropy'' <ref>''Ibid.'', p. 96</ref>:

:"''Minghe morte''," said Duke. "I ''figured'' we were playing it a little slow," Krinkles said.

Also, Mingeborough is where the kids live in Pynchon's short story ''The Secret Integration.''

[[Image:botticelli-birth-venus.jpg|thumb|250px|"The Birth of Venus" by Botticelli|left]]164/175 - '''Birth of Venus''' 
The Botticelli referenced earlier, famously depicting the goddess Venus arising in full womanhood from the sea.

166/177 - '''the Fashoda crisis''' 
See Ch.3 - Fashoda

167/178 - '''Mahdists''' 
Islamic followers of Muhammed Ahmad, or "Al-Mahdi", a late 19th century religious & theocratic leader in Sudan. Ahmad organized local tribes in an attempt to create an Islamic state in Sudan, & eventually the world. The British organized an opposition & eventually crushed the movement at the battle of Omdurman in 1898.

171/183 - '''Khartoum''' 
Site of an 1884-1885 seige, in which rebeling Mahdists surrounded the colonial forces of General Gordon. When relief forces arrived, Gordon was defeated and his head displayed on a pike.

171/183 - '''General Gordon''' 
Charles George Gordan, veteran of British campaigns in China and Africa, and governor general of Sudan from 1874 to his death in 1885 at the hands of Mahdist insurrectionists.

175/187 - '''caviliere''' 
Italian: a knight, although the conotation here may be a "Knight of Labor," an important political or economic figure in a territory.

176/188 - '''Garibaldi''' 
Giuseppe Garibaldi, revolutionary leader of forces for Italian unification in the 19th century - an Italian insurrectionist hero. Earlier in his life, Garibaldi lived in Uruguay and fought against conservative forces in the civil war there. He was famous for his gaucho costume & red shirt that became a symbol for the unification movement in Italy. Some connection, here, with the Argentine gaucho?

179/191 - '''his lieutenant, Cuernacabron''' 
Spanish: "horn" + "bastard" = horny bastard?

<div id="morra">191/205 - '''a loud morra game'''</div>
From Pynchon's short story ''Entropy'' <ref>''ibid'', p. 96</ref>:
:"There was a two-handed, bilingual morra game on over by the icebox. Saul had filled several paper bags with water and was sitting on the fire escape, dropping them on passersby in the street. A fat government girl in a Bennington sweatshirt, recently engaged to an ensign attached to the Forrestal, came charging into the kitchen, head lowered, and butted Slab in the stomach. Figuring this was as good an excuse for a fight as any, Slab's buddies piled in. The morra players were nose-to-nose, screaming trois, sette at the top of their lungs."

From [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morra_%28game%29 Wikipedia]:

:While there are many variations, most forms of morra can be played with two, three or more players. In the most popular version of Morra both players throw out a single hand each showing one or two fingers, and call out loud their guess at what the sum of all fingers shown will be. If one player guesses the sum, that play earns one point. The first player to reach three points wins the game.

[[image:Savonarola_title-page_TRP-bookplate.jpg|thumb|250px|''The Life and Times of Girolamo Savonarola''|left]]192 - '''the most wonderful festa this city has seen since Savonarola was burned''' 
Girolamo Savonarola was a precursor to the Christian Right, preaching a return to traditional values and railing against the humanism of the Medicis who had brought unprecedented prosperity to Florence as well as a different type of artistic sensitivity, a strong scientific impulse and a rediscovered dialogue with the classical world. Savonarola gained a wide following in Florence (his followers were derisively called "the Weepers" because of their penitential practices and professions), but '''he was hanged and burned''' after being convicted of falsely claiming visions, religious error and sedition.

In 2012, ''The Life and Times of Girolamo Savonarola'' by Professor Pasquale Villari, published in 1888, was offered on eBay WITH a "Thomas Ruggles Pynchon" bookplate! This may have been a source for Pynchon and in his library OR in his father's library (also TRP), although the former is more likely.
==References==
<references />

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File:Botticelli-birth-venus.jpg

2012-07-14T18:43:27Z

WikiAdmin: "The Birth of Venus" by Sandro Botticelli, c. 1486

"The Birth of Venus" by Sandro Botticelli, c. 1486

File:Savonarola title-page TRP-bookplate.jpg

2012-07-14T18:38:51Z

WikiAdmin: The title page of ''The Life and Times of Girolamo Savonarola'', and the Pynchon bookplate that's in it. Offered for sale on eBay in 2012.

The title page of ''The Life and Times of Girolamo Savonarola'', and the Pynchon bookplate that's in it. Offered for sale on eBay in 2012.

C

2012-06-25T01:45:23Z

WikiAdmin: Add image of C & O "Chessie" logo

{{V Alpha Top}}

<div id="cabron"></div>'''cabrón''' 
433; Spanish: lit. "he-goat"; fig. "bastard"

'''Caesar, Julius (100-44 BC)''' 
306; Roman general, statesman and writer; 322; 481; 482; 485

'''Café Phoenicia''' 
470; in Valletta

'''Cairo''' 
77; Capital of Egypt and a major port just south of the Nile Delta in the northeast corner of Africa

'''caitiff''' 
308; someone who is cowardly or despicable

'''Camaroon''' 
267; Republic located in west-central Africa. Under British and French control from WWI until 1960.

'''Campagna''' 
184; region in central Italy around Rome

'''Cannes''' 
186; French city southwest of Nice on the Cote d'Azur; 219

'''Cape Town''' 
241; capital of Union of South Africa and located on the southernmost tip of Africa

'''"Capo di minghe!"''' 
164; Italian (southern): "Dickhead!"; [[Chapter_7#minghe|Read more...]]

'''Caprivi, George Leo, Graf von (1831-99)''' 
239; German militaryman who succeeded Bismarck as imperial chancellor and Prussian prime minister

'''carabinieri''' 
205; a member of the Italian national police force

'''CARE''' 
305; Cooperative for American Relief to Everywhere; U.S. charitable organization

'''caries''' 
153; progressive destruction of bone or tooth, esp. tooth decay

'''Carruthers-Pillow''' 
458; S. Stencil's superior at Whitehall

'''Cassar''' 
446; shopowner in Valletta who knows possible whereabouts of glass eye; [[Etymologies#cassar|Etymology]]

'''catechumen''' 
123; one receiving instruction in the basic doctrines of Christianity before becoming a full member of the church

'''cause and effect''' 
306; 489

'''CCNY''' 
128; City College of New York

'''Celda Museo''' 
387; museum in Majorca

'''Cellini, Benvenuto (1500-71)''' 
159; Florentine goldsmith and sculptor expelled from Florence for dueling. Returned to Florence later in life and worked under patronage of Cosimo I de'Medici

<div id="center"></div>'''center''' 
dead center, 22, 44; center of "one of those queer lulls in the noise level of any room," 93; "center of her face," 109; center of town, 188, 207; "I wanted to stand in the dead center of the carousel," 205; "geographical center of the midtown employment agency belt." 213; "self-centered," 214; "a great wooden sun [...] in the very center," 239; "street's center-line," 244; "down the center-line of the skull," 268; "new ones bloom in the centres of old" 323; "Profane felt that [...] he'd come to dead center in Nueva York;" 368; of gravity, 390; "nine light years from rim to center," 394; of the seat, 394; "Itague stood in the center," 396; "a large pouf in the center of the room," 406; "center of the mob," 440; "center of the ceiling," 453; "circle centered at Xaghriet Mewwija," 462; "In the center was a cistern, its rim adorned with a dark sunburst of sewage." 469; ''See also'' [[#circles|circles]]

'''Cesare''' 
159; "seedy looking Calabrese" and Mantissa's "accomplice in crime"

'''C'est Magnifique''' 
438/486; 1953 popular song written by Cole Porter for his musical Can-Can; played by hot-jazz band in Metro, in Valletta

'''Chapman, Maj. Percy''' 
181; English Consul-General in Florence; 183; 188

'''Charisma''' 
51; member of Whole Sick Crew; 124; 224; 287; 295; 300;

'''Charivari, La''' 
407; French: "the loud music"; ''See also'' [[S#shivaree|shivaree]]

<div id="charybdis"></div>'''Charybdis''' 
432; In Greek legend, a monster, the whirlpool she formed and the rock cliff under which she lived, facing Scylla on the other side of the Straits of Messina; ''See also'' [[S#scylla|Scylla]]; [[S#straits|Straits of Messina]]

<div id="cher"></div>'''Cher Ballon''' 
157; French: "beloved balloon"; a bay (horse that's bay colored) Evan Godolphin bets on in Paris and wins 17,000 francs in 1899

'''Chester's Hillbilly Haven''' 
21; bar in Norfolk, VA

<div id="chiclitz"></div>'''Chiclitz, Clayton "Bloody"''' 55; the munitions king; 152; president of Yoyodyne, Inc., 226-27; Chiclitz also appears in Pynchon's [http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=C#chiclitz ''Gravity's Rainbow'']. ''See also'' [[XYZ#yoyodyne|Yoyodyne]]

'''Chiclitz Toy Company''' 
227; outlet in Nutley, NJ, in late 1940s

'''chiffonnier''' 
399; French: "ragman"

'''Chobb, Nasty''' 
433; the baker; plays trumpet on Route 66 in the Union Jack in Valletta; in H.M.S. Ceylon cap, 443

'''Chopin, Frederic (1810-49)''' 
387; Polish composer and pianist

'''Christian, Abraham''' 
255; chief of Bondelswaartz Hottentots in Südwest, shot in Warmbad

'''Christian, Jacobus''' 
232; Bondelswaartz leader in Südwest

'''Cinderella liberty''' 
???/487; in the Navy, a liberty (shore leave) that ends at midnight of a given day

'''Cinoglossa''' 
444; homosexual, epileptic poet friend of Stencil's

<div id="circles"></div>'''circles''' 
"[the Church] formed along with uncle Evelyn the foci of her serene orbit" 72; "three jailbait [...] stood in front of the wheel of Fortune" 139; "[Chiclitz] and Eigenvalue were part of the same Circle." 152; "He belonged to that inner circle of deracinated seers" 160; "I wanted to stand in the dead center of the carousel" 205; "Foppl's own planetarium, a circular room with a great wooden sun" 239; "our Vheissus are no longer our own, or even confined to a circle of friends" 248; "as if Stencil's notion of an inner circle were correct after all" 297; "Fortune's wheel [...] the hub still held the spokes in place and the meeting place of the spokes still defined the hub" 338; "the children's wheel was dead-level, its own rim only that of the sea's horizon" 338-39; "a radius along with leather-winged Lucifer" 339; "an inner circle of enlisted men" 373; Sirius' "halo of plague, which is nine light-years from rim to center" 393-94; "the invisible circle centered at Xaghriet Mewwija with Lampedusa on the rim" 462; "Malta as a charmed circle, some stable domain of peace" 480; "if only to complete a circle begun in England eighteen years ago" 489; "Draw a line from Malta to Lampedusa. Call it a radius. Somewhere in that circle [...]" 492; ''See also'' [[#center|center]]; [[#clock|clock]]

<div id="clock"></div>'''clock''' 
"old clock," 34; "clock of a heart," 40; "turn-of-the-century clock" in Shoenmaker's office, 45-46, 96, 102; "an illuminated clock near Paola Maijstral's bed," 51-52; "unwound like a clock's mainspring," 52; "The train [...] ran on a different clock--its own, which no human could read" 77; "the simple clockwork of itself," 217; "We are [...] the lead weights of a fantastic clock, necessary [...] to keep an ordered sense of history and time prevailing against chaos" 233; "Inside were the delicately wrought wheels, springs, ratchets of a watch, wound by a gold key," 237; "The black oak clock above the fireplace ticked terribly loud in strange waves of silence," 244; "Cuckoo's in his clock with laryngitis," 261; "man as a clockwork automaton" 284; "aware of a clock ticking on the table," 294; "there was only the ticking of the clock," 295; "ticking time-bomb," 300; "I broke the electric alarm clock," 301; clockwise, 305; "Rachel's electric clock," 368; "glass eye in the shape of a clock," 388; "a traveling clock chimed seven" 392; "clock inside the Gare du Nord," 393; clock-tower, 426; "though the drunk's clock slows down, it doesn't stop" 438; "the clockwork figure," 454; "the travelling clock which always tells the wrong time and chimes in different keys" 454; clock-iris, 487; "as if it were marked by any old and overprecious clock which could be wound and set at will" 489; ''See also'' [[T#time|time]]

'''C.O.''' 
220; commanding officer

<div id="co"></div>'''C&O compartment''' 
[[file:chessie_cropped.jpg|225px|left]]
375; a cargo compartment from the Chesapeake & Ohio railroad; can be seen all over the central East Coast, distinctive for their truly weird logo, which is a vague blob in the shape of a cat, ostensibly named "Chessie."

'''cognates''' 
465; In the context of ''V.'', Spanish words that mean the same thing, or have the same derivation

'''coitus interruptus''' 
Paola & Profane, 19; Rowley-Bugge & Alice, 70; Profane & Lucille, 144; Italian couple H. Godolphin interrupts, 185; Rachel & Profane, 359; Pig & Paola, 370-71

'''Collecteurs Généraux''' 
132; worked the main sewer line which ran under Boulevard St. Michel

'''Colonna, Pompeo''' 
464; of the famous Roman family which included a pope (Martin V), several cardinals, generals, statesmen and noted scholars; sent by the Pope with 1200 men to relieve La Valette

'''Colonel Bogie''' 
325; a march, known as "vulgar song" by the Maltese (sung to the tune of "Bridge Over the River Kwai")

'''Comitato Patriottico''' 
472; one of three Mizzist "clubs" in Malta in 1919; 477

'''complexity/chaos''' 
The Situation as, 189; "Any minor accident: a break in the clouds, a castastrophic shivering at the first tentative blow to a shop window, the topology of an object of destruction (up a hill or down--it makes a difference)-
anything might swell a merely mischievous humor to suddenly apocalyptic rage." 477; "Who knows how many thousand accidents--a variation in the weather, the availability of a ship, the failure of a crop--brought all these people, with their separate dreams and worries, here to this island and arranged them into this alignment? Any Situation takes shape from events much lower than the merely human." 483; [[Henry Adams#1900|Education of Henry Adams]]

'''Conferment of Degrees law, 1915''' 
490;

'''coño''' 
135; Spanish: "pussy"

'''Constantinople''' 
462; Originally called Byzantium (c.660 BC - 330 AD), and since 1930 Istanbul, Constantinople was founded by Constantine I in AD 330, becoming the new capital of the Turkish Empire. Now the capital of Turkey, it is located on a thin strip of land (the Golden Horn) between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara.

<div id="contango"></div>'''Contango, LtJG Johnny''' 
431; "Scaffold's damage-control assistant" in Malta; 433

'''Convoy Escort Piers''' 
375; in Norfolk, VA, where Scaffold is docked; 376

<div id="cook"></div>'''Cook, Thomas (1808-1892) (& Son)''' 
71; published tour guides and conducted quick, cursory tours; 76; 77; 156; 184; 190; 204; 408;

'''cool''' 
"too cool. Too unemotional when he said 'I have a problem with my woman.'" 292; "As long as you were flop, everything was cool." 293; "the cool scene after the war" 299; "It will be cool." 301; "There is no tension or malaise to this silence; it's cool, secure." 324; "the only way clear of the cool/crazy flipflop was obviously slow, frustrating and hard work." 365; "keep cool but care" 366 (Sphere), 369 (SHROUD)

'''Coptic''' 
84; relating to a people who descended from the ancient Egyptians

'''corsair''' 
462; a pirate, esp. a privateer of the Barbary Coast

'''corvette''' 
304; highly maneuverable armed escort ship that is smaller than a destroyer

<div id="counterforce"></div>'''Counterforce/anti-paranoia''' 
"I like to see young people get together." 31; "a ready acceptance of miracles or visions," 200; "they seemed to give up external plans, theories and codes [...] to indulge in being simply and purely young," 201; "Inanimate money was to get animate warmth," 214; "life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and still stay sane." 321; "We cannot expect more of the bombs than of the wind." 322; "It is a universal sin among the false-animate and unimaginative to refuse to let well enough alone. Their compulsion to gather together [...] extends on past the threshold of sleep;" 323; "horror of isolation," 324; "no conscious plot/Drove us underground" 326; "accumulation of small accidents" 330; "towards peace and simplicity" as opposed to "exhausted intellectual searching" 309; "once the inadequacy of optimism is borne in on him by an inevitably hostile world, to retreat into abstractions" 310; ''See also'' [[P#paranoia|paranoia]]

'''coutourière''' 
166; fashionable custom-made women's clothes shop

'''Covess''' 
188; school chum of S. Stencil

'''CP''' 
100; custom of port

<div id="crimea"></div>'''Crimea''' 
459; a peninsula in the extreme southern Soviet Russia, bordered by the Black Sea to the east, south and west. The [[Balkan Intrigues#The Crimean War|Crimean War]] (1853-56) was Russia against Turkey, Britain and France. Russia was defeated and Turkey's independence thus guaranteed. (''The Charge of the Light Brigade'' and the nursing of Florence Nightingale occurred during this war.)

'''Crockett, Davy (1786-1836)''' 
219-20; American frontiersman and statesman; died fighting for Texas' independence from Mexico at the Alamo

'''Cromer, Lord Evelyn Baring (1841-1917)''' 
91; English consul-general in Egypt 1883-1907

'''Cuernacabrón''' 
179; Spanish: cuerna: "horns" + cabrón: "bastard" = "horny bastard"; The Gaucho's lieutenant; 202; 206

'''Cunard''' 
189; shipping line between Britain and America began in 1839

'''curvet''' 
262; when a horse makes a prancing leap such that for an instant all its legs are in the air

==Alpha Index==
{{V Alpha Nav}}

File:Chessie cropped.jpg

2012-06-25T01:43:59Z

WikiAdmin: Note the logo with the silhouette of the sleeping cat "Chessie"...

Note the logo with the silhouette of the sleeping cat "Chessie"...

File:Chessie.jpg

2012-06-25T01:41:54Z

WikiAdmin: Note "Chessie" in orange circle at right.

Note "Chessie" in orange circle at right.

V.

2012-03-11T21:17:14Z

WikiAdmin: /* External links */

{{Infobox Book
| name = V.
| title_orig =
| translator =
| image = [[Image:V_cover2_sm.jpg|200px|]]
| image_caption =
| author = [[Thomas Pynchon]]
| illustrator =
| cover_artist =
| country = United States
| language = English
| series =
| genre = Novel
| publisher = J. B. Lippincott Company
| release_date = March 1963
| media_type = Print (Hardback & Paperback)
| pages = 492 pp
| isbn = [http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fo%2FASIN%2F0060930217%3Fpf%5Frd%5Fm%3DATVPDKIKX0DER%26pf%5Frd%5Fs%3Dcenter-1%26pf%5Frd%5Fr%3D0JJMT6PGPA21VWH31FQ4%26pf%5Frd%5Ft%3D101%26pf%5Frd%5Fp%3D269487101%26pf%5Frd%5Fi%3D507846&tag=hyperartspynchon&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325 ISBN 0-397-00301-3]
| preceded_by =
| followed_by = [http://cl49.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ ''The Crying of Lot 49'']
}}

'''''V.''''' is the debut novel of [[Thomas Pynchon]], published in March, 1963. It describes the exploits of a discharged U.S. Navy sailor named Benny Profane, his reconnection in New York with a group of pseudo-bohemianism|bohemian artists and hangers-on known as the Whole Sick Crew, and the quest of an aging traveller named Herbert Stencil to identify and locate the mysterious entity he knows only as "V.".

==Original Dust Jacket Blurb==

This will almost certainly be the most original novel published in 1963. It is a wild, macabre tale of the twentieth century and of two men. One of them is looking for something he has lost; the other never had much to lose and so isn't looking for it. But no two readers will agree about this book because, like life itself, it is big, mysterious, and absolutely fascinating.

Thomas Pynchon's creative imagination appears to be boundless. Set in various and wonderful places (New York, Alexandria, Cairo, Paris, Florence, Malta, Africa), peopled with vivid characters, V. is indescribably original. In a madcap, sometimes sad, frequently hilarious way, it captures the ruthlessness and multiplicity of the modern world. Incident piles on incident until, in what amounts almost to a revelation, the pattern of the book and the century it describes emerge with a terrible beauty.

As for "V.," the unknown lady of the title, she is somebody's mother, somebody's mistress, and a world gone mad with despair. Neither the reader nor the American novel will remain unchallenged and unchanged by this astonishing book.

==Dust Jacket Design==
[[image:ismar-david.jpg|left|thumb|125px|Ismar David]]The dust jacket for the original hardback edition of ''V.'' was designed by [http://www.shunammite.com/idea/ Ismar David] (1910-1996). David was born in Germany and, in 1932, after winning an international design competition, moved to Jerusalem where he worked as a designer. In 1953, David moved to New York and set up his graphic design studio. During his career, he designed over 200 book jackets and covers.

==Plot summary==
{{spoiler}}
The novel alternates between episodes featuring Benny, Stencil and other members of the Whole Sick Crew (including Profane's sidekick Pig Bodine) in 1956 (with a few minor flashbacks), and a generation-spanning plot which comprises Stencil's attempts to unravel the clues he believes will lead him to "V." (or to the various incarnations thereof). Each of these "Stencilised" chapters is set at a different moment of international historical crisis, however, the framing narrative involving Stencil, "V.", and the journals of Stencil's British spy/diplomat father threads the sequences together. The novel's two storylines increasingly converge in the last chapters (the intersecting lines forming a V-shape, as it were), as Stencil hires Benny to travel with him to Malta.

'''The Stencil chapters are:'''

''chapter three'' 
In which Stencil, a quick-change artist, does eight impersonations

This chapter, set among the British community in Egypt toward the end of the 19th century, consists of an introduction and a series of eight relatively short sections, each of them from the point of view of a different person. The eight sections come together to tell a story of murder and intrigue, intersecting the life of a young woman, Victoria Wren, the first incarnation of V. The title is a hint as to how this chapter is to be understood: Stencil imagines each of the eight viewpoints as he reconstructs — we do not know on how much knowledge and how much conjecture — this episode. This chapter is a reworking of Pynchon's short story "Under the Rose", which was first published in 1961 and is collected in ''Slow Learner'' (1984). In the ''Slow Learner'' introduction, Pynchon admits he took the details of the setting ("right down the names of the diplomatic corps") from Karl Baedeker's 1899 travel guide for Egypt. Stencil's reconstruction follows the same basic conflict as "Under the Rose", but it gives the non-European characters much more personality.

''chapter five'' 
In which Stencil nearly goes West with an alligator

Only marginally part of the Stencil/V. material, this chapter follows Benny and others, as Benny has a job hunting alligators in the sewers under Manhattan. It figures in the Stencil/V. story in that there is a rat named "Veronica" who figures in a subplot about a mad priest — Father Linus Fairing, S.J. — some decades back, living in the sewers and preaching to the rats; we hear from him in the form of his diary. Stencil himself makes a brief appearance toward the end of the chapter.

''chapter seven'' 
She hangs on the western wall

In Florence in 1899, Victoria appears again, briefly, but so does the placename "Vheissu", which may or may not stand for Vesuvius, Venezuela, or even (one character jokes) Venus.

''chapter nine'' 
Mondaugen's story

Kurt Mondaugen, who will appear again in ''[http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ Gravity's Rainbow]'', is the central character in a story set in South-West Africa (now Namibia) partly during a siege in 1922 at which one Vera Meroving is present, but most notably in 1904, during the Herero Wars, when South-West Africa was a German colony; in ''V.'', Pynchon clearly sees the German treatment of the Herero at that time as prefiguring the Holocaust of the Jews in the Nazi era.

At the same time, this part of the novel is a haunting indictment of Western colonialism and racism; later, in ''[http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ Gravity's Rainbow]'', Pynchon would emphasize this latter aspect, acknowledging the facile identification made between the Herero genocide and the Nazi Holocaust in his earlier novel as "superficial". In a letter to Thomas F. Hirsch, reprinted in David Seed's book ''The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon'', London, MacMillan, 1988, pp. 240-3), Pynchon wrote, "…When I wrote ''V.'' I was thinking of the 1904 campaign as a sort of dress rehearsal for what later happened to the Jews in the 30s and 40s. Which is hardly profound; it must occur to anybody who gets into it even as superficially as I did. But since reading McLuhan especially, and stuff here and there on comparative religion, I feel now the thing goes much deeper. […] I feel that the number done on the Herero head by the Germans is the same number done on the American Indian head by our own colonists and what is now being done on the Buddhist head in Vietnam by the Christian minority in Saigon and their advisors: the imposition of a culture valuing analysis and differentiation on a culture that valued unity and integration."

''chapter eleven'' 
Confessions of Fausto Maijstral

Fausto Maijstral, Maltese civilian suffering under the German bombardment and working to clear the rubble during World War II writes a long letter to his daughter Paola, who figures in the Benny Profane story; the letter comes into Stencil's hands. The letter includes copious quotations from Fausto's diary. Besides the place name Valletta, V. figures in the story as an old — or possibly not-so-old — woman crushed by a beam of a fallen building while children play around her.

''chapter fourteen'' 
V. in love

In this chapter V. — if V. it is — is entranced with a young ballerina, Mélanie l'Heuremaudit. The story centers on a riotous ballet performance, almost certainly modeled in part on the premiere of Igor Stravinsky's ''Rite of Spring''. The performance centers on a virgin sacrifice by impalement. The young ballerina fails to wear her protective equipment, and actually dies by impalement in the course of the performance; everyone assumes her death throes simply to be an uncharacteristically emotional performance.

''chapter sixteen'' 
Valletta

[[Image:killroy.gif|right|"Kilroy"]]
As the British Navy mass on Malta in the early stages of the Suez Crisis, Stencil arrives with Benny in tow, searching for Fausto Maijstral. (As always, Kilroy was here first, and Pynchon proposes a novel origin for the face: that Kilroy was originally part of a schematic for a band-pass filter.)

Chapter 18
The last chapter is a flashback to Valleta when Stencil sr. was still alive. He becomes entangled in an incident involving a Maltese couple.

At the end of the chapter he leaves in a ship and a water spout throws into the air then plunges into the depths of the Mediterranean.

The paths of Stencil and Profane through the novel form a sort of metaphorical V. The incident of the boat sinking on the last page could be seen as the dotting of the apex on the v, the final plunge into nothingness.

{{endspoiler}}

==External links==
*[http://www.thomaspynchon.com/v/ ''V.'' Web Guide & Concordance at ThomasPynchon.com]
*[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V. Wikipedia Entry]

==References to ''V.'' in other works==
*The title of the American post-hardcore band [http://en.wikipedia.com/wiki/Thrice Thrice's] album ''[http://en.wikipedia.com/wiki/Vheissu Vheissu]'', released in October 2005, refers to Pynchon's book ''V.''
*In congruence with his V.-themed speech and surroundings, the main character in the comic book series ''[http://en.wikipedia.com/wiki/V_for_Vendetta V for Vendetta ]'' reads Pynchon's ''V.''
*Los Angeles based porn actor/director Benny Profane takes his stage name from Pynchon's character.

V.

2012-03-11T21:16:22Z

WikiAdmin: added March to pub date

{{Infobox Book
| name = V.
| title_orig =
| translator =
| image = [[Image:V_cover2_sm.jpg|200px|]]
| image_caption =
| author = [[Thomas Pynchon]]
| illustrator =
| cover_artist =
| country = United States
| language = English
| series =
| genre = Novel
| publisher = J. B. Lippincott Company
| release_date = March 1963
| media_type = Print (Hardback & Paperback)
| pages = 492 pp
| isbn = [http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fo%2FASIN%2F0060930217%3Fpf%5Frd%5Fm%3DATVPDKIKX0DER%26pf%5Frd%5Fs%3Dcenter-1%26pf%5Frd%5Fr%3D0JJMT6PGPA21VWH31FQ4%26pf%5Frd%5Ft%3D101%26pf%5Frd%5Fp%3D269487101%26pf%5Frd%5Fi%3D507846&tag=hyperartspynchon&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325 ISBN 0-397-00301-3]
| preceded_by =
| followed_by = [http://cl49.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ ''The Crying of Lot 49'']
}}

'''''V.''''' is the debut novel of [[Thomas Pynchon]], published in March, 1963. It describes the exploits of a discharged U.S. Navy sailor named Benny Profane, his reconnection in New York with a group of pseudo-bohemianism|bohemian artists and hangers-on known as the Whole Sick Crew, and the quest of an aging traveller named Herbert Stencil to identify and locate the mysterious entity he knows only as "V.".

==Original Dust Jacket Blurb==

This will almost certainly be the most original novel published in 1963. It is a wild, macabre tale of the twentieth century and of two men. One of them is looking for something he has lost; the other never had much to lose and so isn't looking for it. But no two readers will agree about this book because, like life itself, it is big, mysterious, and absolutely fascinating.

Thomas Pynchon's creative imagination appears to be boundless. Set in various and wonderful places (New York, Alexandria, Cairo, Paris, Florence, Malta, Africa), peopled with vivid characters, V. is indescribably original. In a madcap, sometimes sad, frequently hilarious way, it captures the ruthlessness and multiplicity of the modern world. Incident piles on incident until, in what amounts almost to a revelation, the pattern of the book and the century it describes emerge with a terrible beauty.

As for "V.," the unknown lady of the title, she is somebody's mother, somebody's mistress, and a world gone mad with despair. Neither the reader nor the American novel will remain unchallenged and unchanged by this astonishing book.

==Dust Jacket Design==
[[image:ismar-david.jpg|left|thumb|125px|Ismar David]]The dust jacket for the original hardback edition of ''V.'' was designed by [http://www.shunammite.com/idea/ Ismar David] (1910-1996). David was born in Germany and, in 1932, after winning an international design competition, moved to Jerusalem where he worked as a designer. In 1953, David moved to New York and set up his graphic design studio. During his career, he designed over 200 book jackets and covers.

==Plot summary==
{{spoiler}}
The novel alternates between episodes featuring Benny, Stencil and other members of the Whole Sick Crew (including Profane's sidekick Pig Bodine) in 1956 (with a few minor flashbacks), and a generation-spanning plot which comprises Stencil's attempts to unravel the clues he believes will lead him to "V." (or to the various incarnations thereof). Each of these "Stencilised" chapters is set at a different moment of international historical crisis, however, the framing narrative involving Stencil, "V.", and the journals of Stencil's British spy/diplomat father threads the sequences together. The novel's two storylines increasingly converge in the last chapters (the intersecting lines forming a V-shape, as it were), as Stencil hires Benny to travel with him to Malta.

'''The Stencil chapters are:'''

''chapter three'' 
In which Stencil, a quick-change artist, does eight impersonations

This chapter, set among the British community in Egypt toward the end of the 19th century, consists of an introduction and a series of eight relatively short sections, each of them from the point of view of a different person. The eight sections come together to tell a story of murder and intrigue, intersecting the life of a young woman, Victoria Wren, the first incarnation of V. The title is a hint as to how this chapter is to be understood: Stencil imagines each of the eight viewpoints as he reconstructs — we do not know on how much knowledge and how much conjecture — this episode. This chapter is a reworking of Pynchon's short story "Under the Rose", which was first published in 1961 and is collected in ''Slow Learner'' (1984). In the ''Slow Learner'' introduction, Pynchon admits he took the details of the setting ("right down the names of the diplomatic corps") from Karl Baedeker's 1899 travel guide for Egypt. Stencil's reconstruction follows the same basic conflict as "Under the Rose", but it gives the non-European characters much more personality.

''chapter five'' 
In which Stencil nearly goes West with an alligator

Only marginally part of the Stencil/V. material, this chapter follows Benny and others, as Benny has a job hunting alligators in the sewers under Manhattan. It figures in the Stencil/V. story in that there is a rat named "Veronica" who figures in a subplot about a mad priest — Father Linus Fairing, S.J. — some decades back, living in the sewers and preaching to the rats; we hear from him in the form of his diary. Stencil himself makes a brief appearance toward the end of the chapter.

''chapter seven'' 
She hangs on the western wall

In Florence in 1899, Victoria appears again, briefly, but so does the placename "Vheissu", which may or may not stand for Vesuvius, Venezuela, or even (one character jokes) Venus.

''chapter nine'' 
Mondaugen's story

Kurt Mondaugen, who will appear again in ''[http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ Gravity's Rainbow]'', is the central character in a story set in South-West Africa (now Namibia) partly during a siege in 1922 at which one Vera Meroving is present, but most notably in 1904, during the Herero Wars, when South-West Africa was a German colony; in ''V.'', Pynchon clearly sees the German treatment of the Herero at that time as prefiguring the Holocaust of the Jews in the Nazi era.

At the same time, this part of the novel is a haunting indictment of Western colonialism and racism; later, in ''[http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ Gravity's Rainbow]'', Pynchon would emphasize this latter aspect, acknowledging the facile identification made between the Herero genocide and the Nazi Holocaust in his earlier novel as "superficial". In a letter to Thomas F. Hirsch, reprinted in David Seed's book ''The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon'', London, MacMillan, 1988, pp. 240-3), Pynchon wrote, "…When I wrote ''V.'' I was thinking of the 1904 campaign as a sort of dress rehearsal for what later happened to the Jews in the 30s and 40s. Which is hardly profound; it must occur to anybody who gets into it even as superficially as I did. But since reading McLuhan especially, and stuff here and there on comparative religion, I feel now the thing goes much deeper. […] I feel that the number done on the Herero head by the Germans is the same number done on the American Indian head by our own colonists and what is now being done on the Buddhist head in Vietnam by the Christian minority in Saigon and their advisors: the imposition of a culture valuing analysis and differentiation on a culture that valued unity and integration."

''chapter eleven'' 
Confessions of Fausto Maijstral

Fausto Maijstral, Maltese civilian suffering under the German bombardment and working to clear the rubble during World War II writes a long letter to his daughter Paola, who figures in the Benny Profane story; the letter comes into Stencil's hands. The letter includes copious quotations from Fausto's diary. Besides the place name Valletta, V. figures in the story as an old — or possibly not-so-old — woman crushed by a beam of a fallen building while children play around her.

''chapter fourteen'' 
V. in love

In this chapter V. — if V. it is — is entranced with a young ballerina, Mélanie l'Heuremaudit. The story centers on a riotous ballet performance, almost certainly modeled in part on the premiere of Igor Stravinsky's ''Rite of Spring''. The performance centers on a virgin sacrifice by impalement. The young ballerina fails to wear her protective equipment, and actually dies by impalement in the course of the performance; everyone assumes her death throes simply to be an uncharacteristically emotional performance.

''chapter sixteen'' 
Valletta

[[Image:killroy.gif|right|"Kilroy"]]
As the British Navy mass on Malta in the early stages of the Suez Crisis, Stencil arrives with Benny in tow, searching for Fausto Maijstral. (As always, Kilroy was here first, and Pynchon proposes a novel origin for the face: that Kilroy was originally part of a schematic for a band-pass filter.)

Chapter 18
The last chapter is a flashback to Valleta when Stencil sr. was still alive. He becomes entangled in an incident involving a Maltese couple.

At the end of the chapter he leaves in a ship and a water spout throws into the air then plunges into the depths of the Mediterranean.

The paths of Stencil and Profane through the novel form a sort of metaphorical V. The incident of the boat sinking on the last page could be seen as the dotting of the apex on the v, the final plunge into nothingness.

{{endspoiler}}

==External links==
*[http://www.thomaspynchon.com/v/ ''V.'' Web Guide & Concordance at ThomasPynchon.com]

==References to ''V.'' in other works==
*The title of the American post-hardcore band [http://en.wikipedia.com/wiki/Thrice Thrice's] album ''[http://en.wikipedia.com/wiki/Vheissu Vheissu]'', released in October 2005, refers to Pynchon's book ''V.''
*In congruence with his V.-themed speech and surroundings, the main character in the comic book series ''[http://en.wikipedia.com/wiki/V_for_Vendetta V for Vendetta ]'' reads Pynchon's ''V.''
*Los Angeles based porn actor/director Benny Profane takes his stage name from Pynchon's character.

Chapter 11

2011-01-03T04:08:22Z

WikiAdmin:

{{V PbP Top}}

307/337 - '''rhythms pulse regular and sinusoidal''' 
A sinusoidal waves's path, when plotted to a time base, is a sine wave (particles execute transverse vibrations of a simple harmonic type); [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinusoidal Wikipedia]

<div id="siege">318/351 - '''8th of June'''</div>
This date is incorrect. The bombing of Malta began on June 11, 1940. [http://www.octopus-garden.com/english/malta/history/default.aspx History of Malta]

316/??? - '''Valletta of the Knights''' 
Jean Parisot de la Valette (1494-1568), a member of the Knights of St. John, was the leadeader of the resistance against the Ottomans during the Siege of Malta in 1565, and later grand master of the Knights Hospitaller

318/??? - '''June Disturbances''' 
Two days of riots in Valletta, from June 7 to 8 of 1919, which British troops were called in to suppress, resulting in the deaths of several Maltese civilians.

321/354 - '''elephants''' 
There are no elephants on Malta, though there are fossilized remains of dwarf elephants at Ghar Dalam, near Birzebbuga. These remains prove that during the Pleistocene period the island was still connected to Sicily but cut off from North Africa. Apparently the animals got "trapped" on the island as they retreated towards warmer regions.

322/355 - '''v.''' 
After a discussion of the human zygote as matter without soul, shaped by the same mechanical forces that "dictate a bomb's trajectory, the death of stars, the wind and the water spout" we move to Fausto's "understanding" with God which comes down to, simply, "human law v. divine." In context "human law" seems to be a function of, among others, poets in creating metaphors and mothers in perpetrating a fictional mystery about motherhood -- see the "Great Lie" below (p.360). By contrast, the "divine" may simply be the laws of mechanical motion.

The "v." between human law and the divine -- the crux/cross of being animate in an inanimate world is yet another interpretation of the title.

324/358 - '''the first bomb of 8 June 1940''' 
This date is incorrect. [[#siege|See above...]]

?/361: - '''catenary''' 
A catenary is the curve formed by suspending an ideal chain. The catenary resembles a parabola, the recurring curve of [http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Paraboloids ''Gravity's Rainbow'']. Unlike the parabola, the catenary is a transcendental curve, meaning a curve with a non-algebraic function.

The ''locus'' of an equation is the curve that plots the equation, so the "locus of the transcendental" is the graph of the catenary, whose shape is the "smile" in the poem. The final line of the poem is the catenary equation itself appropriately enough for a poem by an engineer-poet.

<div id="stepfunction">331/366 - '''history is a step-function'''</div>
A "step function" is a single real variable that remains constant within each of a series of adjacent intervals, but changes in value from one interval to the next. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Step_function Wikipedia] The graph of a step function looks like a series of small steps.[http://www.icoachmath.com/SiteMap/StepFunction.html]

<div id="virgin-power">338/375 - '''unconscious identification of ones own mother with the Virgin...''' 

From Pynchon's short story ''Entropy'':

:Henry Adams, three generations before his own, had stared aghast at Power; Callisto found himself now in much the same state over Thermodynamics, the inner life of that power, realizing like his predecessor that the Virgin and the dynamo stand as much for love as for power; that the two are indeed identical; and that love therefore not only makes the world go round but also makes the boccie ball spin, the nebula precess. <ref>Pynchon, Thomas, ''Slow Learner'', Jonathan Cape, 1985, pp.84-85</ref>

327/361-2 '''The sun had almost achieved reality.''' 
This line strikes to the core of the animate v. inanimate discussion. Of course the sun is inanimate, though very energetic! -- so in order to almost achieve reality implies the perception of the poet bringing the sun to a subjective-animate reality. "Shades" of Wallace Stevens, Proust, William Blake, here.

For example William Blake in 'A Vision of the Last Judgment' writes:

:I assert for My Self that I do not behold the outward Creation & that to me it is a hindrance & not Action; it is as the Dirt upon my feet, No part of Me. "What," it will be Questiond, "When the Sun rises do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?" O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying "Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty." I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight: I look thro it & not with it.

==References==
<references />

{{V PbP}}

Chapter 11

2011-01-03T04:06:32Z

WikiAdmin:

{{V PbP Top}}

307/337 - '''rhythms pulse regular and sinusoidal''' 
A sinusoidal waves's path, when plotted to a time base, is a sine wave (particles execute transverse vibrations of a simple harmonic type); [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinusoidal Wikipedia]

<div id="siege">318/351 - '''8th of June'''</div>
This date is incorrect. The bombing of Malta began on June 11, 1940. [http://www.octopus-garden.com/english/malta/history/default.aspx History of Malta]

316/??? - '''Valletta of the Knights''' 
Jean Parisot de la Valette (1494-1568), a member of the Knights of St. John, was the leadeader of the resistance against the Ottomans during the Siege of Malta in 1565, and later grand master of the Knights Hospitaller

318/??? - '''June Disturbances''' 
Two days of riots in Valletta, from June 7 to 8 of 1919, which British troops were called in to suppress, resulting in the deaths of several Maltese civilians.

321/354 - '''elephants''' 
There are no elephants on Malta, though there are fossilized remains of dwarf elephants at Ghar Dalam, near Birzebbuga. These remains prove that during the Pleistocene period the island was still connected to Sicily but cut off from North Africa. Apparently the animals got "trapped" on the island as they retreated towards warmer regions.

322/355 - '''v.''' 
After a discussion of the human zygote as matter without soul, shaped by the same mechanical forces that "dictate a bomb's trajectory, the death of stars, the wind and the water spout" we move to Fausto's "understanding" with God which comes down to, simply, "human law v. divine." In context "human law" seems to be a function of, among others, poets in creating metaphors and mothers in perpetrating a fictional mystery about motherhood -- see the "Great Lie" below (p.360). By contrast, the "divine" may simply be the laws of mechanical motion.

The "v." between human law and the divine -- the crux/cross of being animate in an inanimate world is yet another interpretation of the title.

324/358 - '''the first bomb of 8 June 1940''' 
This date is incorrect. [[#siege|See above...]]

?/361: - '''catenary''' 
A catenary is the curve formed by suspending an ideal chain. The catenary resembles a parabola, the recurring curve of [http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ ''Gravity's Rainbow'']. Unlike the parabola, the catenary is a transcendental curve, meaning a curve with a non-algebraic function.

The ''locus'' of an equation is the curve that plots the equation, so the "locus of the transcendental" is the graph of the catenary, whose shape is the "smile" in the poem. The final line of the poem is the catenary equation itself -- appropriately enough for a poem by an engineer-poet.

<div id="stepfunction">331/366 - '''history is a step-function'''</div>
A "step function" is a single real variable that remains constant within each of a series of adjacent intervals, but changes in value from one interval to the next. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Step_function Wikipedia] The graph of a step function looks like a series of small steps.[http://www.icoachmath.com/SiteMap/StepFunction.html]

<div id="virgin-power">338/375 - '''unconscious identification of ones own mother with the Virgin...''' 

From Pynchon's short story ''Entropy'':

:Henry Adams, three generations before his own, had stared aghast at Power; Callisto found himself now in much the same state over Thermodynamics, the inner life of that power, realizing like his predecessor that the Virgin and the dynamo stand as much for love as for power; that the two are indeed identical; and that love therefore not only makes the world go round but also makes the boccie ball spin, the nebula precess. <ref>Pynchon, Thomas, ''Slow Learner'', Jonathan Cape, 1985, pp.84-85</ref>

327/361-2 '''The sun had almost achieved reality.''' 
This line strikes to the core of the animate v. inanimate discussion. Of course the sun is inanimate, though very energetic! -- so in order to almost achieve reality implies the perception of the poet bringing the sun to a subjective-animate reality. "Shades" of Wallace Stevens, Proust, William Blake, here.

For example William Blake in 'A Vision of the Last Judgment' writes:

:I assert for My Self that I do not behold the outward Creation & that to me it is a hindrance & not Action; it is as the Dirt upon my feet, No part of Me. "What," it will be Questiond, "When the Sun rises do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?" O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying "Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty." I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight: I look thro it & not with it.

==References==
<references />

{{V PbP}}

2008-11-17T23:25:37Z

WikiAdmin: add French song detail

{{V PbP Top}}

9/1 - '''Benny Profane''' 
'''Benny''': Benny is slang for benzadrine, a trademarked amphetamine often prescribed for anxiety. First discovered serendipitously in 1954. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bennie Bennie]. Also, ''bene'' [Latin] = "well-intentioned", observes Molly Hite.

'''Profane''': Since 1912, as defined in ''The Elementary Forms of Religious Life'' by the sociologist Emile Durkheim, profane has had the social meaning of 'everything that is not sacred'. 
"The division of the world into two domains, one containing all that is sacred and the other all that is profane—such is the distinctive trait of religious thought."--Durkheim (p. 34).[http://science.jrank.org/pages/11185/Sacred-Profane--MILE-DURKHEIM.html/''Science Encyclopedia: History of Ideas'', Vol. 5] 
Latin root: pro "in front of/before"; fanum "temple", i.e. not within the inner sanctum. Benny is "profane" compared to the almost mystical world of historical fiction Stencil (see below) moves through.

9/1 - '''Christmas Eve 1955''' 
The first time that the Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD) received a call concerning Santa's whereabouts. [http://www.classbrain.com/artholiday/publish/tracking_santa.shtml]
 
Pynchon worked on aspects of NORAD [later acronym] when he was at Boeing.
[http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_biography.html]

9/1 - '''Norfolk, Virginia''' 
Port city.[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norfolk%2C_Virginia/ wikipedia]
The city has a long history as a strategic military and transportation point. Norfolk is home to both the Norfolk Naval Base, the world's largest naval base and was in 1955. Urban renewal, starting
in the 1970s also included the demolition of many prominent city buildings, and large swaths of urban fabric that, were they still in existence today, might be the source of additional historic urban character, a-and including the East Main Street district (where the current civic complex is located), and where Benny starts yo-yoing. 

9/1 - '''his old tin can's''' 
His particular naval ship. The informal usage of "tin can" refers to a naval destroyer, notorious for relatively light armor.

9/1 - '''Sterno can''' 
Sterno Canned Heat is a fuel made from denatured and jellied alcohol. It is designed to be burned directly from its can.[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterno/ wikipedia]

[[image:Packard-Patrician-1954.jpg|thumb|right|150px| 1954 Packard Patrician]]9/1 - '''54 Packard Patrician''' 
The Packard Patrician was an automobile built by the Studebaker-Packard Corporation of Detroit, Michigan, from model years 1951 through the 1956 model. There was even an eight-passenger model.1958 was the last year of
Packard production.
The Packard had a high reputation for quality, for value that would last and Packards are highly-prized by collectors today.

10/2 - '''seaman deuce''' 
A seaman apprentice. See "Deuce Kindred," a character in Pynchon's [http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ ''Against the Day''], his 2006
novel.

10/2 - '''like a yo-yo...maybe a year and a half''' 
"One year of those times [Fifties] was much like another...there was a lot of aimlessness going around". Introduction to ''Slow Learner'', p.14, by Thomas Pynchon.

10/2 - '''Drunken Sailors...Do With''' 
Here, actually beginning on the first page, appears Pynchon's lifelong stylistic use of capitalization--for a certain kind of emphasis?, for a kind of reification?, and for much, much more certainly. See Pynchon's 1997 novel, [http://masondixon.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ ''Mason & Dixon''] for the most extensive use of capitalization.

10/2 - '''one potential berserk...the glass breaks?''' 
Cf. Zoyd Wheeler's annual "act of televised insanity" in Pynchon's 1990 novel, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vineland ''Vineland'']

10/2 - '''SP''' 
Shore Patrol, the naval 'police'.

10/2 - '''Hey Rube''' 
Carnies'--circus folk--call to come together when in a dispute with townspeople. Reviewer, writer, Michael Moorcock, who published an early Pynchon story when he was a young magazine editor, has pointed to circuses as motifs in Pynchon, calling [http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ ''Against the Day''], a massive "circus" novel.

10/2 - '''V''' 
This is the first appearance of the letter that is the title. It describes
ugly green mercury-vapor lamps. Not positive associations--to say the least-- in Pynchon's world. See [http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ ''Against the Day''], passim, especially in the Telluride sections. The V of the lamps recedes to the east, usually a positive association in Pynchon, especially in intellectual connotations.

10/2 - '''doggo''' 
in hiding used chiefly in the phrase ''to lie doggo''

11/3 - '''Beatrice''' 
Probable allusion see 'all barmaids' coming up to Beatrice, [Beatrice Poltinari] guide through 'Paradise' of Dante's [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_comedy/ ''The Divine Comedy''],
whom Dante loves.

11/3 - '''DesDiv 22''' 
Destroyer Division 22. Possible allusion to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch22 ''Catch 22''] ?, another now-classic comic, famously anti-war, novel, published in 1961, but sections were published even earlier in magazines.

<div id="single up all lines"> 11/3 - '''single up all lines'''</div>
"Single up all lines" is a common nautical term. Ships are docked with lines doubled -- that is, with two sets of ropes or chains holding the vessel to the dock. To "single up all lines" is to remove the redundant second lines in preparation to make way. See [http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ ''Against the Day''] for at least three uses and some thematic meanings.

11/3 - '''N.O.B.''' 
Naval Operations Base.

11/3 - '''Ploy''' 
'ploi'..Function: noun 
Etymology: probably from employ..Date: 1722 
1 : ESCAPADE, FROLIC 
2 a : a tactic intended to embarrass or frustrate an opponent b : a devised or contrived move : STRATAGEM (a ploy to get her to open the door -- Robert B. Parker)

11/3 - '''Pentothal injection''' 
Known as truth serum. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_thiopental/ wikipedia]

12/4 '''Negro''' 
Negro is a racial term applied to people of Sub Saharan African origin; The word is now largely seen as archaic, usually neutral and, depending on the user, occasionally offensive. However, prior to the shift in the "lexicon" of American and worldwide classification of race and ethnicity in the late 1960s, the appellation was accepted as a normal formal term both by those of African descent as well as non-blacks. Negro means black in Spanish and Portuguese, and the Italian nero is similar (Latin: niger = "black").Wikipedia 
''V.'' is early sixties, before the word shift in the late sixties.

12/4 '''Dahoud''' 
Name of an inquisitive youth who tended to the camels in El-Jaziri.

12/4 '''"life is the most precious possession you have?"..."without it, you'd be dead."''' 
The 'meaning' of life reduced to this? Somehow seems akin to Profane's yo-yoing, or later randomness. Satire of existentialism?

12/4 '''Lights Out''' 
lights out at 2200 (10:00 PM)---Navy Boot Camp.

12/4 '''snipes'''
A snipe is naval slang for a member of the engineering crew on a ship. Historically, there was always tension between snipes and the deck crew.
http://oldsnipe.com/SnipeBegin.html

12/4 - '''DesLant''' 
Destroyer Force, North Atlantic Fleet.

13/5 '''Mrs. Buffo'''...'''also named Beatrice''' 
A basso buffo, a comic bass, a staple of nearly every classic Italian comic opera.

13/5 '''dragon-embroidered kimono''' 
The Kimono (着物, Kimono? literally "something worn", i.e., "clothes") is the national costume of Japan. Originally kimono indicated all types of clothing, but it has come to mean specifically the full-length traditional garment worn by women, men, and children. Kimonos are T-shaped, straight-lined robes that fall to the ankle, with collars and full-length sleeves. The sleeves are commonly very wide at the wrist, as much as a half meter. Traditionally, on special occasions unmarried women wear kimonos (furisode) with extremely long sleeves that extend almost to the floor. Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimonos 
Kimonos were originally worn only by the nobility.

After World War II, as Japan's economy gradually recovered, kimono became even more affordable and were produced in greater quantities. Europe and America fashion ideas affected the kimono designs and motifs. japanesekimono http://www.japanesekimono.com/kimono_history.htm

Souvenir kimonos collected in great numbers by returning GIs (after WW 2) rekindled interest [in kimonos]. This postwar interest in Japan combined with a rekindled interest in the craft aesthetic created a new wave of kimono influence in America during the late 1960s and 1970s. page 18,
''Kimono Inspiration: Art and Art-to-Wear in America'' Pomegranate Books,
Textile Museum, Washington, D.C. 1996, the book of an exhibit in 1997.

13/5 '''Seventh Fleet''' 
The United States 7th Fleet is a naval military formation based in Yokosuka, Japan, with units positioned near South Korea and Japan.

13/5 '''Dewey Gland''' 
Spelled "Dewy", it means moist, wet--from dew. "Dewy-eyed" means innocent, naive.-M-W Dictionary. The dewy glands of mountian elk are sought for medicinal purposes. Dros"e*ra (?), n. [NL., fr. Gr. dewy.] Bot. A genus of low perennial or biennial plants, the leaves of which are beset with gland-tipped bristles.http://www.everything2.com/index.pl? 
Musicians, often guitar and ukelele players, are positive characters in Pynchon's oeuvre. Since music is a great joy in Pynchon's world, musicians seem often to be his archetypal artist figures. See, as context, the myth of Orpheus,"the music of [whose] lyre was so beautiful that when he played, wild beasts were soothed, trees danced, and rivers stood still." http://education.yahoo.com/reference/encyclopedia/entry/Orpheus

14/6 '''goat hole''' 
The goat is the naval mascot. 
Goat Locker - Chiefs' Quarters and Mess. The term originated during the era of wooden ships, when Chiefs were given charge of the milk goats on board. Nowadays more a term of respect for the age of its denizens.

14/6 '''wardroom''' 
wardroom n : military quarters for dining and recreation for officers of a warship. http://www.dict.die.net/wardroom

14/6 '''X.O.''' 
Executive Officer.

14/6 '''Pappy Hod''' 
Of or resembling pap; mushy. 
pap·py2 (păp'ē)
n. Informal., pl. -pies.---
Father 

hod n. A trough carried over the shoulder for transporting loads, as of bricks or mortar. A coal scuttle.
http://www.answers.com/topic/hod

14/6 '''boatswain''' 
n : a petty officer on a merchant ship who controls the work of other seamen ...
http://dict.die.net/boatswain/

14/6 '''riggish''' 
wanton: said of Cleopatra whom the holy priests praise when she is riggish' (i.e. wanton) ... Anthony & Cleopatra, Shakespeare.

14/6 '''Pig Bodine''' 
Notice immaturity and other relevant meanings to simple 'pig'
1 a : a young domesticated swine not yet sexually mature; broadly : a wild or domestic swine.
3 : a dirty, gluttonous, or repulsive person.--Merriam-Webster Dictionary 

Pigs in ''Gravity's Rainbow'' [http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/gravity/extra/pigs.html]

Bodine: In 1905, two years after the Wright brothers powered flight, the Bodine brothers produced their first electric motor for a dental drill manufacturer.http://www.bodine-electric.com/Asp/AboutUs.asp

See terrific ''Bodine'' entry at AtD wiki: [http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_489-524#Page_517 Bodine]

15/8 '''jarhead(s)''' 
Marine Corps slang for a Marine, perhaps for the shape of the hat/helmet they wore.
The term was well-established by the fifties. Answers.com.

17/10 '''"Where we going," Profane said. "The way we're heading," said
Pig.''' 
Notice the tie-in with yo-yoing, immediacy and goallessness. Also notice that Profane's question is presented as a statement and Pig's answer is all part of the same paragraph. (Unlike almost all dialogue in novels.)

17/10 '''WAVE lieutenants''' 
WAVES, or "Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service". In the decades since the last of the Yeomen left active duty, only a relatively small corps of Navy Nurses represented their gender in the Naval service, and they had never had formal officer status. Now, the Navy was preparing to accept not just a large number of enlisted women, as it had done during World War I, but female Commissioned Officers to supervise them. It was a development of lasting significance, notwithstanding the WAVES' name, which indicated that they would only be around during the wartime "Emergency". Department of the Navy historical bulletin.

17/10 '''Morris Teflon''' 
Teflon, patented in 1941 and trademarked in 1944 by the Dupont company == Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), a synthetic fluoropolymer which finds numerous applications. PTFE has an extremely low coefficient of friction and is used as a non-stick coating for pans and other cookware. It is very non-reactive, and so is often used in containers and pipework for reactive and corrosive chemicals. Where used as a lubricant, PTFE significantly reduces friction, wear and energy consumption of machinery.

17/10 '''switchman''' 
switchman - a man who operates railroad switches. Pynchon does not like railroads. See [http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ ''Against the Day''].

18/11 '''wire-brushed''' 
naval slang for a merciless chewing out.

18/11 - '''She taught them all a song. Learned from a para on French leave from the fighting in Algeria''' 
The song the paratrooper taught Paola song is a French anti-war song, "Le Déserteur" ("The Deserter"), recorded in 1954 by [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Vian Boris Vian] and written by Vian and Harold Berg:

:Early tomorrow morning 
:I will shut my door 
:on these dead years 
:I will take to the road. 
:I will beg my way along 
:on the land and on the waves 
:the old and the new world ...

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYpLHRQV7sQ Have a listen & look]; [http://www.swans.com/library/art7/xxx071.html Lyrics (with a variation)]

18/11 '''Piraeus''' 
Piraeus is a city in the periphery of Attica, Greece, located to the south of the city of Athens. It is the capital of the Piraeus Prefecture and belongs to the Athens urban area. It was the port of the ancient city of Athens and it was chosen to serve as the modern port when Athens was re-founded in 1834. Piraeus is the largest port in Europe (and third largest in the world) in terms of passenger transportation. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piraeus Wikikpedia]

19/12 '''F.L.N.''' 
The National Liberation Front (French: ''Front de Libération nationale'', hence FLN) is a socialist political party in Algeria. It was set up on November 1, 1954 as a merger of other smaller groups, to obtain independence for Algeria from France. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Liberation_Front(Algeria) Wikipedia]

19/12 '''WAVY''' 
WAVY is the NBC affiliate serving the Norfolk-Portsmouth-Newport News, Virginia market.

19/12 '''Pat Boone''' 
A very popular 'smooth' singer of the 50s, famous for doing covers of African-American hit songs. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Boone Wikipedia]

19/12 '''"No", she said. "Meaning Yes"''' 
Foreshadowing of the chapter "In which Esther Gets a Nose Job."

19/12 '''Click, went Teflon's Leica''' 
Reminds of Pynchon's legendary aversion to being photographed. Although, as the narrator notes, "Outraged privacy was not so important; but the interruption had come just before the Big Moment."

20/13 '''Navy greatcoat''' 
Beautiful pictures from all sides here: [http://cgi.ebay.com/Mid-20th-Century-Royal-Navy-Captains-Greatcoat-VXE_W0QQitemZ110167682561QQihZ001QQcategoryZ586QQrdZ1QQssPageNameZWD2VQQcmdZViewItem#ebayphotohosting Navy greatcoat]

20/13 '''topside''' 
the top portion of the outer surface of a ship on each side above the waterline

20/13 '''Madonna, he thought''' 
aka Mother Mary, aka the Virgin Mary, used blasphemously.

[[image:snow-shroud.jpg|right|thumb|Snow Shroud|150px]]
20/13 '''snow-shroud''' 
A coating or "shroud" of snow on the branches of trees.

<div id="inanimate">20/13 - '''inanimate'''</div>
52 uses of the word inanimate in ''V.''; 13 of animate. Thematic: Life vs. Non-Life/Death.

21/14 '''turn a corner in the street'''...'''where nothing else lived but himself''' 
As Benny did "rounding the corner' onto East Main [p.2]. Cf. animate/inanimate above.

21/14 '''mental eye''' 
Consciousness, of course; also a perceptual theory. A-and here is a use by Charles Dickens: "gilding with refulgent light our dreamy moments, and laying open a new and magic world before the mental eye, the drama is gone, perfectly gone,' said Mr Curdle." from ''The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickelby''.

Further reading again indicates that "mental eye" is an older use which has faded, being largely replaced by 'mind's eye".

Cf. '''Third eye''':The third eye (also known as the inner eye) is a metaphysical and esoteric concept referring in part to the ajna (brow) chakra in certain Eastern and Western spiritual traditions. It is also spoken of as the gate that leads within to inner realms and spaces of higher consciousness. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_eye Third eye]
Cf. third eye in [http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_119-148 ''Against the Day'', p. 125]

21/14 '''''Susanna Squaducci'', an Italian luxury liner''' 
Ex-''Scaffold'' sailors hold their 'reunion' here. See Pynchon's later
'linking' of a military ship and a luxury liner, the ''Stupendica'', in [http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ ''Against the Day'']

:Susanna: name of a young woman who is the subject of a famous Biblical story
in the ''Book of Daniel''. Known as 'Susanna and/among the Elders', Susanna is viewed bathing by a group of elders and they attempt to blackmail her into performing sexual favors. There have been paintings and a poem by Wallace Stevens. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susanna_%28Book_of_Daniel%29 Wikipedia]

:Squaducci: need an expert in Italian slang perhaps, but a related word seems to be: sgualdrina f. (pejorative) trollop, strumpet, harlot, tart. Squa(l)might add the negative meaning to whatever 'ducci' [pl. of duchess?] means, since 'drina' can be a girl's name and, in fact, was what young Queen Victoria was called. See ''Queen Victoria'' by Lytton Strachey.

Somehow the meanings seem to fit Pynchonian themes: from the sound, to the
Biblical sexual allusion (of saved purity) reduced to lack of such purity.

21/14 '''dancing the dirty boogie''' 
a voluptuous dance (with varying lyrics) originating within the African-American tradition. "The “Dirty Boogie,” which was made famous by another film, “Dirty Dancing.” As you may recall, this film takes place in the 1960’s in a small Catskill resort where a dance instructor taught a young seventeen year-old varius types of sexy dance moves: one being the “Dirty Boogie.” Of course there was a scene in the movie showing all the teenagers and young adults doing the “Dirty Boogie.” Many of the dance moves in the “Dirty Boogie,” resembled movements featured in the movie, “Lambada.” These movements were acting out sexual pleasure on the dance floor. The Rolling Stones do a "Dirty Boogie" on their ''Black & Blue'' album.

22/15 '''clown's motley''' 
Motley refers to the traditional costume of the Court jester or the Harlequin character in ''Commedia dell'arte''.[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motley]

22/15 '''the Catskills''' 
Catskill Mountains, an area northwest of New York City, famous as a vacation resort area. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catskill_Mountains Wikipedia].

22/15 '''shakedown cruise''' 
Shakedown cruise is a nautical term in which the performance of a ship is tested. Shakedown cruises are also used to familiarize the ship's crew with operation of the craft. The term can also refer in a generic sense to the process of testing out any new technology or systems.

22/15 '''gee and haw''' 
To haw and gee To haw and gee about, to go from one thing to another without good reason; to have no settled purpose; to be irresolute or unstable. [Colloq.] Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.

The phrase derives from "Hey and Go" - turn right and turn left, and was originally used in leading oxen and cattle by teamsters.[http://www.takeourword.com/TOW144/page2.html]

<div id="trocadero">22/15 - '''Schlozhauer's Trocadero'''</div>
The word ''trocadero'', which in Spanish means "place of barter" (from trocar: "to barter"), goes back to a fortified site near Cadiz, Spain, that was the stronghold of the Constititutionalists in the revolution of 1820 and that fell to the French in 1823. During the International Exhibition of 1878 an ornate palace was built to commemorate the French victory. "Trocadero" became a popular name for public places in Europe, one being the Trocadero Palace of Varieties in London, known as "The Troc," which opened as a music hall in 1882 on the corner of Shaftsbury Avenue and Windmill Street.

22/15 '''Liberty''' 
Liberty, New York: [http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=41.797792,-74.742829&spn=0.10,0.10 Google Map]

22/15 '''fight Arabs in Israel''' 
Of the 950,000 estimated Arabs in Israel before Israel became a state in 1948, an estimated 156,000 remained after. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_citizens_of_Israel Wikipedia]

23/16 '''Parris Island''' 
Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island is an 8,095 acre (32.9 km²) military installation near Beaufort, South Carolina, tasked with the training of enlisted Marines. Male recruits living east of the Mississippi River and female recruits from all over the USA report here to receive their initial training. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parris_Island Wikipedia]

23/16 '''Haganah''' 
The Haganah (Hebrew: "The Defense") was a Jewish paramilitary organization in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine from 1920 to 1948. [http://en.wikipedia.org.wiki/Haganah Wikipedia]

23/16 '''mezuzah''' 
A mezuzah (Hebrew: "doorpost") is a piece of parchment (usually contained in a decorative case) inscribed with specified Hebrew verses from the Torah (Deuteronomy 6:4-9 and 11:13-21). These verses comprise the Jewish prayer "Shema Yisrael," and begin with the phrase "Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is One." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mezuzah Wikipedia]

23/16 '''iceberg lettuce''' 
The Iceberg lettuce industry exploded during WWII as salads were seen as a real morale booster. After the war, its popularity continued as soldiers came home wanting the same assortment of fresh produce procured by the military. [http://www.taproduce.com/About/PressReleases07-4.html] California producers of iceberg lettuce were the targets of protests by Cesar Chavez's National Farm Workers Association, beginning in the very early sixties.

23/16 '''watercress''' 
The capital growing city of this leaf vegetable ''was'' Huntsville, Alabama until:
:"The city's transformation began with the arrival of Wernher von Braun, Hitler's chief missile designer, whose V-2 rocket terrorized London and other British cities. An SS major who headed rocket research at the Peenemunde complex, where slave laborers were starved, beaten, and worked to death, von Braun could have ended up in the docket at Nuremberg like other leading Nazis. But at war's end, the Pentagon was anxious to plumb German scientific know-how in order to improve America's weaponry. Under the top-secret Operation Paperclip, the Army smuggled von Braun and his team of 118 Peenemunde scientists out of Germany and brought them to the United States. After first going to a military base near El Paso, they were taken to Huntsville in 1950 and put to work at Redstone Arsenal." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntsville%2C_Alabama]

23/16 '''Belgian Endive''' 
A leaf vegetable grown completely underground or indoors in the absence of sunlight, a process that prevents the leaves from turning green and opening up .

23/16 '''Abdul Sayid''' 
Abdul (also transliterated Abdel, `Abd al-, and other ways) means "servant of the", and is the first part of many Arabic names. It is combined with one of the 99 Names of God in the Qur'an to form a two-word Arabic theophoric name. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul] ''Sayid'' or ''Sayyid'' is an honorific title given to males who are thereby said to be descendants of the prophet Muhammed, founder of Islam.

24/17 '''pedestrian girls''' 
notice double meaning.

The 1913 edition of ''Webster's Dictionary'' seems to be, from this and other citations, one of Pynchon's major linguistic resources or, at least, gives some of the most resonant meanings from a Pynchon Perspective.

24/7 - '''drained-nervous''' 
With the hyphen, this shows another older archaic usage. Cf. Snow-shroud and the loss of hyphens between words above.

<div id="bravo">27/21 - '''a pimpled bravo'''</div>
A "bravo" is a villain, desperado; esp. a hired assassin

32/? - '''Dewey, now astride a lifeline on the bridge, gave a bass string intro and began to sing Blue Suede Shoes, after Elvis Presley.''' 
A slight anachronism. We know the date is 1st January 1956. Carl Perkins wrote [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Suede_Shoes "Blues Suede Shoes"] in on 4/5 December 1955, and released the record on 1st January 1956. Elvis recorded it on 30th January 1956 and first played it on television on the 11th February. It was the first track on his first album, released March. So Dewey couldn’t have played "Blue Suede Shoes" after Elvis Presley.

37/32 - '''horniness''' 
a state of sexual excitement. Pynchon is the first citation in the ''Oxford English Dictionary'' for use of this word in print, in ''V.''.

<div id="Zeitsuss">43/39 -'''Zeitsuss'''</div>
'Zeit' [German] = Time. Mr. Zeitsuss is head of the Alligator Patrol.

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==External Links==

* [http://www.hyperarts.com/thomas-pynchon/ ThomasPynchon.com]
* [http://fortunaty.net/text/textz/textz/pynchon_thomas_v.txt Full Text of ''V.'']
* [http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/ The Modern Word Pynchon page]
: [http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_v.html The Modern Word: ''V.'']
: [http://z11.invisionfree.com/thefictionalwoods/index.php The Fictional Woods] - a Pynchon forum
* [http://www.newpartisan.com/home/literature-for-the-age-of-unease-reading-pynchon-today.html "Reading Pynchon Today" in the ''New Partisan'']
* [http://www.bookforum.com/archive/sum_05/pynchon.html "Pynchon From A to V" - Excellent!]
* [http://pynchonoid.blogspot.com/ Pynchonoid Blog]
* [http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/v/index.html Pomona ''V.'' page]
* [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V. Wikipedia: ''V.'']
* [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_WWII_German_military_terms Glossary of German Military Terms]
* [http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/V. Uncyclopedia's Entry for ''V.'' (Fantastic!)]

==Featured Article==

[[image:logo_NYT.gif|left|200px]]This article from the June 25, 2008 ''New York Times'' Travel section has a video of Malta's history, photographs, and is a pretty good read (but check out the comments!):

Malta’s historical significance, however, outweighs its tiny weirdness. For 2,000 years, it was one of the most important strategic locations in the Mediterranean, a key to controlling naval traffic between the sea’s east and west. More recently, Malta has occupied a strategic spot in the American imagination, from [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Maltese_Falcon ''The Maltese Falcon''] to Thomas Pynchon’s ''V.'' and Joseph Heller’s [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch_22 ''Catch-22''], both of which had significant scenes set here. And Hollywood has gotten into Malta, too: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy_(film) ''Troy''], [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladiator_(film) ''Gladiator''] and even [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popeye_(film) ''Popeye''] were shot here.

[http://frugaltraveler.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/25/mopeds-horsemeat-and-pynchon-on-malta/?scp=10&sq=Frugal%20Traveler%20Grand%20Tour&st=cse Read the ''New York Times'' article...]

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