Chapter 1

Please keep these annotations SPOILER-FREE by not revealing information from later pages in the novel.

One meaning of Bennie is: Shortened form of benefit. All services provided to or for soldiers, sailors, airmen or Marines are considered bennies. Online Dictionary.

Port city.[1] 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.

His particular naval ship.

A seaman apprentice. See "Deuce Kindred," a character in Pynchon's Against the Day, his 2006 novel.

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, Mason & Dixon for the most extensive use of capitalization.

Cf. Zoyd Wheeler's annual "act of televised insanity" in Pynchon's 1990 novel, Vineland[2]

Shore Patrol, the naval 'police'.

Carnies'--circus folk--call to come together when in a dispute with townspeople.
Misc: 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 Against the Day, a massive 'circus' novel.

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 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.

Pronunciation: 'do-(")gO
Function: adverb
Etymology: probably from dog
in hiding -- used chiefly in the phrase to lie doggo. Merriam Webster Dictionary.

Probable allusion---see 'all barmaids' coming up--to Beatrice, [Beatrice Poltinari] guide through 'Paradise' of Dante's Divine Comedy [3], whom Dante loves.

Destroyer Division 22. Possible allusion to Catch 22 [4] ?, another now-classic comic novel, published in 1961, but sections published even earlier in magazines.

"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 Against the Day for at least three uses and some thematic meanings.

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.

A "bravo" is a villain, desperado; esp. a hired assassin