H

Page numbers, if alone, refer to the 492-page editions. Please feel free to add the 547-page-edition page numbers, using the syntax: n/n2 - where "n" is the 492-page and "n2" is the 547-page. Thanks.

Habicht
273; German: "hawk"; troop ship which brought Mondaugen to Südwest

Haganah
22; a clandestine Jewish militia organized in Palestine, when under British mandate, in preparation for the coming struggle for Zionist independence at the end of World War II. It formed the nucleus of the Israeli army when Israel was established as an independent state in 1948.

Hagiar Kim

309; also spelled Hagar Qim (Maltese: "standing stones"), this prehistoric site (ca. 3000-2500 BC) is located on the sea on the southwest side of Malta and contains huge stone megaliths. When it was excavated in the early 19th century, seven fat statuettes were found, among them the so-called Venus of Malta, a headless clay figurine of a female nude; sanctuaries of; "standing stones," 311; 337; See also matriarch/mothers; MAP

Halidom, Dr.
99; plastic surgeon who uses allografts (inert substances into the living face)

Hammett, Dashiell (1894-1961)
127; American crime writer. Author of The Maltese Falcon (1930) and The Thin Man (1934).

Hamrun

482; town about two miles southwest of Valletta on Malta; 491; MAP

Hank, the
437; a ship mentioned by Johnny Contango--"the chief off the Hank" told them about a whorehouse in Valletta

Hanky and Panky
374; airline stewardesses in Virginia Beach, VA

Hanne
See Echerze, Hanne

Harmakhis
74; "God of Heliopolis and chief deity of Lower Egypt. . .Horus on the horizon"

Harris, Chapin Aaron
154; dentist

Harvitz, Esther (b. 1934)

46; member of Whole Sick Crew and roommate of Rachel Owlglass'; at party, 58; nose job, 102; 128; 282; pregnant, 353; fundraising for, 355; 360; See also Astarte (of which name "Esther" is a variation)

Hathaway shirt
433; "I don't want no cabróns puking on it"

Hebdomeros

307; a "dream novel" written by the painter de Chirico in 1929; Read it...

Hedwig
See Vogelsang, Hedwig

hekk ikun

323; Maltese: "So be it"; the equivalent of "Amen" at end of prayers such as Hail Mary.

Heliopolis
74; City of the Sun northeast of Cairo in ancient Egypt where the sun was worshipped in the name of Ra or Aton

Henry IV (1367-1413)
395; King of England from 1399 until his death. His times were full of strife. Attacked Scotland and was turned back; attacked France twice (1411-12) and was turned back. See also Joan of Arc

Hereros
245; According to Bridgeman: "a pastoral people ignorant of the art of metallurgy and contemptuous of agriculture, which they left to their serfs" [1]; 246; 257

Heroic Love Theory

125; Mafia's theory: "the world can only be rescued from certain decay through Heroic Love"; "In practice Heroic Love meant screwing five or six times a night, every night, with a great many athletic, half-sadistic wrestling holds thrown in."; 221; 287-88

Herrenschaft
255; German: "sovereign authority"

Hey Rube
10; traditional warning and rallying cry of circus and carnival people, (fr Rube "Reuben," the archetypal noncircus citizen); "Hey Rube! -- the old carny circus cry for men working the sideshows when they saw some ugly provincial customer coming up on them after they had rooked him. . .Hey Rube! -- a cry to alert all the carny men to a possible rumble [...] Hey-ba ba-Rube-ba! " - Brion Gysin (Interviewed by Terry Wilson in 1981)

Hill, Joe (1879-1915)

355; Swedish-born American labor organizer and songwriter. Came to the U.S. in 1901 and joined the IWW (the Wobblies). He was arrested for a double murder in Utah in 1914 and executed by firing squad in 1915. The subject of a Wobbly athem, "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night" (sung by Joan Baez at the 1969 Woodstock Music & Arts Fair). His collection of workers' songs, The Little Red Song Book, contains his composition "The Preacher and the Slave" which introduced the phrase "pie in the sky."

Joe Hill personifies the tradition of political song. Born in Sweden, he migrated to the US and in 1910 joined the Industrial Workers of the World - the "Wobblies". Over the next five years he campaigned for many working class causes. He became a popular song-writer with a gift for capturing the meaning of these causes in song. In 1914, during bitter struggles over free speech in Utah, Joe Hill was framed on a murder charge. Despite appeals from President Wilson and the Swedish government, Joe Hill was executed on November 19th 1915. His body was taken to Chicago where over 30,000 people attended his funeral procession and eulogies were read in nine languages.

See also Wobbly

Hillman Minx
337; car

Hiroshima, ET3
372; electronic technician on USS Scaffold; 385

history

"We want historical accuracy." 124; "history's gray turbulence," 153; "rippled with gathers in its fabric," 155; "history would continue to recapitulate the same patterns" 160; "all political events [...] have the desire to get laid at their roots," 214; 225; "is made at night," 233; ordered sense of history, 233; Profane's "timescale was skewed toward the past," 285; "the next rising period of history," 297; "Wars begin in August." 301; "only men have histories," 305; "life a successive rejection of personalities," 306; "So we do sell our souls: paying them away to history in little installments. It isn't so much to pay for eyes clear enough to see past the fiction of continuity, the fiction of cause and effect, the fiction of a humanized history endowed with 'reason'." 306; "How wondrous is this St. Giles Fair called history! Her rhythms pulse regular and sinusoidal — a freak show in caravan travelling over thousands of little hills. A serpent hypnotic and undulant, bearing on her back like infinitesimal fleas such hunchbacks [...] and perhaps even an old man with a navel of glass, through which can be seen goldfish nuzzling the coral country of his guts." 307; "the colorful whimsy of history," 308; the "force," 310; "History's serpent is one; what matter where on her body we lie." 310; "by fate or historical writhings," 311; "the 'force' we read of in historical texts," 322; defilade, 331; "is a step-function" 331; "old cyclic idea of history," 338; "submersion [...] in a history too old for him, or at least of a different order from what he'd known" 388; "basic rhythms of History," 405; "Freudian period," 406; 438; "Stencil has never encountered history at all, but something far more appalling," 450; "one century's worth of wavelets," 453; 461; "If no record of this century should survive except the personal logs of F.O. operatives, the historians of the future must reconstruct a curious landscape indeed." 468; 472; 474; "all history seemed simultaneously present," 481; "In London were too many distractions. History there was the record of an evolution. One way and ongoing" 484; "No time in Valletta. No history, all history at once. . ." 489; See also clock; entropy; hothouse; nostalgia; time; Adams on History

Hitler, Adolph (1889-1945)

242; German dictator born in Austria. In 1919, while spying on political parties for the army, he joined one of them, the National Socialist German Workers' Party (the Nazi party). The rest is history; 295; 325; 339

H.M.S. Ceylon
442; on English sailor hat worn by Chobb. A Royal Navy light cruiser which saw action in the Suez crisis

H.M.S. Egmont
456; in Valletta in 1919; 468; 491. In fact a "stone frigate", a naval shore base - the Fort St Angelo in Grand Harbour - treated as a ship for the purposes of naval discipline. The eponymous Egmont was inter alia the protagonist of a play by Goethe who came unstuck trusting in the essential goodness of humanity, a possible parallel with Benny Profane's schlemihl (self-)characterisation.

Hod, Robert ("Pappy") (b. c.1910)

14; the boatswain's mate on USS Scaffold ("BM3, USN"); 127; 219; Etymological Musings; Pappy in Gravity's Rainbow

Hollow Men, The

308; T.S. Eliot poem published in 1925; Read the poem..

holystoning
456; using holystone, a soft sandstone, to scrub a ship's deck

Hooverville
30; a shantytown of temporary dwellings during the Great Depression, where Profane was born; 358

Hopkins
307; Perhaps this is Mark Hopkins (1802-87), an American educationist who published many essays on religion.

Horus
74; one of the major gods of the ancient Egyptians, originally a great sky-god and sun-god, represented in hieroglyphics by the winged sun-disk

Hotel du Nil
88; French: "the Nile"; where Girgis will go to steal; Baedeker, in its Mediterranean guide, lists the address as Rue de l'Ancienne Bourse 11 in Alexandria.

Hotel Khedival
66; in Alexandria, across the street from the Austrian Consulate

Hotel Victoria
83; in Cairo

hothouse

"a hothouse sense of time," 57; "having somehow excaped the hothouse of his fellow Sephardim," 77; "an anteroom full of tropical hothouse growths," 148; sphere of influence, 158; "Like Machiavelli he was in exile, and visited by shadows of rhythm and decay." 160; "a jungle of hothouse flowers," 185; diseased blooms, 244; "sealed against the present," 305; "the room, though windowless and cold at night, is a hothouse. Because the room is the past, though it has no history of its own [...] a room sealed against the present," 305; hermetic, 307, 310; hot and airless, 396, 398, 406; "V. was an obsession after all, and [...] such an obsession is a hothouse: constant temperature, windless, too crowded with patricolored sports, unnatural blooms." 448; "As we get older we skew more toward the past." 470; "Right and Left; the hothouse and the street. The Right can only live and work hermetically, in the hothouse of the past, while outside the Left prosecute their affairs in the streets by manipulated mob violence. And cannot live but in the dreamscape of the future." 468; "But Valletta seemed serene in her own past, in the Mediterranean womb, in something so insulating that Zeus himself might once have quarantined her and her island for an old sin or an older pestilence. So at peace was Valletta that with the least distance she would deteriorate to mere spectacle. She ceased to exist as anything quick or pulsed, and was assumed again into the textual stillness of her own history." 474; "To enter [...] the hothouse of a Florentine spring once again [...] a total nostalgic hush rests on the heart's landscape." 486; "The street and the hothouse; in V. were resolved by some magic, the two extremes." 487; 488; "hothouse-time," 489; "He forced himself into the real present, perhaps aware it would be his last time there." 490; See also balloons; entropy; history; Serre Chaude; street

Hottentot
238; aka Bondelswaartz; tribe in the Südwest

hunchback of Notre Dame
371; "yelling sanctuary"

Hungarian Coffee Shop
131; on York Avenue in New York, where Stencil ends up after getting shot in the sewer

Hunter-Blair, Major-General
458; the OAG (Officer Administrating Government) in Malta in 1919; 471; 478

Hurries
314; slang for Hurricanes, which were British fighter planes in WWII



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  1. Bridgman, Jon M., The Revolt of the Hereros, Univ. of California Press, 1981, p. 16
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