Notes (and rebuttals) to A Gravity's Rainbow Companion
by Steven Weisenburger
Copyright © Ben Teague 1989-2005
So in 1988 the U. of Georgia Press brings out this book, and I along with many other Pynchon readers gobble it up. In some respects Weisenburger's work is not bad--indeed, in some it's quite good: You and I might have missed all the Kaballah imagery.
But humanist Weisenburger was not up to Pynchon's history and technology references or his use of German (and French, Dutch, Russian, Spanish) expressions. I made a lot of notes--rebutting what he said, correcting many spelling errors, and amplifying and inserting entries. This page is a transcript of my notes, updated to 2005.
It's only fair to point out that Weisenburger did not have Google, a site that has made much of his work obsolete so that readers don't have to depend on the Companion as they did in 1988.
In what follows, I color-code my entries:
- Blue for spelling and usage corrections
- Green for corrections relating to German and other foreign languages
- Red for argumentative notes
- Gray for entries the Companion should have included but didn't, or entries I can amplify without arguing
I follow the page referencing method of the Companion. The letter W refers to Steven Weisenburger, P to Pynchon, GR of course to Gravity's Rainbow.
- General points
- Beyond the Zero
- Un Perm' au Casino Hermann Goering
- In the Zone
- The Counterforce
- Assessment
General points
Throughout the work, W misspells Lüneburg.
W pretty consistently identifies "ICI" as "Imperial Chemicals, Incorporated." The abbreviation denotes Imperial Chemical Industries Ltd.
I dispute W's use of "acronym" for many abbreviations such as P/W and V-E. PISCES, now, that's an acronym.
Beyond the Zero
V9.29 Jungfrau: The German word means virgin (or Virgin).
V12.30 walking stick: Non-Californians could use help with the pronunciation Joaquin = (h)wa-KEEN.
V13.28 dacoits: W has this annoying habit of referring to Sax Rohmer as Arthur Sarsfield Ward (and I believe similarly to Bram Stoker under his birth name). Nobody recognizes Ward; the correct reference, the only reasonable one, is to Sax Rohmer.
V13.30-31 Fuzzy-Wuzzies: At least in the time of "Gunga Din," the Brits were fighting against the Fuzzy-Wuzzies, not recruiting them.
V14.12 red-cap: W's entry is seriously misleading, though funny. British military police are identified by their red caps. Sudanese my ass. See also 607.18.
V15.7 Busbies: The "bag" is the floppy crown of the headgear, not an appendage.
V17.26 ATS: Correct spelling is Auxiliary.
V18.8-38 Things: Reichssieger is misspelled. Again at 387.36. Reference in text should read "V142.32."
V19.5 G-loads: Possibly this was argot in 1944, but now good space-age English; it means forces due to acceleration or deceleration, measured in multiples of the weight of the accelerated object. It does not mean the gravitational force or stress.
V19.30 pantechnicon: A carryall or van (named perhaps for the bazaar) makes more sense in 1944.
V19.31-32 quid: It couldn't have hurt to say that "British football" means American "soccer."
V20.36-37 TDY: temporary detached duty.
V28.33-34 Harrimans: Averell is misspelled.
V29.31 sensitive flame: A Bunsen burner flame that is adjusted so that it reacts in an exaggerated way to any air movement--right up to sound waves.
V30.1 Camerons: Trews are IN NO WAY "parade kilts." They are tartan trousers, tight-fitting all the way down, worn by officers in some Scots regiments. One of David Niven's autobiographical books goes into this. More at 212.33.
V40.13-14 the definitely 3-sigma lot: W's phrase "about one-half of the statistical range" points to his misunderstanding of this concept. When frequencies (numbers in the population, say) are plotted versus some characteristic and the distribution is "normal" or "Gaussian," the range from 1 standard deviation (symbolized as 1 sigma) below to 1 sigma above the mean accounts for roughly half the cases. The range from 2 sigma below to 2 sigma above the mean accounts for roughly 3/4 of cases, and from 3 sigma below to 3 sigma above takes in well over 98 percent of cases. "Three-sigma" means "drastically out of the ordinary," i.e., not belonging to the 98+ percent of the population that groups around the mean. What's more, W is wrong to say these are "wildly divergent" people; they may all be alike, just way removed from the population average. In this case, they exhibit abilities out of the ordinary: They are, let's say, more psychic than 98 or 99 percent of the population. (There's a second 3-sigma group, the ones who are less psychic than 98-99 percent. Which is really saying something.)
V42.15 F.R.C.S.: Fellow of the R.C.S., i.e., a legitimate doctor.
V51.31-32 Ick Regis: Fictional, no doubt, but say it: egregious!
V55.11-12 Roger's old Whittaker and Watson: A Course of Modern Analysis by Whittaker and Watson, 2nd ed., 1915, or a later edition. A standard advanced math textbook among, here, a scatter of math publications. Google hit. In turn, Google leads to a view camera made by Watson & Son, London, and to small-format cameras made by Whittaker in the U.S., but not to a "Whittaker & Watson" product. I am confident the book is the right reference.
V56.8 fallacy: "[S]tatistical proofs show that . . ." is mildly wrong. It can be an axiom or an observation but not, I think, a proposition subject to proof. But I could be off the beam.
V59.1-2 Variations: "Variations on a Theme by Frank Bridge" is one of Benjamin Britten's best-known compositions! Also, "over separate radio bandwidths" is meaningless; you can say "at/on different frequencies" or "in different bands."
V60.5 Bonechapel: This isn't a postal district, it is a probably fictitious address in the entirely factual E1 postal district of London. The 11th edition of London A to Z doesn't list a Bonechapel.
V61.17 Amytal: A near-homophone of amatol, the explosive in the V missile warheads.
V68.27 Berdoo: Correct spelling is Bernardino.
V69.12 faro: Players wager on the top 2 or 3 cards of the dealer's deck. See any "Hoyle's" book for a description.
V70.4 platanos: Plátanos are plantains.
V70.36 segway: Hmmm.
V71.11 Kryptosam: Oh dear oh dear. Kryptosam isn't hard, from kryptos and German Samen 'semen'. But tyrosine isn't hard either, and I find it genuinely shocking that W failed this one. It's an amino acid, named from Greek tyros 'cheese', one substance where it occurs. Compare your spanakotiropita, Greek spinach and cheese pie. "[I]t is decrypted" may just be a cute gag, or W may have confused developing a latent image with decrypting a text.
V71.12 IG Farben: In present-day German we'd write Interessengemeinschaft as one word, but possibly at some past time the name was two words as in W. Further, correct German for OKW is Oberkommando der Wehrmacht. W may be confusing OKW (German armed forces high command) with OKH or Oberkommando des Heeres (German army high command). Again at 242.9-15.
V72.32-34 Was tust Du: Not "for the war," for victory.
V78.20 metronome: It must be 80 [beats] per minute, not per second. Eighty ticks a second makes a low-pitched buzz. Evidently P's error.
V81.34-35 so-called: I'd contend there has never in the history of the world been a Hungarian who spoke English haltingly. My suggestion is that the commas signal non-native speech rhythms, not halts.
V82.1 compatriot: Bela Lugosi.
V87.23 nacelle: Is every non-literary word to be labeled "argot"? This one certainly is not, as any kid model-builder could have told W. A nacelle is the faired enclosure for an engine.
V91.37-38 King Tigers: Although there may have been bigger battle tanks, the King Tiger was the biggest to become operational.
V91.37-38 King Tigers: "Thronged" isn't right; you could say densely strewn, though.
W p. 60, introduction to Episode 14: If Jorge Luis Borges had been Dutch, his name might well have been Borgesius.
V94.20 Kinderofen: Grimm's Backofen literally is just an oven (as opposed to a furnace). W often parses a German word one level past its right meaning.
V94.26 Gottfried: While Frieden 'peace' is related to (not provably derived from) Frey, Frey (Freyr) and Frigg are distinct in most accountings of Germanic gods.
V95.3 NSB: Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging is the correct spelling of the Dutch name. The first two words may sometimes be written closed up. W's version of the name is German.
V95.33 Schußtelle: Correct spelling is Schußstelle. If you have to type it on an American keyboard, replace ß by double-S, and yes, that does give you three esses in a row. (A recent spelling reform has changed this: On a keyboard with the ß you still write ßs, but on one without it--like most Swiss keyboards--it collapses to ss.) If Kooy and Uytenbogaart wrote Schuszstelle, they were following an older practice. Again at 104.19.
V95.36-37 Captain's: Hexeszüchtigung looks like an error (P's) for Hexenzüchtigung, which would mean something like "the chastisement of a witch."
V97.9-10 Mussert's: His given name was Anton, not Adrian or Adriaan.
V98.1-2 Und nicht einmal: The first line of poetry should read Einsam steigt er dahin, in die Berge des Urleids . . .
V99.38 crush: It's bad form in German to break open a compound; write Vernichtungsbefehl or, less happily, Vernichtungs-Befehl. Again at 317.2.
100-2.3 We make: Principal is misspelled.
100.34-38 Bodenplatte: The meaning of the German word Bodenplatte is not this clear most of the times it's used. In context it's plain that it means a "hard" or "hardstand."
104.25 genever: Genever or Holland gin is sold as oude 'aged' or jonge 'young, unaged'. Good either way.
V104-30-31 where the great: Marshal is misspelled.
V106.6 bulky: Look at all the schwarz 'black' and los 'fate' references through here, especially the Rilke quotation.
V108.12-13 liever: W makes your head spin. Here the source is cited by Grimm, who translates into High German; but what W quotes is Stallybrass' translation into English of Grimm's translation.
V108.17-18 Mauritius: What in heaven's name does this mean: "The haakbus, from the German for hak-büsche, was . . ." P uses a Dutch word that W states is related to a certain German word (misspelling it in the process: Hakenbüchse is correct). This is like asking what's the Spanish word for piña colada. And would it have cost extra to point out the English derivative name for this weapon, arquebus?
V119.30-31 usurped: Yrjö is misspelled.
V125.19 Mersyside: Merseyside is misspelled.
V125.25 were-elves: What does W's entry mean?
V132-20-21 Eyeties: "[B]its from light operas by (respectively) Verdi and Puccini." First time I've heard them described as "light."
V133.29-30 Big Ben: Strictly it's the name of one bell; popularly the name of the clock; but not the tower!
V135.7 the 88: Cannon is misspelled.
V135.38 Wendell: Chaplain is misspelled. By the way, Oscar Brand used to sing a very funny song about Harry Pollitt, ending "The moral of this story is very plain to tell: If you want to be a Socialist you'll have to go to Hell."
V142.32-33 Reichssieger: GR now misspells Alpdrücken. Reichssieger is not a soldier but a victor, i.e., in the doggy context a "champion." Again at 461.32.
V146.27 Lübeck: Vergeltungswaffen (plural) means "retribution weapons"; the singular form ends in -waffe. "Revenge" is simply not as accurate a translation of the first element.
V150.13 a strange mac: And the postwar PVC raincoat at 615.10 (I owned one of these weird garments).
V152.11-12 "Kreis": Kreis is just 'circle'; a mandala is not a circle but a spoked wheel.
V154.19 Die Faust Hoch: American radicals and dissident blacks didn't invent it; international communists used this salute for generations. A possibly Austrian online commentator suggests translating the phrase as an imperative: "Raise the Fist!"
V159.9 delta-t approaching zero: W's entry is meaningless. In P's image, taken from any standard calculus text, you evaluate the change in a quantity from one slice of time to the next; relate it to the time, delta-t, between slices; and state how the ratio behaves as delta-t gets real small. The result is the rate of change, or derivative, or slope of a curve. The idea that there is "no change" is SO exactly not the point.
V159.19 Nibelungen: Kriemhild and Siegfried are misspelled. Again at 578.31.
V161.30 mansarde: A mansard roof has a shallow slope near the ridge line and a steep slope near the eaves, not horizontal and vertical.
V161.34-35 succession: I think W is misreading the part about Jamf's name; JAMF = I is Slothrop's nightmare equivalence, not an objective one. Google the string JAMF Parker to get a pretty authoritative account of the name.
V162.12 Wandervögel idiocy: Where does W get off passing judgment on someone else's German usage? One Wandervogel, many Wandervögel.
V162.13-14 Society: Raumschifffahrt 'space flight' is misspelled. (Under a recent spelling reform, I believe, the third F has been suppressed, but the H is not optional.)
V163.17-18 wines: Somebody check me on this. Piesporter and Zeltinger are Mosel wines, not Rheingau. Neither locality is within 50 kilometers of the Rhine.
V163.31-33 IG Farben: OKW is the German armed forces high command (see my note at 71.12).
V166.1-9 all right: GR spells the name "Herbert Ganister."
V166.10 Oneirine: The suffix "-ine" actually marks an amine, amino acid, nitrogenous base, or (in this case) alkaloid.
V166.11 cyclized: GR misspells quinoline. W's entry is not nonsense but I suspect his informant was thinking of something else. Isoquinoline is not so large a molecule, there are lots of ways to produce it, and it has many uses. "Numerous derivatives have been prepared and evaluated as pharmaceuticals," too (Kirk-Othmer Concise Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology, p. 986).
V168.21-22 jokes: A strikingly wordy and elaborate entry that explains nothing. What did the Cockney exclaim to the cowboy from San Antonio? "Cor, Tex!"
V169.34 "Diadem": OK, I'm niggling now. A hymn is a poem, in this case "All Hail the Pow'r of Jesus' Name." It is sung to a hymn tune, in this case "Diadem." I imagine that singing "Diadem" gives a general effect like, "Da dum da da da dum da da, da dum da da da da." But that's just me.
V170.13 Vincentesque: An excellent entry. I thought of Van Gogh, but clearly W has this right.
V171.7 "Aberystwyth": Again, "Aberystwyth" is the hymn tune and Wesley's poem is the hymn.
Un Perm' au Casino Hermann Goering
V181.4 faro: Is the Casino the one at Monte Carlo? No doubt there is evidence I can't find. There are other casinos on the Cote d'Azur, though.
V182.17 Valentinos: Webster's New World Dictionary, 3rd College Edition, gives the name as Rodolfo Alfonzo Raffaelo Pierre Filibert Guglielmi di Valentina d'Antonguolla. Woof.
V185.12 lingua franca: That isn't what it means--more like "language that passes freely." A language spoken and understood, often for purposes of trade, by people native to many languages. Swahili is a lingua franca in large parts of eastern Africa, for example. W's characterization seems odd for a humanist.
V190.8 pirozhok: W's phrase is, um, not felicitous. "Pie" would be less distracting.
V195.23 Arnhem: Arnhem is on the Rhine (local name: Rijn) or a branch of it. The Schelde flows through Antwerp, a good 120 kilometers from Arnhem. There were Allied forces at Nijmegen, south of Arnhem on the Waal.
200.21 blighter: An egregious person.
205.13-14 messieurs: Ferrari is the serpent played by Sydney Greenstreet, not the croupier. The croupier, named Emil, was played by Marcel Dalio. See my rueful note at 534.9 and a note on a meaningless coincidence at 365.23.
V210.16-17 Johnson Smith: The company was located in Racine, Wisconsin, at the time.
V210.31 Wivern: Pronounced WYE-vern. A variety of dragon in heraldry.
V212.18-19 comprendez: That's an Americanized or at least altered form. In French, comprenez-vous? or comprenez?
V212.33 Highlander: The Scots Guards are Guards but not Highlanders. A Highlander at the time belonged to one of six regiments: the Black Watch, Highland Light Infantry, Gordon Highlanders, Cameron Highlanders, Seaforth Highlanders, Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. I may have this wrong, but I think officers in the H.L.I. wore trews (see my note at 30.1) in one class of uniform.
V223.8-10 Nusselt: The Reynolds number appears in formulas describing fluid flow, but doesn't by itself represent the flow rate.
V223.13 expansion: It isn't the nozzles that expand; the gas flow expands after it exits the nozzle.
V223.19 Pfau: This one took a long time to work out. The letter V in German is pronounced "fow" (rhyming with "brow"). It's close to a homophone for Pfau, so der Pfau = der V, i.e., the V-weapon.
V223.32 draw-shots: Draw is backspin on the cue ball, applied to control its action after it strikes an object ball. Whether it hits a cushion first is immaterial.
V228.18 Malet: Not unknown at all; it's in London A to Z, and I've bought books there. Malet Street, London, WC1, runs northwest from the British Museum, parallel to Gower Street, and ends at University College London.
V229.34 Pavlovia: The village was renamed Pavlovo.
V230.21-22 Setzt V-2 ein: "Put V-2 into practice" or "Deploy V-2." The "erect" pun works only if you can't make out the German, but there is a legitimate one: "Put V-2 in!"
V233.23 star shell: Phosphorus (the element) is misspelled.
V240.20-21 sour stuff: Sauerstoff is the German word for oxygen.
V243.28-29 formée cross: The cross formée or formy is a heraldic device (used by the Templars, if anybody is up for international secret societies), quite well-defined and not the same as the Maltese cross. The drawing shows a Maltese cross (left) and a formy cross.
V247.11 intrigue: Front money isn't collateral. Money isn't collateral.
V248.40-41 knight: What about that? Connects to Der Springer 'the knight' at 376.26.
V249.21 heterocyclic: The word means that some of the little rings contain noncarbon atoms such as nitrogen. W has misunderstood the nature of a polymer, which is not generally a looped structure but a chain of simple molecules. Doesn't this point vitiate W's notion of "cycles within cycles"?
V257.8 wheel: Katje is a diminutive of Katerina, Catherine, so this phrase also alludes to St. Catherine, traditionally pictured with the wheel on which she was tortured. "Catherine wheel" is one of those propeller thingies that spin in the wind.
V261.17 Uetilberg: Uetliberg is misspelled.
V264.4 Pero ché: Not standard Spanish. A Colombian informant tells me the phrase is distinctively, unmistakably Argentine, and an American who's spent time in Argentina says the speaker is using a dialect she'd expect to hear in a non-urban setting. Pero ché, no sós argentino doesn't start out with "Why not." A better translation is "But hey, you aren't an Argentine." Again at 384.28.
V268.18-19 hemlock: W is just wrong here. Poison hemlock belongs to the genus Conium and is the herb with the Graves-Socrates connection. The hemlock used as a recognition sign was the evergreen tree (genus Tsuga) that grows all over eastern America.
In the Zone
V284.15-16 Grössli: Especially in Switzerland, you can write equivalently Grössli or Groessli. Back when people sent Telexes, this was the universal standard for rendering German (which uses 30 letters) in a 26-letter alphabet. W is simply mistaken in referring to "the Americanized spelling of the umlauted 'o'." There is another complication in that Grasseli is apparently supposed to be Grasselli, a sure-enough industrial chemical company. At least that's what DuPont says in its online corporate history. And Google doesn't lead to a Grössli firm in the chemicals or dyestuffs business. I conjecture that P invented Grössli, picking a name suggestive of Grasselli, and W swallowed the bait. But I could be wrong.
V285.18 eight: Four is the number of letters in the Tetragrammaton. Duh. What W says in the rest of the entry may be so, but it doesn't seem to bear examination. 25 Kislev may fall near the solstice in some years but not all, and the connection between 25 Kislev and December 25 seems to be just moonshine. What's more, Dec. 25 was not established as the date of Xmas until about the second century; even the early traditions don't give a date of birth for Jesus. And to make it worse, "the word was made flesh" when Jesus was conceived, not when he was born.
V286.6 Schwindel: The word does mean 'swindle' (not 'swindler'), but its primary meaning of 'giddiness' makes the name apt in a different way.
V290.16 Tchitcherine: Since Russian names are spelled with Cyrillic letters, we have to scramble to represent them with the Roman alphabet. You have three choices: Use accepted historic forms such as Peter the Great, transliterate, or let the bearer of the name dictate how you will spell it. There's a minor science of transliteration, i.e., encoding each letter of the original form by a letter or string of letters in the target form. Difficulties arise, though: If you are rendering names for German readers you will write the syllable YA as JA; if you will be presenting your results to French readers and you write JA, they will pronounce it as ZHA. So every language community has its own transliteration schemes. Always schemes, because there are as many opinions as there are scholars. The table below will illustrate.
V293.28 tank: The Stalin or IS was a heavy tank and complemented the T-34 main battle tank, which remained in service to the end of the war (and long afterward).
V295.27-28 Profundis: The Latin de profundis is misspelled and also mistranslated; it means "out of the depths" (see Psalm 130).
V298.24 Etzel: The character Etzel in the Nibelungenlied corresponds to the historical Attila; the name is not a diminutive.
V301.13 gs: Well, it's slang, not argot, and it's slang from the world of pilots, not engineers. The g does come from gravitation formulas, but a pilot pulls gs whenever the craft accelerates, gravity or no gravity. One g (not "g-force") is an acceleration of 32 feet per second per second.
V303.19-20 Marie-Celeste: She was called Mary Celeste. Either P's error or a mistake-on-purpose.
V304.36 columns: Lots of people have Lally columns in the basement to hold up their floor joists. The column is usually in two parts with a threaded union; you use a hydraulic jack to align the overhead member, unscrew the Lally column until it bears solidly at top and bottom, and finally remove the jack. The ones in the Mittelwerke are no different; they have nothing to do with overhead hoists.
V308.36 Gruss Gott: Oh dear. Not a mystery, even if GR uses a nonstandard spelling. Grüss Gott! means "Hello."
V309.7 Monel: A nickel-copper alloy, emphatically not steel. It's formally called Monel metal.
V309.11-12 Glimpf: Glimpf is a noun meaning 'gentleness'.
V312.21 Amatol: Somewhere else in the text it's several tons, but a ton is more likely.
V315.38-316.13 earth: The translation from German is wrong at two key points, maybe three. Here is my rendering: When she was pregnant again, it was said she ought to be stuck in an aardvark's burrow in order to lift a spell so that her children would survive. So it happened: She was stuck in an aardvark's burrow, and she received viable children.
V317.22 ergot: Coagulant is misspelled.
V318.18 spieling: No, they are making a spiel, in the (American) sense of pitching a product.
V321.6-7 Siege: The Siege Perilous was the seat at the Round Table that was perilous to (i.e., would destroy) any knight but the completely pure who assumed it. Not a castle.
V326.17 Celle: This wants checking. There is a Hachenburg, a medium-sized town 100 kilometers northwest of Frankfurt-am-Main. While there is a small town called Eschede between Hannover and Lüneburg, Enschede (the place named in GR) is larger and has an industrial base; it might have been a better choice for a "rocket town." See also my note at 486.14-15.
V332.15 K-rations: W says it's an abbreviation for Kämpfen-Zuteilungen, but there are several reasons that this is not a likely explanation. Occam's Razor will be enough: The U.S. army issued K rations to soldiers in the field, and American sentries are far more likely to have had those than suspect German products. I suspect the first part of the German term is misspelled, and I've already corrected the second part.
V336 ff., Episode 5: It might be worthwhile indicating some pronunciations, such as aul ah-OOL, ajtys eye-TIS, dzurt joort (J as in Jack; I can't seem to make the Z with the hook over it), and dessiatina des ya TEE na.
V340.33-34 auls: An aul is a settlement, formerly nomadic (Sovetskii entsiklopedicheskii slovar').
V345.17 Valerian: The genus name Valeriana is misspelled.
V346.4 on s'engage: One engages, and then one sees. In other words, you may know which horse can run fastest, but you still have to hold the race.
V348.8 Journal: The correct title is Journal of the American Chemical Society.
V349.39 epical: The flagship was named Suvorov.
V351.6 candles: An arc lamp patented in 1876 by P.N. Yablochkov. The Russians consider this the basis of the first practical system of electric lighting (Sovetskii entsiklopedicheskii slovar'). The inventor's name is transliterated with a J in German-speaking countries and sometimes elsewhere; see my long note at 290.16.
V352.10-11 era: There's more confusion here than meets the eye. Alexandra Feodorovna was the princess and empress. But the name in GR is Feodora Alexandrevna, and Alexandra Feodorovna died when Tchitcherine was 12 or 13, pretty much ruling out the liaison described. The similarity is there, but an identity of the two women won't fly.
V355.37-39 Tiflis: Tbilisi is the modern name; we used to write Tiflis but it has been a long time. Frunze was correct in 1988; the place was called Pishpek until 1926 and is now Bishkek, capital of Kyrgyzstan.
V361.12-13 Klar: Feuerleitwagen is misspelled. The auxiliary fuel is hydrogen peroxide.
V361.18-19 Meistersinger: Correct title of the opera is Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. The translated title should say of instead of from.
V364.39 magenta: Most people would say it's this color rather than blood-red.
V365.13 Grosser Stern: A big traffic circle in the Strasse des 17. Juni; you can look east and see the Brandenburg Gate.
V365.23 Säure: Emil is a homophone of amyl.
V366.3 Tauschzentrale: Is W's entry confirmed? Literally Tauschzentrale means a barter center. Seems to me this is more likely to have been an informal arrangement and perhaps even a place not, shall we say, under the direct supervision of military authorities. Can you really score stolen costumes at the PX? (GR at 572.39 makes it clear barter is the business there, sure enough.)
V368.9 pisscutter: It has a specific meaning as to headgear: the simple fore-and-aft cap worn by U.S. enlisted personnel until well after the war. American Legion caps share the design.
V372.29-30 Luft: It's quite clear that the sky doesn't hang down; the "Berlin Air" is stagnant. Partial lyrics to the popular song "Berliner Luft":
| Ich frug ein Kind mit jelbe Schuh: Wie alt bist du denn, Kleene? Da sagt sie schnippisch: "Du? Nanu ick werd' schon nächstens zehne?" Doch fährt nach Britz sie mit Mama'n da sagt die kleine Hexe zum Schaffner von der Straßenbahn: Ick werd' erscht nächstens sechse! |
I asked a kid wearing yellow shoes, "How old are you, little one?" She came back, "Hey? Well, I'll be ten my next birthday!" As she and her Mama were going to Britz, I heard the little witch Tell the streetcar conductor, "I won't be thikth till my nektht birthday!" |
V374.39 Wonderflower: Wunderblume is misspelled. Again in W's introduction to Episode 10.
V377.11 Degtyarovs: Well, it's most commonly transliterated Degtyarev, but in some systems more phonetically as Degtyaryov. See my long note at 290.16.
V381.10-14 Riickert: One I or two (as in GR)?
V382.15-16 Hardy: W's entry is misleading. Lionel Barrymore was in the first Andy Hardy picture but no other. Lewis Stone played the judge in all the later flicks, including Judge Hardy's Children.
V383 ff., Episode 8: The "eel" is the torpedo that the sub aimed at the Badass, not the name of the U-boat. U-boats had numbers. Read again 388.32 to 389.21, especially 389.15-21. Is it indeed off the German coast? In spring it was off the Spanish coast (265.15). It took an indefinite time ("eventually") for Squalidozzi to get from Bremerhaven to the U-boat (388.16-17). Now you can see "clear out to the Azores" (389.4) and the Badass, if not the U-boat explicitly, is in a zone of North African corpses (389.33). The case for the North Sea is weak, that for the Atlantic strong. I also suggest the reference to El Ñato's "gaucho slang" may shed light on 264.4 and 384.28.
V383.25-26 pitos: Tacuara is misspelled.
V383.29 Beláustegui: The name is of Basque origin.
V383.36-37 Pavos: There's a resonance with der Pfau, the 'peacock' nickname for the Aggregat.
V384.31 Perspex: Perspex is the British tradename for the product called Plexiglas in the U.S.
V385.8 maté: A slight misreading on W's part. Maté is yerba maté, i.e., the plant, the leaves and the brew. Possibly the gourd too, but the aroma comes from the drink.
V387.14 Gesellschaft: Society in this context; its "contract" a few episodes further on is the "social contract."
V387.29-30 Anilinas: The name "German Anilines" is misspelled.
V388.21 Gondwanaland: Lüderitzbucht is misspelled.
V390.1 Affair: Dreyfus (correct spelling) was a general staff officer but only a captain in rank.
V393.37 Templehof: GR misspells Tempelhof.
V393.41 Dietrich: Monte Cristo is misspelled.
V394.32-33 Reich: Das wütend Reich is plausible in poetic language (the grammar book says it must be wütende); GR spells it without the E. "The Raving Country."
V394.36 Königreich: W parses excessively. The word just means 'kingdom'.
V396.28 singularities: Schwarzschild is misspelled.
V396.28 singularities: W's last sentence in this entry should read, "The connection is tenuous: wholly reliant upon the reader's failing to notice how the name is spelled--not Schwarz-Child but Schwarz-Schild."
V396.33 Friedmann: Not really an optimal explanation of red-shifting. Blue, green, etc., are not necessarily shifted into the red or infrared but toward the long-wavelength portion of the spectrum. For example, infrared is shifted to microwave, red to infrared, and so forth. It's a phenomenon related to Doppler shifting.
W page 194, introduction to Episode 11: When a man and a lady love each other very much, etc. He begets or engenders a child; she conceives it.
V399.38-39 tracing: All these are measurable quantities; there is no formula in the text. P is pressure in atmospheres (gage); W, velocity in meters per second; T sub i, temperature (usually i for initial) in kelvins.
V402.29-32 manometers: Manometer, a pressure gage, doesn't need quotation marks.
V415.36 Brunhübner: It's tempting to go through and change "unknown" and "fictional" in W's work to "not yet found." Remember, tyrosine and Malet Street fell into this category. And W asserts an implausible reality for Feodora Alexandrevna and Grössli.
V421.32 Juch: Macaronic lines in German suggest lyrics from student songs.
V422.26-28 sphere: Compressor? It's a vacuum chamber.
V425.25-29 chances: Naval tactics include "salvo chasing": You steer for the spot where the enemy's last shot fell, knowing that is the one place in the world he will not hit with the next one.
V431.29 SD: Better written as Sicherheitsdienst.
V432.9 first: Franz is misspelled.
V432.27 Obersturmbannführer: This was a well-defined rank in the Waffen-SS (military arm of the SS), not a job title. I believe an Obersturmbannführer ranked with a colonel.
V433.17 tank: Cannon is misspelled.
V433.32 Feind: "The enemy is listening!"
V435.20 Fickt: It is not an archaic construction in German, so why translate it with one? "Don't fuck with Rocketman!" The error der for dem occurs in GR.
V435.29 Post: It was published by Curtis, edited by one of Curtis' employees.
V436.24 Chariot: I believe the gate is at the east end of the Tiergarten.
V440.4 better: The "Ode to Joy" is part of the Ninth Symphony.
V440.26-27 Algiers: Barbiere is misspelled.
V443.10 Mark: Isn't it just the Mark of Brandenburg?
V446.17 (or so): Why DIE, SLOTHROP on the marquee?
W page 209, intro to Episode 13: Scatological is misspelled.
V449.7 gofer: In British public schools, a "fag" is a gofer. See the next sentence.
V449.15 Bayou: Houston, Texas, was founded on the banks of Buffalo Bayou, then a clean, slow-running stream, no longer clean. The mouth of the bayou (locally pronounced BY-oh) was enlarged to make the Houston Ship Channel.
V450.24-25 volunteers: Bund Deutscher Mädchen and Auxiliary are misspelled.
V451.35 Canal: Now called the Nord-Ostsee-Kanal, "North Sea-Baltic Sea Canal." Although its construction was a transforming experience for Germany, the name "Kiel Canal" doesn't appear on most present-day maps.
V452.8 Ludwig: Airplane is misspelled.
V452.30-31 Bingen: You usually have to look at them through a telescope to see it, but contrails are helical and not a flourish.
V453.20-21 Reynolds: These dimensionless numbers or parameters describe relationships between models and real systems; they appear in the formulas for drag and so forth, but none is a measure of the quantity it relates to. And Péclet is actually fairly well known.
V454.36 Wasserkuppe: Beware false friends! Kuppe doesn't mean "cup"; it's a knob or top.
V457.1 Canal: Some maps show it as the Oder-Spree canal.
V460.12 Swinoujscie: It isn't some perverse Polish spelling of a name, it is the Polish name of the town (not the bay). W and GR get the diacritical marks right. Why two names for some of these estuary places? Of course because they were under German government at some times, Polish at others. The Swin- part of the name is common to Swinoujscie and Swinemünde; -ujscie in Polish and -münde in German mean 'mouth'.
V465.18 Wozzeck: Wozzeck is not the captain!
V468.10 chignon: Getting food and women mixed up seems to be a vagary of W's. See my note at 190.8.
V471.10 Pullman: Schlafwagen is misspelled.
V476.7 corso: Corso means a race or contest.
V483.25 Lotte: Actually the German word is lustig not lüstig, but the suggestion of a fun-loving, lusty or even voluptuary person is there.
V485.32-34 Schußtelle: The usual misspelling of Schußstelle.
V485.35 Blicero: Deity is misspelled.
V486.14-15: He did not fall back along roads. Something has come unstuck in my note at 326.17?
V489.11-15: A little scene of artillery fire control: X's on plastic overlay on an A-scope (a kind of radar screen); laying a gun by hand-cranking.
V496.23-24 Ulcerous: Gesellschaft is misspelled.
V501.5-6 scorched: "White Russia" is an old name for Belarus. Even under the Soviet regime, Belarus, Latvia and Lithuania were separate. When P and W wrote, Belarus was the Belorussian or Belarussian Soviet Socialist Republic.
V504.28 Befehl: Zu Befehl! was the response of an inferior to a superior's command, e.g., in the military.
V508.9 Zitz: "Low German" has a quite specific meaning, not the German spoken by low persons but the collection of dialects spoken in northern (lowland) Germany. Is Zitze really Low German? I suspect not; I think most of those dialects have initial T where High German has initial TS (written Z). And is it necessary to point out that the narrator is not really even trying to do this in German (Zitz und Arsch, tits and ass)?
V508.39 herniate: Ack! A Gaussian distribution has equal, very small numbers of individuals at the upper ("excellent") and lower extremes. See my illustrated note at 40.13. What's to happen here is that the number of "excellent" cases far exceeds that small number, so that the distribution looks blown-out at the upper end of the scale. Such a distribution is no longer Gaussian, of course; some people would even use the word "pathological," which goes well with "herniate."
V508.40 tankers: In context a "tanker" is a fighter who "goes in the tank," loses on purpose. Not a champion, and his enterprise is not "honest and sporting."
V513.9 pogoni: The English equivalent and the etymology are both questionable, I'd say dead wrong in fact. Russian pogon is a shoulder strap. Preobrazhensky (Etymological Dictionary of the Russian Language) derives pogon from a Polish word meaning 'tail' or 'whip'. The part about the beard is fantasy. Did Soviet officers even wear epaulets?
V516.30 east: Raketenbetrieb is misspelled. So is Kirghizstan, although in 1988 many writers preferred Kirghizia. The whole question's academic now that the independent country has renamed itself Kyrgyzstan.
V518.8 eletro: Siemens is misspelled. Those instruments were built to last forever and are quite lovely.
V520.15 Jamf: Where does W get "synthetic"?
V534.9-10 Basil: S.Z. Sakall (born Szakall) played the waiter Carl in Casablanca. You know, web sites like IMDB will spoil you: I felt a little bitter with W for getting so many details of casting wrong, but before the database came online it was really difficult to winkle some of these details out. We do live in an enlightened time. See my note at 205.13.
V545.4-5 Porky: I don't think this is right at all. Bugs, Porky and Daffy are Warner Bros. characters, and Woody came from the Lantz studio. While none of my informants has an encyclopedic knowledge of 1930s comic books, not one of them believes it is even remotely plausible that Disney, of all people, borrowed characters from the other houses, even in wartime. Again at 592.32.
V545.4-5 Porky: While manufacturing a prop bomb for a community theater production, I had many talks with cartoon fans about the anarchist's bomb as icon. Most of them connected the bomb with Bugs. But here's something interesting: In his 1994 A Companion to The Crying of Lot 49, J. Kerry Grant cites an article that identifies the cartoon short P refers to: "The Blow Out," Warner, 1936. And it is a Porky Pig story. Source: Matthew Winston, "A Comic Source of Gravity's Rainbow," Pynchon Notes 15 (Fall 1984), 73-76.
V549.1 gassen: In fact Gassen are minor city streets. Again at 668.6.
V549.18-20 Vikings, water-meadow, Byzantium: The North German/Baltic lowlands offer easy water travel south. For example, you can (and Vikings did) take the Vistula-Bug or the Dvina far upstream into what's now Russia/Belarus/Ukraine, make a short portage, then travel the Volga, Don or Dnieper right down to the Black Sea and, at that time, Byzantium. This lack of borders is crucial to the Zone.
V549.24 ff. The Nationalities are on the move: As in the migrations of the 4th century and later, the Völkerwanderungen that peopled England and parts of Italy, France, Spain, Africa and other places with Teutons. In the Zone it isn't just Germanic nationalities. Volksdeutsch--we would now say "ethnic Germans"; Tosks and Ghegs are Albanians, one tribe Christian and the other Muslim; Vlachs or Wallachians come from Rumania; Circassians from north of the Caucasus. (My notes say "Check Spaniols" but I haven't.)
V550.3-4 White Russians: Not, I think, people from Belarus but anti-Soviet Russians.
V550.38-39 Vorsetzer: Not any player piano; this very special and costly machine preserved all the performer's nuances. People like Rachmaninoff and (I believe) Saint-Saëns recorded on it.
V550.40 Jugendstil: The term is almost synonymous with Art Nouveau.
V555.29-31 tract: In the second paragraph of this long entry, W has misunderstood a key term from Medieval Christian lore: "the harrowing of Hell." This was not something done to Christ; it was his raiding Hell to rescue righteous souls. The harrowing took place during the three days after the crucifixion, illustrating Paul Newman's dictum: "A fellow has to be somewhere."
W page 239, introduction to Episode 26: I truly thought that "bloody Chiclets" was a universal American expression for teeth knocked out in a brawl.
V558.9-10 arms around each other: Tweedledum and Tweedledee's pose.
V559.16-17 For De Mille: The phrase was popular in World War I, and Texas Guinan didn't even quote it straight. See Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 15th ed., entry 924:12 and footnote. W's entry at V657.10-11 gives details on Guinan.
V560.5-6 design envelopes: A design envelope is the first, roughest draft of specifications for materiel--e.g., range, capacity, number of wheels--without regard to, say, the body styling and upholstery, which have now been stripped away again.
V560.21 Soviet CIC: Of course Marvy has no such thing in mind. He means the Soviet counterpart of the Counter-Intelligence Corps. Where on EARTH does "All-Soviet Trade Union Council" come from?
V562.7 thumb-harp: I suggest it's a "finger piano." (a) A harmonica has no soundbox, but a finger piano does. (b) Has anyone tried making Volkswagen springs sound by blowing on them? (c) The finger or thumb piano is widely played, especially in West Africa.
W page 242, introduction to Episode 27: "[I]n readiness for" is wrong, I think. I have the strong impression the attack went ahead and they are puzzling over why it failed (the Schwarzkommando had left). See 611.10-11.
V566.1-2 Roosevelt: I believe Elliot died in 1987 or 1988.
W page 244, introduction to Episode 28: "[A] (seemingly) fictional pig-hero." Well, it could take years to check. Google hits on Plechazunga relate entirely to GR. In some German parts the name would be pronounced with initial B, and a Blechazunga is attested as meaning "gleam, coruscation."
V569.26 hammer-and-forge: Oh dear, W's explanation is such a waste of a good metaphor for sex. This would be the first time Slothrop went off with some women to play a pub game.
V571.28-29 Buchdrucherverband: W is right to correct the spelling of the German word. Buchdrucker in this context is just 'printers'.
V573.19-20 Winkelhaken: But here, it's plain in the text, Winkelhaken has its common meaning of 'composing stick'.
V576.35 polyimide: W gets another chemical explanation wrong. These two classes are the same only in that both contain C, H, N and O. Aromatic polyimides are mostly film-forming plastics. Polypeptides include biopolymers as well as synthetic products. The description of the synthesis looks like nonsense. See the Kirk-Othmer Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology.
V578.25-26 Mare: The word Nocturnum should be capitalized. I can only hope W's entry is a joke.
V580.15-16 scrawled: "The wave of the future" in Jamf's mind involves a new realm of chemistry based on silicon instead of carbon, silicon-nitrogen bonding instead of carbon-hydrogen. It's a delusion; while silicon forms many compounds analogous to organic ones, the energetic and geometric relations are far less favorable than in familiar carbon chemistry. In some senses, though, it's an attractive one; a few science fiction writers have explored this "silicon world."
V582.28-29 annual: Asunder is misspelled.
V584.9-10 Keokuk: Good heavens, the game is marbles, not pinball! GR actually says marbles, just one line up. I can't help asking what country this guy grew up in.
V584.14 M-1: This passage is familiar to anyone who took ROTC in the 1960s and had to stand inspection with an old M-1. You mess up your timing with the follower and the operating handle and WHAM the bolt crushes your right thumb, unfitting you to play marbles any time soon. Gangrene seldom results, but the typical bruising and split nail have their own name: M-1 thumb.
V587.29 Illuminati: One Adam Weisshaupt procured a royal Bavarian charter for a society called "Illuminati" on July 4, 1776.
V590.28 power series: W's definition is close; it's a sum of terms each of which is a power of the variable multiplied by a coefficient.
V591.22 salutes: The Queen Anne salute is a drill-team evolution, a fancy ending to a display. It involves twirling rifles and winds up with the team kneeling, rank by rank, with hands and weapons at "Present Arms." The British army has no formation called "Royal Guards."
V591.24 bobtail: "Bobtail" usually means a short-bed truck with enclosed bed or box.
V594.31 Krypton: Krypton is indeed inert, but it's a colorless gas; this was the case even before Wikipedia went online. And "corpsman striker" is a sailor seeking a corpsman's rating; there are also radarman strikers, in fact a "striker" for every rating.
V602.12-13 Helgoland: Not Teutonics but Teutons.
V603.8 Solange: Pronounced so-LANZH as a French given name; but the German homograph solange (pronounced zo LANG eh) means "as long (as)."
V605.37-38 ay, Manuela: Not "yes Manuela" but "oh, Manuela."
V607.1 puto: In other words, she flatters him by calling him these names.
V611.10-11: Indeed, Episode 27 of "In the Zone" starts out as a post-mortem on the failed raid.
V615.10 Postwar PVC Raincoat: Planned or not, this artifact really existed. See also 150.13. This rates a note only because it's my favorite gag in GR.
V615.28-29 Groupers: A "ginger group" is a group that seeks to enliven its political party or other organization and induce it to accept new ideas. A British term based on the verb "ginger up," meaning to add spice or energy. In Canada, there was a 1924 Ginger Group of parliamentarians who split from the Progressive Party over questions of party discipline, but there's no reason to think the reference is this specific. Google the string "ginger group" (with the quotes) to see how frequently the term appears in the Commonwealth and how seldom in America.
The Counterforce
W page 263, introduction to "The Counterforce": Exercise is misspelled.
V621.26 Bakelite: The Merck firm was founded in the German town of Darmstadt. I have a notion about the source of the "D.": W may have seen a citation like, "Nachdruck d. Merck AG," meaning simply a reprint from Merck. The definite article (here abbreviated) appears because "Merck AG" isn't a personal name but winds up with -gesellschaft, a common noun.
V622.3 Spohr: The emperor's name is either Frederick William or Friedrich Wilhelm instead of the hybrid form W writes.
V624.18 Slothrops: Lenox is misspelled.
V625.10 gnädige: For such a short entry this shows a remarkable number of levels of misunderstanding. Suffice it to say that gnädige Frau is the way a polite German or Austrian addresses a lady: "Ma'am."
V626.2 Chapter 81: Chapter 81 of the Massachusetts law code relates to highways and the funding of highway construction.
V626.22 Horch: It's pronounced horkh, not hortch, so I suggest the plural in English should be Horchs.
V628.28 brogans: I presume W has a good source for the high tops, since brogans aren't usually high-topped. Auxiliary is misspelled.
V629.6-7 News: Saying News of the World is a news periodical doesn't quite do it justice. It is a largely pictorial mishmosh of news, sensation and skin.
V630.23 Wehrwirtschaftstab: I suspect GR misspells Wehrwirtschaftsstab, meaning roughly "military economic staff"; it would be interesting to know W's source for "economic warfare" and also for his statement that this is identical with Wehrwirtschaftsabteilung, roughly "military economic department."
V630.25 Vermittlungsstelle: "Liaison" may be better than "coordination." W misspells the name. Sparte has a meaning closer to "branch" or "sector" than "branch office."
V631.5-6 Draufgänger: W errs in dividing the word with no hyphen.
V635.35 colors: Colors that are rare, outré, nonstandard. See my note at 40.13.
V636.28-29 Phi: I may be wrong here, but I believe some of the honors listed are civil rather than military. The Legion of Honour at least has a civil class; the Order of Lenin was, I think, strictly for nonmilitary achievements; and I seem to recall a civil class of the Iron Cross too.
V641.17 Fourier: Sorry, the last part of W's entry is meaningless. The Fourier series represents a waveform as a sum of all the frequencies that are present in it (the fundamental and the overtones or harmonics). You can do a Fourier analysis of the sound produced by a guitar string, for example, although fretting is another issue.
V646.12 Schalterwerke: A switcher or switching system. GR errs: It's -werk in the singular.
V646.38 lieder: Not just lyrical songs, all songs.
V647.5 Osram: One L in Philips, and it is a Dutch firm (as P knows; see 649.21).
V649.15 Phoebus: You can't really blame W for his incredulity; the whole Byron story seems a dizzy fiction. But David Seed, in The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon (Iowa, 1988), pp. 210-11, says there really was a cartel: "The Phoebus S.A. Compagnie Industrielle pour le Développement de l'Eclairage was established in Geneva in 1924 and confirmed in 1935 from where Pynchon takes his ownership figures. It was dominated by General Electric and did possess a virtual world monopoly of light-bulb manufacture." Seed cites as his source Ervin Hexner, International Cartels (London, Pitman, 1946), pp. 358-59. I should add that light-bulb tales do exist, and given the fact that the distribution of bulb life is pretty well Gaussian, it is plausible that one bulb in ten or a hundred million can burn for many years.
V649.27 Siemens: The Columbia Encyclopedia spells his name Werner.
V652.29 Helgoland: Mönch is misspelled (correct in GR).
V653.14 Fahne: In line with "Die Faust Hoch" (see my note at 154.19), the title can be translated as "Raise the Banner!"
V659.17 Lüneburg: I think this is the one place where W spells the name correctly.
W page 280, introduction to Episode 5: There was a "city" of 175s, then an ordinary DP camp. Two different places and times.
V664.4-5 sinuous: Another misleading entry. The text just means the curves don't have sudden jumps (discontinuities, singularities). Mathematicians say the functions are "well-behaved."
V678.26 Fleet: Remarkably, this checks out, although another writer might have preferred to call it a passenger line. The name has to have been borrowed from Theodore Roosevelt's naval demonstration, since the fleet was in existence from the 1930s to the 1950s. I've tried to resist including links in this page, but here you can view a United Fruit brochure for the service dating from about 1950.
V682.11 Jew-zeppy: She calls him Giuseppe and José.
V683.28 Läufer: Wait-wait-wait. It is quite possible (for a nonspeaker of German) not to notice an umlauted letter in print, but not to be able to hear it in speech? Absurd. The dots are not a decoration, they mark a change in pronunciation (in this case from Laufer LOW-fer, the first rhyming with brow, to Läufer LOY-fer). I have not found Laufer attested. Läufer is the actor-noun derived from laufen 'to run', hence meaning 'runner'. If Laufer is nonsense, then Läufer must be Säure's word, not Minne's. I think the only correct statement in W is that Läufer is a bishop.
V684.39 hypothetical: Mendelssohn is misspelled. The only one-S Mendelsohn I find was an architect.
V684.40 suppressed: The Rossini works are known in English as "Sins of My Old Age."
V687.25 Schitt: Sorry, the whole point is that there's no relation between "shit" and "Schitt," an exclamation meaning "Bother!" No form of the verb scheissen seems to end in -tz, and in particular the imperfect indicative is schiß. See my next note too.
V687.31 Schein-Aula: See, there is equally no connection between "Shinola" and "Schein-Aula." This passage in GR is a demented metaphrast's dream.
V690.27-28 Takeshi: Ohka is misspelled twice. And again at 690.36-37, and at 696.30 for good measure.
V692.19 Streets: W is hasty in saying these streets are fictional. P doesn't make up things he can document in Baedeker. (From p. 17 in the introduction to his collection Slow Learner: "Loot the Baedeker I did, all the details of a time and place I had never been to . . .") I have located Semlower Strasse in Stralsund, Hafenstrasse in Greifswald, and the Petritor (tower of St. Peter's church) on Sluterstrasse in Rostock. (The map I viewed online was not clear enough to say if it showed Sluter or Slüter.)
V696.30-40 voice: Was Nonaka a lieutenant, a lieutenant commander, or a lieutenant commanding the squadron?
V698.33 keying: No, this entry doesn't work. The electro-freaks have a practice of "keying waves"; it isn't the waves that are described as keying. Shooting electricity, screwing in, and keying waves are parallel.
V702.15-16 recalling: A rich cluster of references missed. Tchaikovsky is usually reported to have died of cholera, which he contracted by drinking tainted water. It may have been suicide anyway; he drank the water knowing it was bad (in the midst of an epidemic).
V702.24 Polschuhen: No, they are "pole pieces" used (as GR says) to shape magnetic fields. And it isn't jargon.
V704.3 We lost: Russian dushi means "souls," metonymic for "people" just as it is in English. The word has nothing to do with peasants. Officially the USSR did not claim to have any peasants.
V711.2 safety: Not right. The cat's whisker in a crystal set is used for tuning. Before crystal sets went out, this term became standard, no longer slang.
V719.39-40 cross: The surveyor never drew in the dirt. He used a trick (for finding approximately a direction perpendicular to a line between two points) that looked from a distance like a priestly gesture.
V722.28-29 Europe's Original Sin . . . Modern Analysis: Neat. Freudian analysis and mathematical analysis (see my note at 55.11-12) have figured as humanity's worst enemies throughout GR.
V726.6-8 Constance: Medmenham is misspelled twice.
V726.15 toruses: The image relates not to a goddess' attribute or an architectural feature, but to a geometric figure shaped like a donut. If you mark up a map to illustrate the range of a rocket, you get a simple circle representing the nominal range; this is the set of points where the probability of a hit is highest. But some hits fall inside and outside the circle. Imagine adding a third, up-down dimension to the picture, and let the height in the new direction stand for the hit probability. You get, well, half a donut. It's fattest on the nominal range circle, lower as you go in or out from that circle, and very low far away from the circle. Every set of launch conditions will generate its own (half-)torus in the same way: a half-torus fattest in mid-London, one fattest at Antwerp, and so forth.
V726.41 quaternions: There was a real dispute in the late 19th century between advocates of the vector/matrix apparatus and the quaternion apparatus. The vector people won, for good reasons, and for a hundred years quaternions were a curiosity. More recently they have come back to life as having uses that didn't exist in the 1880s.
V728.39 laager: A laager is also a circular camp made by seminomads. In this sense it corresponds to an aul in Central Asia (see my note at 340.33). The word is pronounced virtually the same as Lager, German for 'camp' as in Konzentrationslager.
V734.2 LOX: Liquid oxygen itself, not the generator.
V739.22-24 why you see: I thought the word was commonly "Manichaean."
V742.5 Bayer: Bayer as an independent company predates the IG by some years.
V745.19 Schadenfreude: Enjoyment of shame, more exactly.
V751.35 Superman: Siegel and Shuster are misspelled.
V756.22-23 Lincolns: Ottawa is misspelled.
V757.17 ff. Räumen: Treibwerk means "propulsion system" or, in the case of missiles and aircraft, "motor." Stecker (same form in singular and plural) are electrical cable connections. Signals to initiate launch steps go into the rocket through them from the fire control car, and status signals from the rocket pass in the other direction.
Assessment
What's really going to be fascinating is if Pynchon's reading notes for GR ever become public. Weisenburger has tried something that seldom works very well, trying to reconstruct a mental and creative journey given only the names of points along the way. It turned out, in my view, to be worth the effort but nonetheless an unsuccessful project. In this and other books about Pynchon, humanists have sought to explain what he wrote without understanding what he was writing about. Pynchon's work just doesn't lend itself to that. (It appears, besides, that W administered the same treatment to aid from his colleagues in the sciences, history, foreign languages and engineering. Too many of those mathematics entries read like they were written at 3-4 times the length by a mathematician, then condensed by someone who didn't begin to comprehend them.)
More than by anything else in the work, I'm angered by W's tendency to dismiss problems. Can't find the old Baedeker for northern Germany? The street names in Greifswald must be fictional. Don't live among techies, or actors, or soldiers, or anybody else with an extramural job? Label their every phrase "argot." Can't follow the explanation you get from the math professor down the hall? Edit to make it shorter. A more astute writer would have borne down harder on the hard points and created a more useful book.
In the end, what we have is a vast conversation starter: 300-odd pages of W's sweat that have incited a yarnball of web authors to dish out their own answers. I can't admire the execution as a whole, but the devotion fills me with awe. What I regret is that W's book is the only such collection of references and has led a generation of young readers astray in some important respects.
| Approved Ben Teague web site |
 |
A Gravity's Rainbow Companion Companion