Cuteness/German/Double Postings

[LARSSON at vax1.mankato.msus.edu]

To John:
Please don't be annoyed by the cuteness--call it mid-winter madness, but it's
enjoyable enough as a form of academic Mindless Pleasure.  Anyone who reads
Pynchon--whose own share of outrageous puns can cause sensory overload--has
to be ready to put up with quite a bit.

Speaking of which, Bonnie Surfus writes:
"What do I mean?  Simply that "saure" in German is not, as it seems to me
anyhow, the "acid" of LSD, but something more like acidity of the sour
stomach.  And "bumme" as bummer (if TRP is consistent w/in the naming as
far as the use of German goes) is not found.  The closest I get is
"bummel" which, if conjugated to 1st person, might be "bumme" for
"I dawdled."  The trans. I like best is "pub-crawl."  So what I could see
might suggest a pub-crawling drunk with a sour stomach.  Of course, this
is just one iteration of meaning.  ONe thing I'll check on in my German
class today--I can't make out if "bummel" is a noun or not.  It may make
a difference, or maybe not.

Anyhow, please don't take offense.  If anything, your comments give me
more to work with in the essay I'm developing.  And if I were to jump off
a cliff with anyone, it would be with all of you  (or maybe I'd just go
look for a new boyfriend.""

One could of course be quite Derridean about all this and spin out continuous
freeplay of associations evoked by P (now *there's* academic "cuteness" with
a vengeance!) but I wouldn't be too sure about the sophistication of 
Pynchon's German.  Nonetheless, his naming of German characters is often 
evocative--much has been noted about Blicero/Weissmann, Gottfried, and
others, but there are also (very) minor characters, like the Nazi wag
Heinz Rippenstoss (GR, Viking ed., p. 167), whose name literally means
"nudge in the ribs" and Blicero's former lover Rauhandle (sp.?  page?), whose
name--"rough trade"--evokes *their* relationship.

On the other hand, I've never seen a satisfactory explication of the names
Pokler or von Goll (sorry, no umlauts available here).  Ideas, anyone?


Finally, is everyone else getting double postings of PYNCHON-L messages?
It's a minor annoyance, but unusually common--this has happened on other
 lists from time to time, so I expect it to go away eventually unless 
someone knows more.

--Don Larsson, Mankato State U., MN