GRGR(6)--Episode 15 notes: liquorice bazooka &c

[rj]

Gary:
> W points out that Mrs. Quoad's wine jellies couldn't have included a
> "licorice bazooka," as bazookas were first invented and used during
> WWII. Has Pynchon nodded, or has he deliberately (if inconspicuously)
> broken the period frame?

It's a marvellously phallic metaphor, and a combination which links
delightfully (?) back to Slothrop's Roseland toilet escapade. I doubt
that reference to a bazooka's an anachronism though. If it is, it'd be
about the first thus far. Interesting gloss in _Brewer's Dictionary of
20th Century Phrase and Fable_ (1991):

bazooka   US infantry light rocket-firing tube used as an anti-tank
weapon in WWII. It was then applied to the British PIAT (projection,
infantry anti-tank) and the German Panzerfaust. The name was possibly
derived from its earlier use for a comedian's trombone-type wind
instrument (perhaps modeled on the kazoo, a submarine-shaped toy
producing sounds of the 'comb and paper' variety). (p.40)

According to the Collins English Dictionary 3rd ed. (1994) the
comedian's name was Bob Burns (1896-1956).

The candied simulacra of war weaponry (117) in the Disgusting English
Candy *Drill* repeats, in miniature, the themes of denial/trivialisation
of the horrors of the war, and the exploitative appropriation of war
paraphernalia by commercial producers (and a duping of the consumer) for
the sole purposes of fiscal return and thus prolongation of the
corporate enterprise.

best