GRGR(14) 'notes' & queries #3

[Alex Johnston]

>305.10 : ' ROCKET LIMERICKS '
>  Well, what do you make of these?
>  More later on the prurient subject matter, what of the
>  technique employed here -- insertions of these strict
>  little Choruses to punctuate the action, and their
>  association with (some of) Slothrop's pursuers?
>  Anyone find it Pavlovian that from now on we'll think
>  of Marvy's gang as soon as the familiar rythmn strikes
>  up off the page, like a clock in a crocodile?

Perhaps part of the deal with the limericks is that, as verse forms go, 
they're all stamped out of the same tin, as it were; the limerick is a 
simple and easily moulded industry standard that's far more accessible to 
the amateur versifier than the sonnet.  It has this democratic quality in 
common with the, ah, lighbulb joke.

I don't really know what I'm saying here but it seemed sort of interesting.


>306.2 : ' cracker '
>  See also COL49 p.8 : ' people poorer than him come in,
>  Negro, Mexican, cracker, '
>  {sw} white, Southern backwoodsman; usually from Georgia.
>  This particular chap is playing the role of Boatman, isn't
>  he.  Reminds me of that Immanuel Ice character in M&D.

cf. Gilbert Sorrentino, "Mulligan Stew", p.90; a bitter novelist refers to 
the sniffy book critic Gerard Rube of the Dixie Review as "Cracker faggot".  
Rube has an accent on the "e" which I can't reproduce (but spelling it 
without gives, of course, "rube".)

More on a bizarre and improbable Sorrentino connection in a second.


>308.20 : ' grease gun '
>  From context, a submachine gun, presumably?

I shouldn't even be doing this because the computer is in the workplace and 
the copy of GR is a mile away in the bedroom.  But can someone remind me of 
the context?  All I know is that the M3 Thompson was nicknamed a grease gun 
because it resembled one.

"Keep it greasey so it'll
go down easy"

- Frank Zappa, "Keep it Greasey", 1979 and therefore not a song that TRP 
could have heard while writing GR.

The b. and i. Sorrentino connection is earlier in the aforementioned novel; 
on p.32, among the list of books in the house where Halpin and Beaumont are 
confined is "How Do Accidents Occur?" by B.G. Conondrom.  Which reminds me 
irresistibly, I'm afraid, of Pynchon's 1960 Aerospace Safety article on the 
safe transportation of the IM-99A missile.

Anyway.

Alex

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