GRGR(13) Notes (Pt 2)

[RICHARD_WILSON at udlp.com]

283.23 "with thirty other cold and tattered souls" - why do you suppose are we
given an exact number here? could it be that counting Slothrop there are 31
people in the car (which is 32 less 1) - so that each passenger might represent
a section of GR Pt 3?  do you think Slothrop actually counted the number of
fellow passengers? 

283.26 "out on the road" - ref to Kerouac's _On The Road_?

283.27 "a dozen variations" - as above, we are given an exact number ('dozens of
variations' would be the indeterminate way of saying it - though a dozen could
also mean 13)
should we be looking out for twelve (possibly encrypted) variations of the DP's
song in upcoming text? is this an astrological ref?

283.30 "wooden blanket" - not sure what a wooden blanket is supposed to be. most
forms of wood would be difficult to wrap around oneself. however, paper is
mostly made from wood pulp and could be used as such.

284.8 "for song, and sin" - the comma here seems out of place... (why not 'for
song and sin'?)

284.12 "his paper misfortune" - whereas earlier generations of Slothrops had
made their fortune in paper (note also that the sentence-terminating word "word"
occurs in juxtaposition with this sentence)

284.14-15 "token scientist" - interesting that a chemical corporation would only
have one scientist on its board of directors (i might research this sometime).
also, the phrase is suggestive of the corporate racial slur 'token black'.

284.18 "octopus IG" - possibly suggests yet another double relation - in this
case, IG and Grigori (the octopus)

284.27 "before he was 30" - there's that number thirty again (cf 283.23) - a
textual instance of a double?

285.17-8 "(even in the shape of a human being: golden an monitory light)" - a
strange parenthetical - what exactly is TRP referring to here?

285.18 "eight ink marks" - as in the letters in Slothop's name. Weissenburger
points out the wide significance of the number 8, both inside and outside of GR
(number of sections in Pt 2, number of avatars of Slothrop / Stencil, May 8 {
V-E Day, White Lotos Day, TRP's birthday }, number of Chanukkah candles, etc) -
one that he misses is the "eightfold way" of 1960's particle physics in which
the then-known set of elementary particles was mapped to a mathematical group
with eightfold symmetry. (the names Feynman, Gellman, and Schwinger all sort of
remind me of GR character names, however this is probably just my own fancy...)

285.24 "a soft and chemical smell" & 286.39 "the smell of Imipolex G" -
Imipolex-G itself would not have a smell (!). a finished piece would be too
large a molecule (macroscopic dimensions like nylon, plastic wrap, etc) for the
concept of vapor pressure to be meaningful on human nasal scales. the smell
might have come from a residue of smaller molecules which were attached to the
surface of the polymer (eg un-reacted monomers). or there could be a reaction
going on at the surface in which bits of the polymer break off and diffuse
through the air (or whatever interface it happens to be in contact with... such
as human skin) - this would kind of sort of be a recapitulation of GR 10.8-19
(where the topic of *smell* is first brought up) - except in Slothrop's case the
spell is *for* (not against) falling objects...

285.27 "a secret he cannot survive" - Fowler considers this phrase a key not
only to the fate of Slothrop but other protagonists in other pynchon novels
(such as Oedipa Maas) and in a way the essence of TRP's fiction.

285.30 "his erection hums from a certain distance" - compare this with
Slothrop's first erection of the novel:

    "the sky, beaten like Death's drum, still humming, and Slothrop's cock--say
what?" (26.23-5)

285.36 "Jim Fisk" - as Weissenburger explains, Fisk was a 19th century rail
baron who (along with financier Jay Gould) attempted to de-rail the stock market
and his competitors (by hoarding gold) and thus has a thing or two in common
with Hugo Stinnes et al.

286.5 "Schwarzknabe" - 'black-boy' or 'black-jack' (as Kai and others have
pointed out, Weissenburger's translation 'black child' is incorrect)

286.14 "Tough Shit" & 286.19 "Bull Shit" - so we have "shit, money, and the
Word" (28.3-4 & 28.8) re-appearing (or "re-asserting themselves") in this
section (also see note to 284.12)

286.40 "recent dream he is afraid of having again" - one of the apparently few
dreams (or fantasies) explicitly tagged as such in GR (Weissenburger's
observation that it is a paranoid fantasy is superfluous)

287.3 "JAMF" - the capitalization might suggest an acronym 
(jive-assed-mother-fucker?) instead of a name.

287.4 "begging It *no*" - which 'It'? (the definition? the technical manual? the
dream? the Worst Thing?)