GRGR(13) Notes (Pt 3)

[RICHARD_WILSON at udlp.com]

287.10-11 "action, action" - director's cue for the guy with the black and white
striped 'chopper thing' with the scene info written on it to chop the chopper
which tells the actors to assume their positions and the camera-man to start the
flim rolling (right?). also, another textual double.

287.12 "double row of shiny bright teeth" - aha - there's my other set of teeth!
so we have *(doll's) eyes for (potato) eyes and (dragon's) teeth for (Marvy's)
teeth* (not exactly what the ancient Hebrews had in mind methinks). a-and
there's that word 'double'.

287.13 "Boogie, boogie, boogie!" - possibly an ananchronism since Marvy seems to
be using the term 'boogie' here a'la 70's disco (first instance of 'boogie'
without the hyphenated 'woogie' referring to a song-form that i'm aware of is a
late 60's grateful dead tune). on the next page, Marvy uses the term in its
racial slur form (288.7 - "all boogie batteries").

287.21 "P-47" - Weissenburger suggests TRP made a mistake here and meant to
write C-47 since the P-47 was a single-seat fighter plane (and Marvy description
has him as rather corpulent) while the C-47 was the standard wwii cargo plane on
which it was common for US military personel to hitch rides. 

still, i like the notion of Marvy conveying himself into the text on something
called a 'Thunderbolt'.

287.23-4 "Project Hermes People from General Electric" - Weissenburger tells us
that this was the code name for a collaborative effort between GE and US Army
Ordinance to sneak dismantled A-4's out of Germany to White Sands, New Mexico.
Hermes (like the dragon's teeth) is also from Greek mythology. 

And General Electric is one of two generals mentioned in this section (Rommel's
title was 'field marshal' right?)...

287.39 "Old Blood 'n' Guts" - is the other general, in this case George S.
Patton (who also joins JFK, Malcom X, Rosa Luxemburg, usw... as a political
person mentioned in GR who was assassinated)

288.13 & 288.17 "A-and" - hey Marvy, that's Slothrop's expression! (so maybe
you're a fantasy of Slothrop's?)

288.18 "childlike race. Their brains are smaller" - sounds like that guy at
Harvard (Adolf something-or-other) who wrote some pseudo-scientific nonsense
about racial intelligence in the late 60's

288.19-20 "but out patience" .... "our patience is enormous, though perhaps not
unlimited" - note the doubling of 'our patience'. also (imho) one of the coolest
lines in pynchon-lit.

289.3 "Double-u Double-u Two-o-o-o" - this phoneticised spelling out of the
standard abbreviation of World War Two is the most blatant instance of textual
doubling (a sextuple double!)

-----------------------

the technique(?) of 'doubling' is obviously important in this section.
historically, i'd imagine that 'doubling' goes back at least as far as the Torah
(literary scholars feel free to correct me). Also, it was one of Shakespere's
favorite comedic devices. 

think i'll go dig up Susan Strehle's essay in _The Vineland Papers_ tonight. 

--rwilson

"back to silence, back to minus" -- eno