GRGR(31) Some Notes and Questions

[Doug Millison]

[more to come; can't promise I'll be able to go through each of this 
episode's segments in this kind of detail, but I'll highlight what I 
find interesting - Doug]

Notes

674.3 "this typical American teenager's own *Father*, trying episode 
after episode to kill his son. And the kid knows it." Apart from the 
twisted allusion to TV sit-coms, plus the usual Freudian and Oedipal 
baggage, Pynchon may have bigger fish to fry here.  In the late '60s, 
of course, more than a few fathers were packing their teenaged boys 
off to fight and die in Vietnam.

674.27 "the Radiant Hour, which has been abstracted from the day's 24 
by colleagues of the Father, for sinister reasons of their own." 
Sounds a bit like the missing 11 days in M&D, and this whole 
Floundering Four passage might find echoes in Mason's "stumble, daz'd 
and unprepared, into that very Whirlpool in Time,-- finding myself in 
September third, 1752, a date that for all of the rest of England, 
did not exist,-- Tempus Incognitus." (M&D p. 556).

675.3 "a white clockface drifts conveniently by" -- A nod to Salvador 
Dali, perhaps, and maybe an acknowledgement of Pynchon's debts to the 
Surrealists.

675.10 "Club Oogabooga" This polically-incorrectly-named club is 
probably not far from the Roseland Ballroom in Roxbury (founded by 
William Pynchon, Weisenburger reminds us), and I'll bet Maximillian 
knows "Red the Negro shoeshine boy" (63.22).  Links perhaps to  the 
Kenosha Kid episode that begins on p. 60, including a reference here 
to teenaged Slothrop as The Kid.

675.30 "19th-century brainwork"  -- Interesting that this "human art" 
is "lost as the dodo bird" here in the "giant factory-state"; perhaps 
an echo of the Luddites' fear that their arts were not needed in the 
factory-state that swept away cottage industry

676.4 Wonder Woman -- I doubt that Pynchon intends this reference as 
an homage to my former Arcadia High School classmate, Lynda Carter, 
who played Wonder Woman <http://www.hastur.com/WonderWoman/>   on TV 
in the '70s. (I expect I'll be seeing her at our high school class 
reunion later this year). I'm sure some of you will enjoy seeing 
Lynda tied up <http://www.hastur.com/WonderWoman/images/ww018.jpg > 
Here she is fighting a gorilla, 
<http://www.hastur.com/WonderWoman/images/ww020.jpg>.

676.33 "a chaos of peeves, whims, hallucinations and all-round 
assholery" -- obvious allusion to Pynchon-L.

677.2 "glozing neuters".  The Kid comes down hard on the excluded 
middle.  Weisenburger provides a reference to the "old Puritan 
sermons" by Thomas Hooker. At 677.6 "intensely lukewarm" reminds me 
of the contempt Jesus expresses for those who are neither hot nor 
cold.

678.9 "bananas!" -- A bit more context to interpret that all-male 
banana breakfast back at the beginning, I guess.

679.30 "spectators " -- The Kid  winds up in the Big Brother show on the Tube.

680.27  "_The Wisdom of the Great Kamikaze Pilots_ with illustrations 
by Walt Disney" -- getting us ready for the introduction of Takeshi 
and Ichizo later in this episode; Takeshi returns in Vineland, of 
course.



Questions


676.1-2 Why would homosexuals be included in "others of her [Myrtle 
Miraculous] class"?


676.14 What is "Slothrop's *own* gift and Fatal Flaw"?



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