V.V. 3--Notes and queries

[Don Corathers]

V.V.3
Notes and queries

I'll post V.V. 3 in three parts: these notes, and two posts containing observations and questions for discussion. Page and line numbers are from the Harper & Row Perennial Library edition, which I'm told match at least one other edition.  

45.2 Schoenmaker. Schoen = Nice? Beauty? 

45.24 Retrousse = "turned up"

47.32 Flat Earth Society. That Englishman would be Samuel Shenton (d. 1971), whose Flat Earth Society, which has survived its founder, believes the Earth is a disk with the North Pole at the center. The outer edge is ringed by the southern ice, a wall 150 feet high that nobody has ever crossed. Except maybe Godolphin. 

There is another organization using the name Flat Earth Society, kind of a rump caucus, I guess, with a slightly different schematic of the planet. Here's a paragraph from their website: "While the Society is not a 'crackpot' group, it is opposed to the fashionable, politically correct Spherical Earth theory, which is expounded every day by so-called 'scientists,' the media and political leaders. The Society asserts that the Earth is flat and has five sides, that all places in the Universe named Springfield are merely links in higher-dimensional space to one place, and that all assertions are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true false and meaningless in some sense."
	
47.34 Lamarck. Jean Baptiste Lamarck, French biologist (1744-1829) whose work prefigured Darwin's, but who is remembered today chiefly for his assertion that acquired characteristics could be passed on to succeeding generations.

48.1 White Sands, Cape Canaveral. A pregnant reference. The first launches from Canaveral happened in June, 1950, when the tests of a series of modified V-2s (codenamed "Bumper") were moved there from White Sands, New Mexico because the coastal launch site offered a much larger clear downrange area. A brief digression that sort of completes a literary circle: at the time of Schoenmaker's conversation with Rachel, the major activity at Cape Canaveral was testing of the Snark, an early cruise missile that looked like a longer, fatter, swept-wing V-1, and that apparently was named for the elusive creature in Lewis Carroll's 1872 poem "The Hunting of the Snark." (Digression squared: the name has more recently been applied to software bugs. Digression cubed: I suppose it would be gratuitous to point out that Lewis Carroll is also the author of "Through the Looking Glass.") The Snark (that would be the missile, not the poetical beast) had a range of up to 2000 miles and could carry a 20-megaton nuclear warhead. So many of them ended up in the ocean off the Florida coast that NASA personnel were making jokes about the "Snark-infested waters" off the cape many years after the missile was retired. 

51.7 Winsome, Charisma, Fu and I. Somebody suggested a while back on the list that these names are a pun like the Pynchonian law firm Poore, Saltieri, Nast, Debrutis and Short. Seems plausible, but if it is, I don't get it. Anybody?

51.16ff Rachel's song. My Merriam Webster defines torch song as a "popular sentimental song of unrequited love." As we have seen, Rachel is in fact carrying a torch for Benny, but her song is more like a lowdown blues in the style of Bessie Smith doing "Pigfoot." No big surprise that it leaves undefined just precisely what it is that a kind-hearted man will do. Anybody care to take a shot at finishing the verse?

52.3 The party? unwound like a clock's mainspring. Another clock image, this one explicitly connected to the inanimate quality of the time-keeping machine. Earlier, at the end of the mirror-time paragraph on page 46, the human heart was compared to a clock.

52.21 Young Stencil. He's 55 years old, young only relative to his father. We will learn early in the next chapter about Stencil's habit of "forcible dislocation of personality," which suggests something about both the significance of his name and his interesting way of referring to himself in the third person. 

53.2 Margravine. The wife of a military governor, esp. of a German border state, per MW.

54.17 That interregnum between the kingdoms of death. 1918-39, the period between WW I and WW II.

54.22 September came and went. Germany invaded Poland, September 1939.

54. 28 Tobruk, El Agheila, El Alamein. Beginning in January 1942 British forces under Montgomery and Germans under Rommel fought a brutal series of tank battles back and forth-you might even say they yo-yoed-across the northern parts of Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia, ending with an Allied (the Americans were in it by then) victory at Tunis in February 1943. Worth noting that El Alamein is not far from Alexandria, one of the objects of Stencil's investigatory interests, and Tunis is probably the port you would use for a boat trip to Malta, if you happened to be headed there from North Africa.

58.28 Fourth position. Feet turned out, right a short step in front of the left. Tellingly, Esther "pointed her (remodeled) nose at his heart." 

59.5 McClintic Sphere? swinging his ass off. Likely this is an inadvertent connection, but I couldn't help but think of the guy on page 40 who took the gold screw out of his navel. Couple days ago somebody (jbor?) suggested there's a connection between Sphere and Monk. Don't get it. How's that work? 

59.11 4½ reed. A hard reed that requires a lot of breath support and produces a tone that a sax-playing friend describes as "dark."

59.34 Horn and alto together? like a knife fight or a tug of war. Check out Miles Davis and Charlie Parker on "Chasing the Bird," which can be found, among other places, on the great Rhino two-disk set Yardbird Suite.

60.6 Death of Charlie Parker. Charles Christopher "Yardbird" Parker, Jr., 1920-55. A brilliant improviser on alto sax, Parker created bop (with the help of Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonius Monk, and others), which became the jazz of choice in New York within a few years after Bird moved there from Kansas City in 1942. "No one other than Louis Armstrong has cast such a long shadow over succeeding generations of jazz musicians," writes Brian Priestly in The Rough Guide to Jazz, describing Parker's "perhaps childlike" ability "to conceive fantastic ideas which other, more rational beings would have dismissed as technically impossible."

Quite by coincidence, a 1971 recollection by Charles Mingus of a 1950 Bird gig turned up in this week's New Yorker. Mingus was describing a party at the Bandbox on 52nd Street. "The critics were there, and they didn't stop talking once. They kept right on even when Art Tatum and Charlie Parker sat in together for maybe the only time in their lives. It was the most fantastic music I ever heard. Tatum didn't let up in either hand for a second-whoosh-hum, whoosh-hum in the left, and aaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrhhhhhhhhheeeeee in the right-and neither did Parker, and to this day I don't know what they were doing." 

Addicted to heroin and a prodigious drinker, Parker died March 12, 1955 in the home of jazz benefactor Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswater. He was 35. Priestly: "Although never excusing or recommending his own habits to others, Parker nonetheless set an example in this sphere as much as in his music?" Parker's dissipation was probably accelerated by his frustration with attempts to package his musical genius in ways that might make it more appealing to mainstream tastes. "It wasn't the booze and junk that killed him," one music writer quoted a Parker acquaintance. "It was the strings." 

Don