IMIPOLEX

[jbor]

I'm wondering what status the Imipolex stands in relation to the 
Schwarzgerat ("Schwarz" black + "gerat" device)? It strikes me that if it's
*both* clear *and* black then, as well as its amazing tensile and carbon
compounding capabilities, it's also somehow containing? combining?
transcending? the whole rainbow spectrum of colour -- that phrase "brilliant
transparency" (699.23) also being an oxymoron of sorts?

Re the name:

I wonder if the "-ex" suffix is a sort of modern U.S. or Western proprietary
affix for "expanding" or "expansive", as with "Spandex" for example?

And, if so, I think "Imi" might well be from "imitate". And -pol- might be
from "poly" (= many). This stuff can transmogrify *into* anything!

And so,

Overlaying this onto MalignD's earlier speculations about "Slothrop slowly
turning into Imipolex G" would have interesting ramifications vis a vis the
"race problems" (75.5) experiments being done on Slothy as part of
"Operation Black Wing". If Slothrop is "becoming" Imipolex G, actually
reifying the cartoon-book Plasticman (in the text/in the world), then might
he be turning this "brilliantly transparent" Schwarz-"colour" as well?

Indeed, I've always thought that, as well as Power's, the name "Tyrone"
might have been taken for its relative popularity as an African-American
boy's name, perhaps a generation or two after Pynchon was growing up but
certainly as he is writing _GR_, which would make the full name itself both
oxymoronic or paradoxical (or *subversive* -- Black "tyrone" Power!) as well
as, at the symbolic level, mutually inclusive of both the Puritan and
African-American American heritage. (As a session muso, it's probably the
only way he'd get in the photo on the back cover of a late 60s/early 70s
Stones clones album, too!)

best