col49 2 pt2

[Dave Monroe]

Yet again from J. Kerry Grant, A Companion to The
Crying of Lot 49 (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1994),
albeit on Sick Dick and The Volkswagens rather than
The Paranoids.  Pop music, then ...

"H23.3, B12.3  "I Want to Kiss Your Feet"  The song
that Mucho is whistling contains in its title an
allusion to the legend of Saint Narcissus, third
century bishop of Jerusalem.  Oedipa will learn during
the performance of The Courier's Tragedy of the death
of the good Duke of Faggio as a result of his practice
of kissing the feet of a picture of the saint
(H65.21n).  This is one of the many embedded pointers
to the novel's preoccupation with the concept of
narcissism." (p. 27)

Esp. given Richard M. Zhlubb's "Managerial Volkswagen"
in Gravity's Rainbow, Sick Dick and the Volkswagens
seems, beyond it pop music cognates--Nashville
(?!--talk about yr "Shores of Bohemia") surf group
Ronnie and the Daytonas of "Little GTO" fame being the
glaringly obvious one that JKG doesn't list (Grant, p.
28)--seems an obvious RMN ref. here.  And Dick Nixon's
more a California beach boy ...

http://ci.yorba-linda.ca.us/detail.asp?img=tour/nixon2.jpg&Caption=2

'Course, "IWTKYR" evokes all those British Beat bands
Grant does list (along with automotivated doo-wop
groups), but ... but Grant also notes that one Alfred
Mac Adam "connects 'Sick Dick' with Richard
Wharfinger, author of The Courier's Tragedy, that
'ill, ill Jacobean revenge play' (H63.21)."  See ...

Mac Adam, Alfred.  "Pynchon as Satirist: To Write,
   to Mean."  Yale Review 67, No. 4 (1978): 555-66.

Still gotta account fer them Volkwagens, but ... but
the more connections the better, in my (not to mention
Pynchon's) book ...

--- cj hurtt <cj6 at casco.net> wrote:
> 
> Since hitting SN, the only music Oed has heard has
> been by The Paranoids


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