V.V.(9) Chapter Seven, part 1 - Notes, part 1

[Michael Perez]

     153.10  “malocclusion”
“Poor positioning of your teeth.”
from A Dictionary of Dental Terms at
http://www.bracesinfo.com/glossary.html

     154.24  “caries”
“Another name for a cavities (tooth decay)”
from A Dictionary of Dental Terms at
http://www.bracesinfo.com/glossary.html
“a progressive destruction of bone or tooth; especially : tooth
decay”
from Merriam-Webster Online at
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary

     157.16  “Vheissu”
I will be exploring the idea and origins of Vheissu much more in
another post, but the following etymological possibilities are on
Tim Ware’s _GR_ site at:
http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/v/eti.html#vheissu
“From Molly Hite's _Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas
Pynchon_: 
‘If "Vheissu" encodes anything, it is a pun--"Wie heisst du?,"
"What is your name?"--that parodies Stencil's preoccupation with
sub rosa identities.’(p.54) 
‘George Levine cites in addition vécu , "Sartre's term for 'lived
experience," and Richard Leverenz's "V. is you," reinforcing the
suggestion that Vheissu is as overdetermined as V.’ (p.161, fn.7)”
In addition, these messages from the list archives from Bonnie
Surface and Heikki Raudaskoski:
“Date: Wed, 22 Feb 1995 16:23:53 -0500 (EST) 
From: ‘Bonnie Surfus (ENG)’ <surfus@[omitted]> 
To: ‘Michael G. Koopman’ <koopman@[omitted]> 
Subject: Re: ‘Real Subversive Lit.’? 

Just a thought on the subversiveness of _V._:

First, a question.  What is the meaning of Vheissu?

Second, an answer/s.  ‘Vheissu,’ very close to the German ‘Wie
heisse 
du?’ means ‘How are you called?’  In idiomatic German, this is
‘what's 
your name?’  But in idiomatic English, it is ‘HOW are you 
called?’--something like ‘how do I get in touch with you?’ 
OR ‘how can I address you?’

The two meanings could imply very different sentiments: one, a
request to 
know someone's name;  the other, a kind of secret password, a way
to 
evoke the god/gods/goddess.  I favor the ‘goddess’ reading.  And in
both 
forms of the German expression.  For if Vheissu is representative
of the 
development of the bomb, then ‘Vheissu’ could express either a 
question--what do we call this mystery?  OR a prayer to whatever
force 
is behind this discovery.  The Goddess was prominent in her 
manifestations as a destroyer, a destructive force that maintained
an air 
of mystery.  Yes, she animates, but she also destroys.  

In _V._, women are almost always void of their powerful, even
destructive 
sensibilities.  When they do appear as such, it is only in mutilated 
form--Vera, the Bad Priest--and always concurrent with some
predominantly 
patriarchally motivated construct (dominion over the bondels, the
Church, 
cybernetics.)  The destruction of the Goddess has seen/sees to it
that 
women appear as only half as powerful as they might, and thus
mainly as 
vulnerable, vain, domesticated, pathetic, crippled, naive. . . This
other 
half has/is been appropriated in the creation of the bomb--mystery 
explored and exploited, and finally exhausted (later.)

Pynchon's ‘flatness’ could be either representative of the notion of 
mystery exhausted, as later made more explicit in _Vineland_, or it
could 
be that it is not flat at all, merely deplorably accurate, and thus 
problematizing history and narrative all at once.

Bonnie”

“Date: Tue, 2 Jul 1996 14:23:48 +0300 (EET DST) 
From: Heikki Raudaskoski <hraudask@[omitted]> 
To: "Bonnie Surfus (ENG)" <surfus@[omitted]> 
Subject: Re: Strange Journeys 

     [snip]

In addition to these somebody has dropped the French 'vecu',
Sartre's
term for 'lived experience'. Phonetically this limps: 'c' is
pronounced
as 'k', not as 's'.

So perhaps we should quit all this Westernism, and agree that the
word
comes from the Lappish, or better, Sami word 'viessu', 'mountain
hospice'.

     [snip]

In a terrible rush,

Heikki”

     160.22  “Decadents of England and France”
“in literature, name loosely applied to those 19th-century,
fin-de-siècle European authors who sought inspiration, both in
their lives and in their writings, in aestheticism and in all the more
or less morbid and macabre expressions of human emotion. In
reaction to the naturalism of the European realists, the decadents
espoused that art should exist for its own sake, independent of
moral and social concerns. The epithet was first applied in the
1880s to a group of self-conscious and flamboyant French poets,
who in 1886 published the journal Le Décadent. The decadents
venerated Baudelaire and the French , the group with whom they
are often mistakenly identified. In England the decadent movement
was represented in the 1890s by Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Ernest
Dowson, and Aubrey Beardsley and the writers of the Yellow Book.
J. K. Huysmans’s À rebours (1884) and Wilde’s Picture of Dorian
Gray (1891) present vivid fictionalized portraits of the
19th-century decadent—his restlessness, his spiritual confusion,
and his moral inversion.”
from The Columbia Encyclopedia at 
http://bartelby.com/65/de/decadent.html

     160.23  “Generation of ‘98”
“Spanish literary and cultural movement in the first two decades of
the 20th cent. It was so named by Azorín (see Martínez Ruiz, José)
in 1913 to designate a group of young writers who, in the face of
defeat (1898) in the Spanish-American War, proclaimed a moral
and cultural rebirth for Spain. Azorín’s original list included Valle
Inclán, Unamuno, Benavente y Martínez, Baroja y Nessi, Ramiro
de Maeztu, Darío, and Azorín himself. It has since been emended
to include Ganivet and Antonio Machado, as well as Ortega y
Gasset, Pérez de Ayala, and Marañón. Darío is more often
considered as the founder of modernismo. The group was
concerned with defining the essential quality of Spain, studying its
history and culture. In the austere life of Castile many of them
discovered the key to the essence of Hispanicism. While they
attacked aestheticism and the current adulation of the Austrian
satiric poet Karl Krause, they also represented cosmopolitan
trends, including political liberalism. They greatly influenced the
work of later Spanish writers.”
from The Columbia Encyclopedia at 
http://www.bartleby.com/65/ge/Generati.html

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