MDDM Ch. 11 Some notes

[jbor]

105.15  "The Merchant of Purposeful Explosion" (i.e. LeSpark, which is the
pun in his name I think) ribs Wicks about the insincerity of his remark
about "Celestial ... Trade", and makes a disparaging comment about Roman
Catholic hypocrisy in the process:

    "Your Halo blinds me, Sir. Aye, most Italian,-- Joy of it, I'm sure."

Mercantile imagery proliferates: Wicks's snide comment about how Maskelyne
was "doing his bit for global Trade" (105.11), and the "global/Celestial"
quip right after; the rainwater "bartering its way out to sea" (107.24); the
land precariously intact through mysterious "Payments credited against the
Deluge" (107-8); the way the islanders promenade, glum, as if on the deck of
an "East Indiaman" (108-9); the harlots who are "shuttles upon the loom of
Trade" (109.10). 

Later, expostulating for Florinda's benefit the difference between innocence
and guilt in terms of their respective effect on a man's sexual arousal at
the moment of death, Mason makes reference to "the noted highwayman Fepp ...
being mov'd by the Mathematicks of his wealth, or rather lack of it."
(111-12)

110.13 "In lower-situated imitations of the Hellfire Club, he [Mason]
hurtl'd carelessly along some of Lust's less-frequented footpaths, ever
further, he did not escape noting, from pleasure ... "

Hellfire Club: A notorious 18th C. coterie founded about 1755 by Sir Francis
Dashwood, afterwards Baron Le Despencer (1708-81). Its thirteen members
conducted their profanities and revelries at Medmenham Abbey,
Buckinghamshire, which formed part of the Dashwood property. Among the
'Monks of Medmenham' were John Wilkes, Paul Whitehead, the satirist, who was
secretary and steward, Charles Churchill and the Earl of Sandwich. The motto
of the fraternity was: "Fay ce que voudras" ("Do as thou shalt wish").

We have a Hellfire Club here, a leather and S&M-night once a week in one of
our city nightclub drug-dens.

110.19 "the Fabulators of Grub Street"

Grub Street: The former name of a London Street in the ward of Cripplegate
... the name came to refer generally to the world of literary hacks and
impoverished authors. In his Dictionary of the English Language (1755),
Samuel Johnson says it was "much inhabited by  writers of small histories,
dictionaries, and temporary poems; whence any mean production is called
'grub street'."

A reflexive nod on Pynchon's part perhaps?

113-14 "Bubb Dodington"

DODINGTON, George Bubb, 1st Baron of Melcombe (1691-1762), a "person of
importance in his day", was born plain Bubb in 1691, the son of an Irish
fortune-hunter or apothecary, and took the name of Dodington in 1720 on
inheriting a fine property from his uncle.  Resolved to "make some figure in
the world", he had got into Parliament in 1715, and from 1722 to 1754 sat
for Bridgewater. Otherwise, he was always changing his place, from Walpole's
service to the Prince of Wales's, from his to Argyll's, then back to the
Prince's, and so on, his one good action that he spoke up for Byng [i.e.
John Byng, English admiral, 1704-57, accused, tried, acquitted and
eventually put to death for "cowardice" and dereliction of duty for fleeing
from battle with a French fleet which was attacking the English garrison at
Minorca.] Dodington was sometimes in office but oftener out of it.  He had
not long reached the goal of his ambition, a peerage, when he died at
Hammersmith. A self-styled Maecenas, he passed for something of a wit and
poet.

114.3 "the ancient Fitch of legend"

Perhaps FITCH, Ralph (d. 1606) English merchant, in 1583-91 traveled by way
of the Euphrates to and from India, Burma, and Siam. The founders of the
East India Company sought his advice on Indian affairs.

114.11 "There's one, says Pearse, as he fell in the well"

?

115 "You must have been one of the Zanies?"

Zany: The buffoon who mimicked the clown in Commedia dell'Arte, hence, a
simpleton, or one who acts the goat. The name comes from Italian *zanni*,
buffoon, a familiar form of Giovanni (John). Horace Walpole famously
described James Bosell's *Tour of the Hebrides* (1785), chronicling the
journey that he undertook with Dr Johnson, as "the story of a mountebank and
his zany" (letter to Hon. Henry Conway, 6 October 1785.)

best