Welsh Main

[Dave Monroe]

"Both Gentlemen note, after a while, that the net
motion of the Company is away from the Street-Doors
and towards the back of the Establishment, where, upon
a length of turf fertiliz'd with the blood and the
droppings of generations of male Poultry, beneath a
bright inverted Cone of Lanthorn-Light striking blue a
great ever-stirring Knot of Smoke, and a Defaulter
merry beyond the limits of cock-fight etiquette
suspended in a basket above the Pit, a Welsh Main is
in progress." (M&D, Ch. 3, p. 24)

"Welsh Main" = Battle Royal

"A certain number of cocks, say sixteen, are pitted
together; the eight victors are then pitted, then the
four, and last of all the two; and the winner is
victor of the battle royal. Metaphorically, the term
is applied to chess, etc."

http://www.bartleby.com/81/17369.html

http://www.bartleby.com/81/1476.html

>From Lisa Picard, Dr. Johnson's London (New York: St.
Martin's, 2001), Ch. 19, "The Middling Rank of Men,"
pp. 199-214 ...

"Hogarth's print The Cockpit (1759) had a political
message (refrring to Pitt's conduct of the war), but
as a straight picture of the scene at a cock-fight it
could not be bettered.  Boswell added a sound track. 
'The uproar, and the noise of betting, is prodigious. 
A great deal of money made a quick circulation from
hand to hand,'  And 'on the least demur to pay a bet
"basket' is vociferated in terrorem', according to the
rules, by which 'Should any man make a wager an lose,
but not pay his dues and make another wager, he shall
be put in a basket and hung up to th eaves of the
main, where all men shall see him, and there shall
remain till the end of the session, when he shall be
cut down and banished from the main'.  In Hogarth's
print the shadow of a man suspended overhead in a
bsket holding out his watch as an offer, falls on to
the ring.  There was no segregation of gentry and
commoners." (p. 208)

www.library.nwu.edu/spec/hogarth/Politics4.html

www.haleysteele.com/hogarth/plates/cockpit.html

Note, of course, in Pynchon's text, the negentropic
"net Motion of the Company ... away from the
Street-Doors and toward the back of the
Establishment"; the classic boxing match scene, "a
bright inverted Cone of Lanthorn-Light striking blue a
great ever-stirring Knot of Smoke" (on boxing, see
Picard, p. 208); but also, that "length of turf
fertiliz'd with the blood and droppings of generations
of male Poultry," cf. ...

"The stink of shit floods his nose, gathering him,
surrounding.  It is the smell of Passchendaele, of the
Salient.  Mixed with the mud, and the putrefaction of
corpses, it was the sovereign smell of their first
meeting, and her emblem." (GR, Pt. 2, p. 235)

And, of course, note as well, afterward ...

"Beyond this, a Visto of gaming tables may be made
out, and further back a rickety Labyrinth of Rooms for
sleeping or debauchery, all receding like headlands
into a mist." (M&D, Ch. 3, p. 24)

A Visto, a Labyrinth ... but "receding like headlands
into a mist"?  Just how extensive is "The Pearl of
Sumatra"?  Nigh unto Vegas here (and on gambling, see
Picard, pp. 206-8; an excellent reference work all
'round here) ...

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