More Von Braun

[Mark Kohut]

Foax:
   
  I am doing a crawling-thru the text of Pynchon's works...."annotating" the earlier ones as carefully as AtD is being annotated...as Shakespeare, Austen, Sherlock Holmes, even The Cat in the Hat is---[check out; fascinating].....
   
  I am doing it on the pynchon wiki.
   
  If you want to see---FEEL!----some of the incredible genius of OBA from the beginning, look up some simple words, as you ask yourself why OBA chose some of the words he did.---Google is an amazing tool for this, of course.
   
  All of which is prolegomena to something I just found....surely not known by many of us and not me, fer sure----re "watercress'...........one of the three common salad vegetable items that TRP mentions early in V re Da Conho of the 'yibble, yibble' machine gun (pages 23/16, V.)
   
  The watercress capital of the US was Huntsville, Alabama until it became known as Rocket City WITH THE ARRIVAL OF WERNER VON BRAUN!  
  "The city's transformation began with the arrival of Wernher von Braun, Hitler's chief missile designer, whose V-2 rocket terrorized London and other British cities. An SS major who headed rocket research at the Peenemunde complex, where slave laborers were starved, beaten, and worked to death, von Braun could have ended up in the docket at Nuremberg like other leading Nazis. But at war's end, the Pentagon was anxious to plumb German scientific know-how in order to improve America's weaponry. Under the top-secret Operation Paperclip, the Army smuggled von Braun and his team of 118 Peenemunde scientists out of Germany and brought them to the United States. After first going to a military base near El Paso, they were taken to Huntsville in 1950 and put to work at Redstone Arsenal."
   
  I did not know this (although many of you who know more about Von Braun might have)....but TRP chose 'watercress' in 1961 to characterize a salad 'camouflage' of a machine gun!......
   
  Foax---I hope some others would join me in this project, I can only do 5 to ten entries every few days.......it is a communal effort...like this p-list......with incredible discoveries and connections to yet make.   Join up....
   
  Best,
  MK

       
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