CoL49(6): Humbert Humbert Cats

[Dave Monroe]

SERGE'S SONG

What chance has a lonely surfer boy,
For the love of a surfer chick,
With all these Humbert Humbert cats
Coming on so big and sick?
For me, my baby was a woman,
For him she's just another nymphet;
Why did they run around, why did she put me down,
And get me so upset?
Well, as long as she's gone away-yay,
I've had to find somebody new,
And the older generation
Has taught me what to do--
I had a date last night with an eight-year-old,
And she's a swinger just like me,
So you can find us any night up on the football field,
In back of P.S. 33 (oh, yeah),
And it's as groovy as can be.

   "You're trying to tell me something," said Oedipa.
   "They gave it to her then in prose.  Metzger and Serge's chick had
run off to Nevada, to get married. Serge, on close questioning,
admitted the bit about the eight-year-old was so far only imaginary,
but that he was hanging diligently around playgrounds and should have
some news for them any day." (Lot 49, Ch. 6, p. 147)


"Humbert Humbert cats"

Lolita is narrated by Humbert Humbert, a literary scholar born in 1910
in Paris, who is obsessed with what he refers to as "nymphets"....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolita#Plot_summary

Lolita introduced the word "nymphet" to describe a sexually attractive
girl between the ages of nine and fourteen. In following years,
mainstream usage altered the word's meaning somewhat, broadening its
applicability. Perhaps appropriately, Pynchon provides an early
example of the modern "nymphet" usage entering the literary canon....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crying_of_Lot_49#Vladimir_Nabokov

Humbert Humbert is the protagonist of Nabokov's novel Lolita and hence
the prototype for the oldr man obsessed with very young girls.  The
jury is still out on the question of Pynchon's contact with Nabokov at
Cornell.  For a long time it was asserted that Pynchon took a course
from Nabokov, with the accompanying suggestion that he was somehow
personally known to the great man.  Hollander devotes some space to
dismissing this possibility, having determined that Pynchon was not
actually enrolled in Nabokov's class, which he may simply have audited
([Hollander, p.] 12). [Kerry, Companion, p. 142]

http://www.ugapress.org/0820332070.html
http://books.google.com/books?id=s3atiqlECBIC

Hollander, Charles.  "Pynchon's Politics: The Presence of an Absence."
   Pynchon Notes 26-27 (Spring-Fall 1990): 5-59

http://www.ottosell.de/pynchon/ppolitics.htm

Cf. ...

   "Nefastis had been watching on his TV set a bunch of kids dancing
some kind of a Watusi.  'I like to watch young stuff,' he explained.
'There's something about a little chick that age.'
   "'So does my husband,' she said.  'I understand.'" (Lot 49, Ch. 5, p. 105)

"Would then proceed at a KCUF record hop to look out again across the
gleaming gym floor and there in one of the giant keyholes inscribed
for basketball see, groping her vertical backstroke a little awkward
opposite any boy heels might make her an inch taller than, a Sharon,
Linda or Michele, seventeen and what is known as a hip one, whose
velveted eyes ultimately, statistically would meet Mucho's and
respond, and the thing would develop then groovy as it could when you
found you couldn't get statutory rape out of the back of your
law-abiding head." (Lot 49, Ch. 3, pp. 45-46)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0108&msg=58983

As well as ....

"Three jailbait, all lipstick and shiny-machined breast- and
buttock-surfaces, stood in front of the wheel of Fortune, twitching
and hollow-eyed." (V., p. 143)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0101&msg=52383

Bianca
393; daughter of Greta Erdmann & Miklos Thanatz; "I think Bianca is
[Schlepzig's] child." 395; 457; disappears, 480; mapped on to
Gottfried, 484, 672;"Bianca's a knockout, alright: 11 or 12 [...]"
463; going overboard, 491; "a clever child" 494; body discovered, 531;
mapped on to Ilse, 576-77; "her dead flesh" 576; 672;

http://www.thomaspynchon.com/gravitys-rainbow/alpha/b.html
http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=B

How old IS Bianca?

http://www.thomaspynchon.com/gravitys-rainbow/extra/bianca.html
http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Bianca

Vroom, Jemima ("Jet")
60; Dutch: "vroom" = "pious" or "godly"; 16-year-old daughter of
Cornelius & Johanna; the three daughters are named after Job's three
beautiful daughters in the Bible.

Vroom, Kezia ("Greet")
60; Dutch: "vroom" = "pious" or "godly"; middle daughter of Cornelius
& Johanna; the three daughters are named after Job's three beautiful
daughters in the Bible.

Vroom, Kerrenhappuch ("Els")
60: Dutch: "vroom" = "pious" or "godly"; 12-year-old daughter of
Cornelius & Johanna; the three daughters are named after Job's three
beautiful daughters in the Bible.

http://www.thomaspynchon.com/mason-dixon/alpha/v.html
http://masondixon.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=V

"It is no secret nowadays, particularly to women, that many American
males, even those of middle-aged appearance, wearing suits and holding
down jobs, are, in fact, incredible as it sounds, still small boys
inside.  Flange is this type of character, although when I wrote this
story I thought he was pretty cool.  He wants children--why isn't made
clear--but not at the price of developing any real life shared with an
adult woman.  His solution to this is Nerissa, a woman with the size
and demeanor of a child." (SL, "Intro," p. 10)

>From Jules Siegel, Christine Wexler, et al., Lineland: Mortality and
Mercy on the Internet's
Pynchon-L@[omitted] Discussion List (Philadelphia: Intangible Assets
Manufacturing, 1997), "Part 4: What Did Lolita Say about Humbert?" pp.
69-80

"Bianca, obviously, is based on Chrissie, who matured very late
phyisically.  The first time Tom met her, she still had a thin wire
orthodontic retainer....  her Shirley Temple imitations...." (p. 75)

"... this unbelievably beautiful little blonde girl with huge green
eyes and eyelashes like a moth's wings, a perfect figure like one of
those water nymphs in the Blue Danube sequence of Fantasia, wearing a
skimpy ecru cotton-knit shift and no underwear at all, an over-sized
blue man's fedora and Tom sawyer schoolboy oxfords for girls from the
children's shoe department at Saks Fifth Avenue." (pp. 76-7)

"I think she got into his head and walked around in there and
rearranged the furniture." (p. 77)

Cf. ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9610&msg=7406

>From Jules Siegel, "Who Is Thomas Pynchon ... and Why Is He Taking Off
with My Wife?," Playboy (March 1977), rept. in Siegel et al.,
Lineland, pp. 83-98 ...

"A cute preteen attracted Tom's notice enough for him to mention her
lasciviously."

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9505&msg=1497

"The next year they drifted to Paris, where Fariña fell in love with
Mimi Baez, a lovely piece of
15-year-old jailbait."

"Reportedly a double biography of Fariña and Dylan is in the works
that documents a romance between Pynchon and Fariña's widow."

http://www.salon.com/ent/music/review/1999/10/13/farina/index.html

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0211&msg=72560

What IS with all the nymphets/subdebs and/or Humbert Humbert cats?
Here?  Elsewhere?  Help!  Thanks!