CoL49 (5) Strange words in Jacobean texts [PC 81/82]

[Robin Landseadel]

	Since 1959, we have come to live among flows of data more
	vast than anything the world has seen. Demystification is the
	order of our day, all the cats are jumping out of all the bags and
	even beginning to mingle. We immediately suspect ego
	insecurity in people who may still try to hide behind the jargon
	of a specialty or pretend to some data base forever "beyond"
	the reach of a layman.
	Thomas Pynchon: "Is it O.K. to be a Luddite?"

http://www.themodernword.com/Pynchon/pynchon_essays_luddite.html

Oedipa wakes up after a night full of nightmares and strange dreams to  
see her exhausted face reflected in the mirror of her Berkeley hotel  
room. Her quest for the Trystero leads her to the Lectern Press—"a  
small office building on Shattuck Avenue." The Shattuck Ave. outlet  
did not have "Plays of Ford, Webster, Tourneur and Wharfinger", so  
Oedipa picks up the book from the Lectern Press warehouse in Oakland.  
Sure enough, the copy of this collection of Jacobean plays does not  
have the "Trystero" line, but it does have a Trystero reference. Note  
the footnote—yet another collection of misdirections with a little  
personal fillip thrown in:

	According only to the Quarto edition (1687). The earlier Folio
	has a lead inserted where the closing line should have been.
	D'Amico has suggested that Wharfinger may have made a
	libellous comparison involving someone at court, and that the
	later 'restoration' was actually the work of the printer, Inigo
	Barfstable. The doubtful 'Whitechapel' version (c. 1670) has
	This tryst or odious awry, O Niccolo,' which besides bringing in
	a quite graceless Alexandrine, is difficult to make sense of
	syntactically, unless we accept the rather unorthodox though
	persuasive argument of J.-K. Sale that the line is really a pun on
	 'This trystero dies irae . . . .' This, however, it must be pointed
	out, leaves the line nearly as corrupt as before, owing to no
	clear meaning for the word trystero, unless it be a pseudo-
	Italianate variant on triste (= wretched, depraved). But the
	'White-chapel' edition, besides being a fragment, abounds in
	such corrupt and probably spurious lines, as we have
	mentioned elsewhere, and is hardly to be trusted.
	PC 81/82

". . . the rather unorthodox though persuasive argument of J.-K. Sale  
" is most likely an offhand reference to Kirkpatrick Sale, probably  
the only author to have collaborated with Pynchon:

	Mistral Island Manuscript
	From the University of Texas:
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	Recent acquisition: "The manuscript for an unproduced musical
	called Minstral Island by Pynchon and Kirkpatrick Sale. Early
	notes, outlines, and drafts for the 1958 collaboration between
	Pynchon and Sale which explores the year 1998 when IBM
	dominates the world and artists (including musicians,
	sailmakers, and prostitutes) are pariahs who have yet to be
	assigned roles in the new world order. Pynchon collaborated
	on the manuscript with Sale in 1958, prior to the publication of
	Pynchon’s first novel, V. Kirkpatrick Sale has written extensively
	on the political, economic, sociological, and environmental
	impacts of technology, even going so far as to reconstitute the
	term Luddite to describe a contemporary movement that is
	skeptical of uncontrolled technological advance. Pynchon
	manuscripts are notoriously rare, which makes this unpublished
	gem particularly exceptional."

Speaking of Luddite:

http://www.themodernword.com/Pynchon/pynchon_essays_luddite.html

The scholarly preface to the collection of Jacobean revenge dramas is  
supplied by Emory Bortz [nuck, nuck, nuck . . .], Professor of English  
at U.C. Berkeley as of the time—1957— of the publication of "Plays of  
Ford, Webster, Tourneur and Wharfinger". It takes Oedipa a trip to  
Berkeley's campus to find out that Professor Bortz now teaches at San  
Narciso College. "Of course, Oedipa thought, wry, where else?" 1957  
happens to be the time Oedipa was going to college. There is a mammoth  
gap separating campus life in 1957 from the scene at U.C. Berkeley  
circa 1964, as we are about to witness.