IV: a time and place when one's sex orientation did not need declared

[Robin Landseadel]

On Jan 27, 2010, at 8:41 AM, rich wrote:

> If Inherent Vice is about anything, it's about the time and place  
> where
>> Gravity's Rainbow was written.
> ________
> that may be so and valuable in some way, but if that's the true worth
> of the book then one can't help to feel let down

On one level, I feel your pain. On another, it was easy for me to  
guess that at some point our boy was going to get autobiographical on  
us. Anyway, I don't feel let down. I'm rereading Gravity's Rainbow and  
there's plenty to cross-reference.

> and Robin, man I love ya but u gotta drop you had to be there quip.
> Never felt Pynchon was that sort of insider type of writer, you know.
> we have too many artists nudging and winking to those "in the know"

	. . . Pynchon, concerned with history as he is, often writes about the
	sadness, the tristesse, of the disinherited, the victims in the various
	situations of his fictions–the Ojibwa, the American blacks, etc. In  
The Crying
	of Lot 49, Pynchon writes with a spooky reluctance, as if certain  
things can
	not be spoken of, as if they had no name, as if the naming of  
historical
	names will go on only through cognate and metaphor, corruptions and low
	puns which might contain high magic. Indeed, one character is named  
John
	Nefastis, “nefastus” meaning nefarious, and a cognate, “nefandous”
	meaning not to be spoken of. Of the real historical figures alluded  
to in his
	mock Jacobean revenge drama, The Courier’s Tragedy, Pynchon says, “It  
is
	all a big in-joke. The audience of the time knew.”

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

Hey? Who came up with "Those who know, know" in the first place?

Seriously, I'm reverse-engineering the author's trajectories. L.A. in  
1970 resonated with Goodbye to Berlin /I Am a Camera/Cabaret, notably  
in the sexual particulars. The musical appears in 1966, the movie  
version is awarded Oscars in 1973, the same year Gravity's Rainbow is  
published. All this "divine decadence" was H.I.P.P. for L.A., 1970.

> Weimar Germany was very much the same in terms of loose sex, gender
> bending, political upheaval, etc. Puck would've made a good candidate
> for the SA

Yhep, he sure would. If Puck was in Gravity's Rainbow—and who's to say  
he isn't?— he'd be in the Sturmabteilung alright. Come to think of it,  
Woevre is a similarly nasty bit of work. Yes, this is a persistant  
theme, isn't it? But above and beyond all that, Puck is a bit of a  
dick, isn't he?

	One of the most popular characters in English folklore of the last  
thousand
	years has been the faerie, goblin, devil or imp known by the name of  
Puck
	or Robin Goodfellow.

	The Welsh called him Pwca, which is pronounced the same as his Irish
	incarnation Phouka, Pooka or Puca. These are far from his only names.

	Parallel words exist in many ancient languages - puca in Old  
English,puki
	in Old Norse, puke in Swedish, puge in Danish, puks in Low German,  
pukis
	in Latvia and Lithuania -- mostly with the original meaning of a  
demon, devil
	or evil and malignant spirit ... Because of this similarity it is  
uncertain
	whether the original puca sprang from the imaginative minds of the
	Scandinavians, the Germans or the Irish.

	Indeed, Pouk was a typical medieval term for the devil. For example,
	Langland once called Hell "Pouk's Pinfold." And the Phouka was
	sometimes pictured as a frightening creature with the head of an ass.  
Truly
	a devil to behold. The Welsh Pwca also did not match our modern
	conception of dainty tinkerbell fairies. According to Louise Imogen  
Guiney,
	a peasant drew the Pwca as "a queer little figure, long and  
grotesque, and
	looked something like a chicken half out of his shell".

http://www.boldoutlaw.com/puckrobin/puckages.html

Any of you out there in P-land up for cross-referencing knight errants  
and crossroad figures?

And [once again] Puck's appearance in Midsummer's Night's Dream serves  
to sow the seeds of sexual confusion.