V-2nd - 2: Names

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Stencil:  well, we all know what a stencil is, though here's the definition, anyway:

 an impervious material (as a sheet of paper, thin wax, or woven fabric) perforated with lettering or a design through which a substance (as ink, paint, or metallic powder) is forced onto a surface to be printed.  So how does this relate to our Stencil?  Any thoughts?

Margrave Chiave Lowenstein:  A Margravine is the wife of a Margrave - an obscure, minor European title.  Pynchon playfully reduces her name to Marg.  Chiave is Italian for key (a fairly pithy word in this context).  Lowenstein is one of those old European noble-names.  In the nobility registry

http://www.nobilityregister.com/sovereign.html

there are two current noble Lowensteins listed: the Princes zu, respectively, Lowenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg and Lowenstein-Wertheim-Rosenberg.  This register, by the way, is a hot-bed of character names for any budding Pynchon copy-cats.  My favorite:  Prince Hubertus Fugger von Babenhausen.

Slab:  like Shale?  A big, heavy lug?

Raoul, Melvin, Fergus Mixolydian (Irish Armenian Jew, Armenian mix?), Charisma, Winsome and Fu:  Pynchon's kind of all over the place with these names.  A seemingly haphazard collection of names he found comical or that had some other personal meaning for him?

Paola: A fairly common name, but also a town in southern Malta.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paola,_Malta

McClintic Sphere:  refer to the Pynchon-wiki for this chapter to see more discussion of this musician and his possible analogs, including Bird and Thelonius Sphere Monk.