V-2nd - 2: Names

[Mark Kohut]

Short post on names....maybe we look at the (rest of) the whole sick crews' 
names below as comic ways of characterizing types
in such a group......

We have Charisma---and we remember backwards what TRP wrote of charisma in 
GR--'disease"....
And Winsome a childlike innocence that might become the eternal adolescent?...
and Fu....which occurred to me might be P's way of naming him "Fuck You"...that 
type in a group with lotsa
anti-whatever attitude...and, as I've just learned via Google Wikipedia 
search....it is also AN ANCIENT CHINESE VESSEL!...
with all allusions to the Golden Fang either real or AKUTELY KUTE...........



----- Original Message ----
From: "kelber at mindspring.com" <kelber at mindspring.com>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Thu, July 1, 2010 3:24:37 PM
Subject: V-2nd - 2: Names

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.