MJJG: intertextual link-o-mania - 115 al fine

Wed Jan 13 21:19:04 UTC 2021

Note 10
Nigerian shiva dance

(— autocorrect needs corrected - )

Should be “Nigerian shika dance”

________________________________
From: Raphael Saltwood <PlainMrBotanyB at outlook.com>
Sent: Wednesday, January 13, 2021 4:13 PM
To: pynchon-l
Subject: MJJG: intertextual link-o-mania - 115 al fine

Probably have missed some, but...

1) pg 115 _Bronze Casting in Benin_
No author given, not finding this exact title as of yet

But the Benin bronzes are pretty cool!

https://www.montrealmetalart.com/en/blog/the-benin-bronzes-are-glorious

Oh dear: from the page -
“The Benin Bronze’s [sic] are Glorious”

2) pg 115, rejection letter on “suicide” Abdul Hamid’s desk for a manuscript of _The Book of Tot_

  *    now, this isn’t the book of Jes Grew, right?

3) pg 116 rejecting editor advised Hamid to write more like Claude McKay’s _If We Must Die_

{ Digression
It’s a sonnet:

If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

McKay - IWW member who leaned towards Communism for awhile but away from it by the 30s. He was from Jamaica, wrote some of his work in patois, and several novels in English about walking on the wild side in Harlem.
Then he converted to Catholicism!

For the editor to tell Abdul Hamid to write like Claude McKay is hilarious, given the differences.
Also, a traditional sonnet on the lines of “Invictus” isn’t exactly characteristic of McKay either, and contrasts humorously with the attempted slang used to describe it. }

3) pg 116 a handbill for the play “Harlem” by Wallace Thurman.

4) pg 118, Langston Hughes: “We liked people of any race who smoked incessantly, drank liberally, wore complexion and morality with loose garments, made fun of those who didn’t do likewise .... After fish we went to two or three in the morning and drank until five.”

This is from a brief & funny story about color distinctions within “races”:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/genius.com/amp/Langston-hughes-whos-passing-for-who-annotated

5) pg 120 “The Benign Monster” - Hinckle von Vampton’s fictitious magazine

6) pg 124 PaPa LaBas’s book _Blue Back: a Speller_ “required reading at Mumbo Jumbo Kathedral”

— could be a reference to Reed’s earlier book _Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down_

7) pg 125, Mary Lou Williams’ “Roman Catholic Jazz Mass”
https://urbanfaith.com/2020/06/mary-lous-sacred-jazz.html/

8) pg 135 - _Moby-Dick_
(Musclewhite horrified that a black person dared to interpret it)

9) pg 136 - Musclewhite misquotes Goethe: “Helen goes the way of Euphoria”
Thor Wintergreen corrects him: “Euphorion.”

10) pg 136 “The shimmy, that descendant of the Nigerian shiva dance, is outlawed....Doctors in Yakima Washington announce that “the source of man’s wickedness is a ‘torrid zone’ in the brain, an inch and a half thick from the ears up.”

Footnoted to _This Fabulous Century 1929-1930 volume 3, Time-Life Books

11) pg 136, “Jazz did a number of things to popular music as well as to metropolitan life. It sped up the tempo of things. Whether it was a cause, or the effect of a still more general cause, is here beside the point. Once the new musical spirit had come, it rapidly spread into daily - and nightly! - activities. It was not long before the old type of musical comedy began to appear outmoded. ‘Pep’ was heard in the land. Once we had ‘ragged’ words; now we ‘jazzed up’ everything.” Isidore Witmark and Isaac Goldberg, _From Ragtime to Swingtime_

12) pg 137 - Nathan Brown and his poetry collection, _Dark Crepuscule_  appear to be inventions of Reed.

13) pg 140 “But the woman he really loved
Was a voodoo queen” (lyric from “Stackalee” )

14) pg 162 _The Forest Within_ by PaPa LaBas

15) pg 162, James Weldon Johnson’s articles on Haiti (and the US occupation) for “The Nation”

16) pg 170, the picture on the Aunt Jemima pancake box (stretching “intertextual” to include this)

17) pg 177, songs by Fats Waller
Soothing’ Syrup Stomp
Stomping’ the Bug
Hog Maw Stomp
The Rusty Pail
Abercrombie Had a Zombie

18) pg 178, bio of Harding by “William Eastbrook” detailing allegations of Harding’s black ancestry

  *    the actual biographer “William *Estabrook* Chancellor” did oppo research on Harding, denied authorship of pamphlets but lost his professorship at Wooster College over them

19) pg 178, _Warren Harding, President of the United States_

  *    there’s an asterisk but no corresponding footnote at chapter’s end afaict

20) pg 179, Mark Sullivan - big name in journalism circa 1900-1930 - (description of Harry Daugherty, Harding’s Atty Gen’l & Wallflower Order handler.)

21) pg 180 _The Five Black Presidents_ JA Rogers

22) pg 180 _The Harding Era_ Robert K Murray

23) pg 181 _Our Times, vol 6, The Twenties_ Mark Sullivan - details of Harding’s last days

24) pg 188 “After the stock market crash, some
New York editors suggested hearings be held; what had caused the Depression? They were held in Washington. In retrospect, they make the finest comic reading. The leading industrialists and bankers testified. They hadn’t the foggiest notion what had gone bad. (My italics. I.R.)”
Carey McWilliams, from _Hard Times_ (1970) by Studs Terkel

25) pg 194, fictional character Hubert “Safecracker” Gould’s poem, “Harlem Tom-Toms”
Something of a lampoon of Vachel Lindsay but with interesting details of its own

26) pg 197 _The Golden Bough_, Sir James Frazier

27) pg 199 “The First Poets”
Humorous sidelong ref to “the Last Poets”?

28) pg 200 - The Book of Thoth “the first anthology written by the first choreographer”

29) pg 200 “the Egyptians had little trouble being good.” Unnamed historian

30) pg 204, “a contemporary writer”
(When Proteus, king of Tiryns, closed a Dionysian temple) “They rushed out of doors and in frenzied dance raged over the countryside, singing weird songs, tearing their garments, unable to stop dancing.”

31) pg 204, Hippocrates, “If they imitate a goat, or grind their teeth, or their right side be convulsed, they say that the mother of gods is the cause, but if they speak in a sharper and more intense tone, they resemble this state to a horse and say Poseidon [Neptune] is the cause.”

32) pg 204 (the satirist) Lucian made fun of Osiris and Isis in
_Dialogues of the Gods_

33) pg 205 The Daily Heliopolitan
Purported ancient “yellow journalism” paper

34) pg 205 Julian the Apostate Emperor
“...Yet Jesus, who won over the least worthy of you, has been known by name for but little more than three hundred years: and during his lifetime he accomplished nothing worth hearing of, unless anyone thinks that to heal crooked and blind men and to exorcise those who were possessed by evil demons in the villages of Bethsaida and Bethany can be classed as a mighty achievement.”

35) pg 206, John Milton the poet on Christ chasing away those old deities:
“The brutish gods of Nile as fast,
Isis and Horus and the dog Anubis hast

Nor is Osiris seen
In Memphis grove, or Green
Trampling th’ unshowr’d
Grass with lowing loud:
Nor can he be at rest
Within his sacred chest
  Naught but profoundest
Hell can be his shroud;
In vain with timbrel’d anthems dark
The sable-stoled sorcerers bear his worship’d ark.”

36) Bilious Styronicus
“The Confessions of the Black Bull God Osiris”

Fictional writer ancient Egyptian Pulitzer winner;
Sounds a lot like William Styron _Confessions of Nat Turner_

37) pg 210 Manetho 3rd century BC Egyptian historian who said Moses converted to Osirianism...
Sourced in footnote to Madame Blavatsky, _Isis Unveiled_

38) pg 213 & forward, the Book of Thoth

39) pg 220 Fats Waller
“Formerly the right hand was given all the work and the left hand shifted for itself, thumping out a plain octave or common chord foundation; now it’s more evenly divided and the left hand has to know its stuff.”

40) pg 221, HP Blavatsky, “The fraternity of Free Masons was founded in Egypt, and Moses communicated the secret teaching to Israelites, Jesus to the Apostles and thence it found its way to the Knights Templar.”

41) pg 225 Pennethorn Hughes, _Witchcraft_ (1965)
“Studies of the magic and ritual of Africa... have established with some certainty that all systems for the disturbance of consciousness practiced by the African Negro are derived from ancient Egypt.”

42) pg 225 “Is such an etymology to be trusted? One of the fragments of myth still to be found in Haiti makes Guede the first dead man to be saved by Legba, who called his soul up from beneath the waters. If the baton wielded today by the Guedes is the counterpart of Osiris’s severed penis, which fathered Horus upon Isis, the matter may have something in it...” _The Invisibles: Voodoo Gods in Haiti_, Francis Huxley

43) pg 225 - footnote for speculation on Moses’s later life
_Introduction to African Civilizations_, John G Jackson, with introduction by John Henrik Clarke

44) Details of propagation of lore through the ages:
Footnotes
 _Book of Moses: 8, 9 and 10th, Henri Gamache

And
_Concise History of Freemasonry_, Calvin I Kephardt

45) pg 228  “Morals and Dogma”
Tract by 19th century Freemason & bigot Albert Pike