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Errata

2013-10-21T03:07:07Z

Dezama125: arithmetic error (no evident reason for its being intentional)

The following list provides '''errata''' for ''[[The Crying of Lot 49]],'' indicating places where readers have found misspellings, punctuation gaffes or other similar errors. Please note that some of these "mistakes" may be deliberate stylistic choices on the author's part. Unless otherwise noted, the list of errors refers to the 183-page edition of the novel (the first edition from Lippincott, the hardcover edition from Buccaneer Books, and the Harper Perennial paperbacks from 1986/1990). The errors also recur in the reset 152-page paperback edition from Harper Perennial (1999, reissued in 2006 with a new cover), but with the exception of “do think?” for “do you think?” and “Normany” for “Normandy,” the errors were removed from the Bantam paperback reprints.

Copyright page of the 1999/2006 edition, line 2: "1965" (should be "1966")

Page 8 of 1999/2006 ed., line 2: "surburban" (should be "suburban")

Page 87 line 16-17 (page 69, line 19 of 1999/2006 ed.) "do think?" (should be "do you think?")

Page 89 line 24 (page 71, line 18 of 1999/2006 ed.) "to see it he'd known" (should be "to see if he'd known")

Page 98 line 14 (approx page 79 of 1999/2006) "an 800-year tradition of postal fraud" From 1290 to 1966 is 676 years, so Cohen's rounded figure should be "700-year."

Page 103 line 11 (page 82, line 25 of 1999/2006 ed.) "Odeipa" (should be "Oedipa")

Page 114, line 33 (page 93, line 1 of 1999/2006 ed.) "Normany" (should be "Normandy")

Page 155, line 9 "notice" (should be "Notice")

Page 151 of 1999/2006 ed., line 3: "the only was" (should be "the only way")

Finally, it should be noted that there are several textual differences between the American editions and the English Picador/Vintage paperback, and that several additional errors have been introduced in the English paperback edition.

Chapter 2

2013-01-05T21:08:33Z

Dezama125:

{{CL49 PbP Text}}

a: 23, b: 13 - '''Sick Dick and the Volkswagens''' 
Fictional, but a 1970s New York City punk band adopted the name. [http://black2com.blogspot.com/2006/03/black-to-comm-back-issue-update-hey-ya.html] "I Want to Kiss Your Feet" no doubt an allusion to the 1963 Beatles hit, "I Want to Hold Your Hand." The 1960s Volkswagens were referred to as "Beetles" because they were similar in shape to the insect. (Get it?) Might this mean that Pynchon was fond of the Beatles but "did not believe in" them? Also, Pynchon explores the foot fetish in greater depth in [http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=F#footfetish ''Against the Day''] ...

a: 24, b: 14 - '''printed circuit''' 
Many people have undoubtedly seen civilization from a plane or high place and been reminded of a circuit board, but this description is probably one of, if not the first time it's been set down in American fiction.

a: 25, b: 14 - '''believe in his job''' 
Echoes the "believe in" language from two pages back. Pynchon is drawing a metaphor between "believing in" a band and "believing in" a job. 

:"Believing in" here seems to mean something like identifying with; being one with (sorta); not being alienated from. Which seems thematic to the mystery within the story.
:also see [[Voices,_Voices|'''Voices, Voices''']]

a: 25, b: 14 - '''religious instant''' 
May be a stretch, but Pynchon's works seem to have many such "religious instants," in which a character experiences a flood of ideas and emotions in just a few moments. [[Talk:Chapter_2|Further discussion]]

a: 25, b: 15 - '''giants of the aerospace industry''' 
Pynchon worked as a technical writer at Boeing from 1960-62.

a: 26, b: 15 - '''horse''' 
Heroin.

a: 26, b: 17 - '''the Paranoids''' 
Some fan has made a mock-up of what a CD by The Paranoids might look like, [http://www.entropic-empire.com/cds/paranoids.html here].

The Paranoids are a pastische of various Rock & Roll bands struggling in L.A. in the wake of the success of the Beatles.

see [[The_Paranoids|'''The Paranoids]]

b: 18 - '''kasher''' 
Generally refers to a process that renders a utensil fit for use ("kosher") by removing material that has been absorbed in it. However, it can also be used (as Metzger does) in reference to the process by which meat is made kosher, which involves soaking the meat in water, salting it, and then rinsing it. This process pulls the excess blood out of the meat and makes it kosher for eating.

a: 30, b: 19 - '''Gallipoli''' 
The Battle of Gallipoli took place at Gallipoli from April 1915 to December 1915 during the First World War. A joint British and French operation was mounted in an effort to eventually capture the Ottoman capital of Constantinople (Istanbul). The attempt failed, with heavy casualties on both sides. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Gallipoli Wikipedia]

b: 19 - '''Hun''' 
Slang/nickname for Germans. Refers to a speech made by Emperor Wilhelm II in July 1900, wherein he urged his troops to emulate the brutal and merciless conduct of the Huns under Attila.

b: 20 - '''Fangoso''' 
Spanish: muddy.

a: 31, b: 20 - '''hierophany''' 
Physical manifestation of the holy or sacred. This manifestation can be in many forms, often in symbols or rituals. An example of a hierophany would be an apparition or image appearing on a window bearing resemblance to the virgin Mary.

a: 31, b: 20 - '''Book of the Dead''' 
ancient Egyptian funerary text used by the ancient Egyptians as a set of instructions for the afterlife. Not all the spells were used for every burial; some depended on wealth and status. Some spells were gifts to the gods, while other were used so the person could walk, a spell for not dying again in the afterlife, and even a spell 'For preventing a man from going upside down and from eating feces' [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_the_Dead Wikipedia]

Also a reference to the [http://near-death.com/experiences/buddhism01.html '''''Bardo Thodol'''''], or [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bardo_Thodol '''''Tibetan Book of the Dead'''''], a text [http://www.randychase.com/leary_1.htm '''Timothy Leary''']:

::I was tremendously influenced by Thomas Pynchon whose book, "Gravity’s Rainbow," I think, is the Bible of the information and communication age. Naturally, it’s underestimated and ignored, because it’s so powerful, and because he won’t play the game. . . .
found invaluable in exploring the [http://tinyurl.com/337xqe '''''The Psychedelic Experience''''']. In turn, this rediscovered material from the [http://www.lib.virginia.edu/small/exhibits/dead/otherworld.html '''''Tibetan Book of the Dead'''''] influenced the [http://www.egodeath.com/johnlennonhelp.htm '''Beatles'''] on their first track recorded for the LP [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolver_(album) '''Revolver'''], [http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=Tomorrow%20Never%20Knows '''Tomorrow Never Knows.]

<div id="single_up_all_lines">a: 31, b: 20 - '''singling up all lines</div>
Pynchon was in the Navy for a spell and "single up all lines" is a common nautical term. Ships are docked with lines doubled -- that is, with two sets of ropes or chains holding the vessel to the dock. To "single up all lines" is to remove the redundant second lines in preparation to make way.

Pynchon uses this term in almost all his novels, notably as the first sentence of [http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ ''Against the Day.''] For more, see [http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_1-25#Page_3 ATD, page 3].

b: 21 - '''Jerry''' 
A nickname for German soldiers that was popular among the British.

a: 33, b: 21 - '''a cash nexus''' 
a phrase of Karl Marx that refers to the way interpersonal relations in a
(Capitalist) society are 'reduced' to economic relationships.

a: 33, b: 22 - '''Manny di Presso''' 
Manic depression?

a: 36, b: 24 - '''Botticelli''' 
Botticelli is a guessing game which requires the players to have a good knowledge of biographical details of famous people. The game has several variants, but the common theme is that one person or team thinks of a famous person, reveals their initial letter, and then answers yes/no questions to allow other players to guess the identity. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botticelli_%28game%29 Wikipedia]

b: 26 - '''Lord love a duck''' 
An inoffensive expression of surprise of British origin. Another example of Miles' affectation of British mannerisms.

b: 26 - '''seraglio''' 
Harem.

{{CL49 PbP}}

Chapter 1

2013-01-05T20:58:24Z

Dezama125:

{{CL49 PbP Text}}

Title Page: '''The Crying of Lot 49''' 
In property auctions, numbered "lots" of property or tangible objects are "cried" by an auctioneer.
*There's a line in ''Ulysses'' that bears an odd coincidence to the title: "The lacquey by the door of Dillon's auctionrooms shook his handbell twice again and viewed himself in the chalked mirror of the cabinet. Dilly Dedalus, loitering by the curbstone, heard the beats of the bell, the cries of the auctioneer within. Four and nine. Those lovely curtains." (Ulysses, 304) Given that ''Gravity's Rainbow'', written at the same time as CoL49, contains numerous Joyce references (mainly in the character of Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck), it's possible that this is a nod.

*For a discussion of some other things the title may or may not allude to, see the article [[7 x 7|'''''7 x 7''''']].

a: 9, b: 1 - '''Oedipa''' 
Oedipus was the mythical king of Thebes who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oedipus Wikipedia] Oedipus the King, aka Oedipus Rex, is a Greek tragedy written by Sophocles and first performed in 428 BC. Many critics, including Aristotle, consider it the greatest tragedy ever written. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oedipus_the_King Wikipedia]

*Whether Oedipa has anything to do with Oedipus is an open question. Some critics find zero connection and note that the name indicates that names are only words, and not necessarily full of meaning (mysteries without answers being a theme in CoL49). Others have teased various interpretations from Sophocles' play to connect its protagonist to Pynchon's. So far, no single explanation is remotely concrete or thoroughly convincing. [[User:Bleakhaus|Bleakhaus]]

*''See also'' Emma Miller, "The Naming of Oedipa Maas: Feminizing the Divine Pursuit of Knowledge in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49" ([https://www.pynchon.net/owap/article/view/12/67 Link])

*A number of fragments further discussing Oedipa's name are in the [[Talk:Chapter_1|Discussion page]].

a: 9, b: 1 - '''Maas''' 
For more discussion of the name, see below.

a: 9, b: 1 - '''kirsch''' 
a clear cherry brandy from Germany. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirsch Wikipedia]
*many references to Germany, German words or German history run through Chapter 1, and indeed the entire novel. Pynchon scholar David Cowart posits that "Pynchon seems to have had a German period, a post-German period, and a neo-Continental or global period. During his German phase he produced his first three novels... His next work, the long-awaited ''Vineland'', represents a new phase in which the almost obsessive attention to German more seems to have faded." ''Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History'' (2012), at p. 59.

a: 9, b: 1 - '''Pierce Inverarity''' 
Inverarity is a village in Scotland.
*The name sounds a bit like a portmanteau of "inverse polarity" (electronic terminology appears in Pynchon's short stories and later in CoL49).
*Perhaps worth noting that when Pynchon & Company (an actual East Coast Brokerage house owned in part by Pynchon's relations) fell apart in 1931, E.A. Pierce (a larger financial institution) picked up that company's holdings. See [http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F50910FE3E5F11738DDDAC0A94DC405B818FF1D3 New York Times April 25, 1931].

a: 9, b: 1 - '''California real estate mogul''' 
Many of the terms and concepts in ''The Crying of Lot 49'' are derived from laws concerning property and investment.
*The ancestors of Thomas Ruggles Pynchon [apparentlty the fifth Pynchon to be so named] had much involvement in real estate and property laws. See "the Petition of the Springfield Aquaduct" ([http://books.google.com/books?id=asAOAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA51&dq=Stearns+pynchon+springfield&as_brr=1#PPP1,M1 Link]), pages 44 - 53. Also see "Popular Law Library" [http://tinyurl.com/2gb8aa at page 95].

a: 10, b: 1 - '''Mazatlán''' 
City in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, located on the Pacific coast of Mexico, east from the southernmost tip of the Baja California peninsula.
*Perhaps worth mentioning that a large wave of German immigrants arrived in the mid 1800s, developing Mazatlán into a thriving commercial seaport. Additionally, Mazatlán played a role in the California gold rush, with people traveling by boat from Mazatlán to San Francisco.
*Pynchon apparently lived in Mexico off and on in the 1960s and 70s.

a: 10, b: 1 - '''Cornell University''' 
Pynchon attended Cornell, where he studied engineering physics, but left after two years to serve in the U.S. Navy. In 1957, Pynchon returned with a focus in English, a BA he received in 1959. "The Small Rain", Pynchon's first published story, was printed in the ''Cornell Writer'' in May, 1959.

a: 10, b: 1 - '''Bartók Concerto for Orchestra''' 
Five-movement musical work finished in 1943 by Hungarian composer Béla Bartók (1881 - 1945), after his native exile to the United States in response to the rise of the Nazi party. Bartók is one of a number of references to the theme of "exile" in this first chapter.

*The critic Charles Hollander suggests that the fourth movement is neither "dry" nor "disconsolate," and that Pynchon deliberately reversed the facts to bring attention to Bartók's status as a political exile. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concerto_for_Orchestra_(Bart%C3%B3k)#Fourth_movement Wikipedia: Bartok Concerto] [http://www.vheissu.info/art/art_eng_49_hollander.htm Hollander Essay]
*"Dry and disconsolate" are not facts but opinions, although the consensus opinion might be "facts". Pynchon may have described the movement as it sounded to him (or his character).
*For more, see the [[Talk:Chapter_1|Discussion page]].

a: 10, b: 1 - '''Jay Gould''' 
(1836 – 1892) Infamous American financier (known as the "Mephistopheles of Wall Street"), who became a leading American railroad builder and speculator in the mid 19th century. In 1869, the Fisk-Gould Scandal (also known as Black Friday) spread financial panic as a result of Gould and fellow financier James Fisk's efforts to corner the gold market. Further political scandals and unfair dealings have cemented his reputation (both throughout his life and during the century after his death) as one of the most unethical of the 19th century American robber barons. It is worth note that the bust of Jay Gould is the "only ikon in the house" of Pierce Inverarity, and that Oedipa expressed the fear that it (on a shelf over the bed) would "someday topple on them". [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Gould Wikipedia: Gould] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_%281869%29 Wikipedia: Black Friday]

<div id="warpe">a: 10, b: 2 - '''Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek and McMingus'''</div>
Law firm representing Pierce Inverarity.

*"Warpe," possible reference to the municipality of Warpe located in the district of Nienburg, in Lower Saxony, Germany (Germany and Nazism being referenced thoroughly in Chapter 1). --[[User:Dezama125|Dezama125]] ([[User talk:Dezama125|talk]]) 10:39, 1 January 2013 (PST) Please see my addition to ''Kubitschek'' below. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warpe Wikipedia]

*"Kubitschek" is possibly drawn from Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira (1902 - 1976), a Brazilian social reformer and 24th President of Brazil (1956 - 1961) who went into a self-imposed exile after a military coup d'état, which had later been claimed to have been taking as a preemptive measure to deter an "inevitable communist revolution" (the coup having been tacitly (and directly) assisted and supported by the United States government and the CIA). Further possible references to "exile" as well as United States foreign policy. --[[User:Dezama125|Dezama125]] ([[User talk:Dezama125|talk]]) 10:39, 1 January 2013 (PST)Also, in some pictures, Kubitschek bears a strong resemblance to Bela Lugosi, so the first two dialects Pierce does in his phone call, Transylvanian and Negro, relate to the last two names of the partners of the lawfirm representing him. The phone call may have started from the comic idea of pretending to be calling from the office of the lawfirm: "I'll pretend to be Kubitschek, then McMingus will get on the phone." Of course, this exemplifies Pierce's ''warped'' sense of humor (which Oedipa shares---see her comment immediately preceding the reference to the lawfirm, "You're so sick, Oedipa.") ''Wistful'' well describes her mood during the day after receiving the letter. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juscelino_Kubitschek Wikipedia: Kubitschek][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_1964_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat Wikipedia: 1964 Brazilian Coup]

*"McMingus" is a probable nod toward Jazz legend Charles Mingus (1922 - 1979). Pynchon is a lifelong Jazz fan, and references Jazz in most (all?) of his works. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Mingus Wikipedia]

*Pynchon's penchant for absurd, punning law firm names is continued in [http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=S#salitieri ''Gravity's Rainbow''] with Salitieri, Poore, Nash, De Brutus and Short.

a: 10, b: 2 - '''Metzger''' 
Co-executor of Inverarity's will and signatory of the letter Oedipa receives in Chapter 1. Metzger is German for "butcher".
*Could also be a reference to Wolfgang Metzger (1899 - 1979), a German psychologist who served as one of the main representatives of Gestalt psychology, a theory that proposes that the operational principle of the brain is holistic, parallel, and analog, with self-organizing tendencies; or, that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This concept will recur later in the chapter, under the term "Triptych". Additionally, the introduction of Dr Hilarius, a German psychologist, will strengthen this association. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Metzger Wikipedia: Metzger][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology Wikipedia: Gestalt].

*[http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metzgerpost Metzgerpost] ("butcher post") was an early type of mail service in the western regions of the Holy Roman Empire, superseded by the Thurn und Taxis-dominated imperial system. 

*Compare '''Meztger''' to [http://www.csp.org/chrestomathy/unfolding_self.html '''Ralph Metzner'''], co-author with [http://www.timothyleary.us/ '''Timothy Leary'''] and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ram_Dass '''Richard Alpert'''], also known as [http://www.ramdass.org/ '''Ram Dass'''], of [http://tinyurl.com/337xqe '''The Psychedelic Experience''']. 

a: 10, b: 2 - '''Kinneret-Among-The-Pines''' 
Fictional California town that Oedipa Maas resides in.
*Yam Kinneret (Sea of Kinnereth) is the modern Hebrew name for the Sea of Galilee, Israel's largest freshwater lake. Upon the shores of Galilee, much of the ministry of Christ was said to have occurred, among which include His Sermon on the Mount, as well as the miracles of His walking on water, calming a storm, and feeding the multitude with five loaves of bread and two fish. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_of_Galilee Wikipedia]. During the years Pynchon was working on 'The Crying of Lot 49, College buddy [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Fariña '''Richard Farina'''] lived in [http://ci.carmel.ca.us/ '''Carmel by the Sea''']. However, the clue that Mucho Maas worked “further along the Peninsula” points more to the regions near Palo Alto & Stanford, such as San Mateo.

a: 10, b: 2 - '''settecento''' 
Italian: seven hundred. It is the standard Italian term for the 18th century (the 1700s). It is used in English mostly to refer to art-historical and architectural movements and styles of that period. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settecento Wikipedia]

a: 10, b: 2 - '''variorum''' 
A work containing all known varients of a text whereby all variations and emendations are set side-by-side to track textual decisions. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variorum Wikipedia]

a: 10, b: 2 - '''Vivaldi Kazoo Concerto''' 
Kazoos are mentioned many time in Pynchon's novels. ''Gravity's Rainbow'' similarly references "Haydn's "Kazoo" Quartet in G-Flat Minor, Op. 76". [http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Pages_706-717 GR, 711].

a: 10, b: 2 - '''Boyd Beaver''' 
A typical Pynchonesque name that appears just this once.
*The name bears a resemblance to Zoyd Wheeler, the protagonist of ''Vineland'', though he played the keyboard.

a: 11, b: 2 - '''Wendell ("Mucho") Maas''' 
"Mucho más" is common Spanish phrase, meaning "much more." Mucho Maas reappears in [http://vineland.pynchonwiki.com/wiki ''Vineland''].

:''Maas'' is also Dutch for ''mesh'' and ''loophole'' (in the architectural and the figurative sense as well), which may be related to the book's treatement of webs or networks.

:The near-likeness "mass" becomes an important word/concept in ''Gravity's Rainbow'' and, especially, ''Against The Day'', although the associative meanings do not seem to mesh! [[User:MKOHUT|MKOHUT]] 13:42, 11 July 2007 (PDT)

a: 11, b: 2 - '''Pachuco dialect''' 
Pachucos were Mexican American youth who developed their own subculture during the 1930s and 1940s in the Southwestern United States. They wore distinctive clothes (such as Zoot Suits) and spoke their own dialect (Caló). [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachuco Wikipedia] Zoot suits appear a few times in [http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ ''Gravity's Rainbow''].

a: 11, b: 2 - '''chingas and maricones''' 
Spanish slang words. "Chingas" is a conjugation of the word "chingar" (slang for "to fuck"), translating "chingas" as "[you] fuck" (or, better, just a plural of "chinga"). "Maricones" refers to the term "maricón" (based on the word "marica" or "male homosexual") which is equivalent to the English insult "faggot".

a: 11, b: 3 - '''Lamont Cranston''' 
[[image:The-Shadow_1939.jpg|right|thumb|150px|The Shadow comic]]One identity adopted by The Shadow, a character of pulp fiction, radio shows, and comic books. Cranston was a wealthy young man about town. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow Wikipedia]

a: 11, b: 3 - '''Commissioner Weston... Professor Quackenbush''' 
Police Commissioner Weston was the Shadow's friend and running mate. There is a Professor Quackenbush in two Three Stooges shorts "Half-Wits Holiday" and "Pies and Guys", as well as a Dr. Hackenbush in the Marx Bros. film, ''A Day at the Races''.

a: 13 b: 4 -'''I don't believe in any of it, Oed''' 
The short form of Oedipa "Oed" means "boring" in German.

a: 13, b: 4 - '''Mucho shaved his ... throw them further off''' 
All of the references in this section refer to the stereotypical (often Italian) used car salesman with greased back hair, a very short mustache, and huge lapels on his suit.

[[Image:jacklemmon.jpg|120px|thumb|left|Jack Lemmon and his hair in the 60s]]a: 13, b: 4 - '''used only water, combing it like Jack Lemmon''' 
American comedic actor (1925-2001).

a: 13, b: 4 - '''creampuff''' 
A very well maintained used car. 

a: 16, b: 7 - '''Dr. Hilarius, her shrink or psychotherapist''' 
[[Image:Hilarius.jpg|right|thumb|St. Hilarius|150px]]Pope Saint Hilarius was Pope of the Roman Catholic Church from 461 to 468. He was canonized as a saint after his death. As archdeacon under Pope Leo I, he fought vigorously for the rights of the Roman See and vigorously opposed the condemnation of Flavian of Constantinople at the Second Council of Ephesus in 449 to settle the question of Eutyches. According to a letter to the Empress Pulcheria, collected among the letter of Leo I, Hilarus apologizes for not delivering to her the pope's letter after the synod.

Shrink is a shortened form of headshrinker, which is '50s slang. The OED cites 'shrink' in this text of 1966, as the first recorded written use of it as a slang term. Which must be why Pynchon defined it in the text.

a: 17, b: 8 - '''LSD-25, mescaline, psilocybin''' 
These hallucinogenic drugs are also mentioned in ''Gravity's Rainbow'', while LSD gets a special mention as an agent of spiritual awareness in ''Vineland''. See notes for [http://cl49.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Chapter_6 '''She Loves You''] on page a: 143, b: 117 of CoL49 wiki, where Mucho Maas is expressing ideas about psychedelics concordant with the writings of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldous_Huxley '''Aldous Huxley'''.] Peyote's magical potential is rendered on pages 392-394 of Against the Day, in wholy favorable terms, with the connection of divinatory powers and envisioning agents such as [http://www.britannica.com/eb/topic-405965/Native-American-Church '''Hikuli'''] displayed in a very favorable light.

It remains an open question as to whether and to what extent Pynchon took or was influenced by them. ''See also'' "Smoking Dope with Thomas Pynchon: A Sixties Memoir" ([http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Smoking_Dope_with_Thomas_Pynchon link]).

a: 18, b:8 - '''lapses from orthodoxy''' 
Orthodox Freudian psychotherapy involved the therapist literally trying not to impose himself at all on the patient. That's why the therapist is often shown sitting behind the patient. The goal is to be a blank canvas and have the patient paint his problems on the therapist, thereby bringing them into consciousness.

[[Image:rorschach1.jpg|150px|thumb|right|The first of the ten cards in the Rorschach inkblot test]]
a: 18, b: 8 - '''Rorschach blot''' 
The Rorschach inkblot test is a method of psychological evaluation. Psychologists use this test to try to examine the personality characteristics and emotional functioning of their patients. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rorschach_inkblot_test Wikipedia]

[[Image:rorschachcomic1.png|thumb|150px|right|Rorschach, a comic book character in ''Watchmen'']]
a: 18, b: 8 - '''a face is symmetrical like a Rorschach blot''' 
In the graphic novel, ''Watchmen'', written by Alan Moore, there is a character named Rorschach who wears a mask with a Rorscach blot on the front. Moore is a self-professed Pynchon fan: he referenced ''V.'' in ''V for Vendetta'' and has mentioned ''Gravity's Rainbow'' in interviews. It is possible, not to say probable, that Moore was inspired by this line.

a: 18, b: 8 - '''TAT picture''' 
The TAT is popularly known as the picture interpretation technique because it uses a standard series of 31 provocative yet ambiguous pictures about which the subject must tell a story. It was developed by American psychologists in the 1930s. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thematic_Apperception_Test Wikipedia]

a: 18, b: 9 - '''Fu-Manchu''' 
Dr. Fu Manchu is a fictional character, an evil genius of Chinese origin, who first featured in a series of novels by Birmingham author Sax Rohmer during the first half of the 20th century. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu_Manchu Wikipedia]

a: 18, b: 9 - '''Perry Mason''' 
a fictional defense attorney who originally appeared in detective fiction by Erle Stanley Gardner. Mason was portrayed by Raymond Burr in a television series which ran on CBS from 1957 to 1966. The typical plot involves Perry Mason unmasking the actual murderer in a final dramatic courtroom showdown. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Mason Wikipedia]

a: 19, b: 9 - '''''The Profession v. Perry Mason...''''' 
Roseman may be trying to undermine Perry Mason by arguing that the dramatic courtroom twists in the TV show are actually uncommon in the American legal system.

[[Image:remediosvaro.jpg|thumb|175px|''Bornando el manto terrestre'', 1961|left]]
a: 21, b: 11 - '''Bornando el Manto Terrestre''' 
Remedios Varo (1908 - 1963) was a surrealist painter. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remedios_Varo Wikipedia]

Bill Brown [http://www.notbored.org/crying.html notes] that "Pynchon saw Bordando el Manto Terrestre when, as part of the first full retrospective of the painter's work, it was displayed at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City in 1964, a year after her death at the age of 55. Painted in 1961, el Manto (oil on masonite, roughly 40 by 48 inches) is the central panel in an autobiographical triptych. It is possible that Pynchon, writing ''Lot 49'' in 1965, recalled the painting from memory or incomplete notes, and not with a reproduction of it set in front of him. He gets ''a lot'' wrong." --[[User:Dezama125|Dezama125]] ([[User talk:Dezama125|talk]]) 12:45, 1 January 2013 (PST)Brown is quoting Janet A. Kaplan, author of ''Remedios Varo: Unexpected Journeys'' about when Pynchon probably saw the painting. I mention that because Brown's article gets most of what he claims Pynchon got wrong wrong. (I have added italics to "a lot" here per Brown's original, so that the reader may get some sense of his wit.) I will adopt the numbering of his points in my response to them.

1. First, Brown makes the mistake of forgetting point of view, which is Oedipa's throughout. However you read what's going on in the painting, whether Oedipa gets it right is far less important than what it means to her. The Rapunzel/captive maiden trope, it is clear, preceded seeing the painting for Oedipa. She makes a connection between that idea about herself and the painting---she can't be ''wrong'' to do so. So Brown's statement that "nothing [in the painting] suggest that the girls . . . are prisoners" is hardly to the point. Having proved that "Pynchon" got it wrong, he then proceeds to adopt the idea (from Varo, by way of Kaplan) that one of the girls---though supposedly not a prisoner---"escapes." . . . Next, while Brown is right that the tower in the painting is not circular (this may be one of the few things he gets entirely right), it is not definitely octagonal. The floor pattern suggests that there are eight sides, but the fact that there are six women embroidering, and that the small tower in the foreground, which seems to be a miniature twin of the main tower, looks hexagonal, at least raise the possibility that it is six-sided. (Note also that the roofs of all the buildings in the painting follow perspectival convention and show half their sides, four-sided roofs showing two, six-sided three, and so on.) Finally, of the two embroiderers' faces visible, Brown says that they are "clearly ''smiling''." I leave it to the reader to decide if that is right---to me one of them has a very slight smile, and one looks merely neutral, as if concentrating on her work.

2. I don't see what's wrong with the term "slit windows." It's not patent that someone in the room couldn't see out of them if the fabric of the mantle of the earth wasn't also being fed out of them. You couldn't see much, true, because they are ''slits'', but does that mean they aren't ''windows''? If Kaplan is referring to the slits, as Brown suggests, when she mentions "battlements," I think ''that'' is a misleading term, but I'm not sure whether the error is hers or Brown's. (Battlements are those notches in top of a medieval castle towers, whose function was to allow people to look out (!) from behind a protecting wall as well as to be able to shoot arrows at an enemy surrounding the castle.) Brown does notice the echo of the shape of the alcove in the background with that of the imaginary window that allows us to see inside the tower. Though his point that the window is "dream-like" rather than simply a visual convention may seem strained applied to the painting, the sense of receding, echoing frames is alluded to later in the book, when Oedipa meets Genghis Cohen (p. a94), and in the ''book'' it does acquire a dreamlike quality. I'm afraid, however, that much of his discussion of the windows seems as though Brown is trying to score points against Pynchon.

3. Brown doesn't see the fabric spilling out of the slits as " 'filling' ''any'' void, nor does it manage to 'contain' the whole world." Again, his reading of the image is tendentious. The black clouds that form the background of the painting surely could represent "the void"; and the fact that the embroidered fabric falls away from the tower into a spherical shape suggest that the world is being pictured. Anyway, the title refers to the "earth's mantle" (''el manto terrestre'')---what is the mistake in assuming that the earth is the world? (Brown's citing the other meaning of ''bordando''---''circumnavigating'' as well as ''embroidering''---while worth pondering, seems to be a non sequitur.) His reading of the bodies of water as filling gaps in the embroidery done by the young women is not the only way to view the image: If they are embroidering all of the features that elaborate the plain stuff of the mantle (buildings, people, trees, etc.), the bodies of water could just as well be their work. If the young woman on the left can plot her escape by embroidering an image of herself reunited with her lover, then one has to consider whether it is merely a message she is sending to him or whether she is ''creating the world'' in which she will rejoin him, as is seen in the next panel of the triptych. (Note that the houses and trees embroidered by the young woman on the right emerge from the slit as "mere embroidery" on fabric, but that as the material flows down, they become ''real'' houses and trees.)

4. Brown is correct that Pynchon doesn't mention the other two figures in the painting, the central figure who holds a book and stirs the vessel from which flows the thread that the young women use to embroider, and the small figure playing a wind instrument in an alcove in the background. (By the way, Brown is wrong that the instrument may be a recorder. It could either be a shawm or a cornett, the first, a medieval ancestor of the oboe, the second, a kind of trumpet made of wood covered with leather.) Clearly, the other figures aren't mentioned because Oedipa identifies with the embroiderers. The text doesn't mention the ship sailing on a body of water in the distance or any number of other details; it doesn't describe the other panels of the triptych. I hope not to belabor the point, but again, what's most important to the reader is what's most important to Oedipa. Brown could be right that there is some reason why the spooky central figure isn't mentioned, but that can never be anything more than speculative. It is true that Pynchon's writing invites this kind of speculation, and naturally, as a student of Derrida, Brown is going to look for what's left out as much what's there.

All in all, however, Brown's conclusion seems both hyperbolic and wrongheaded: "''None'' of this [the detail of the painting] is adequately captured, [and] indeed, most of it [is] changed to ''the opposite'' of what it had previously been, by Pynchon's recollection." My sense of what Derrida says is that the author's intentionality has little to do with the text; in all fairness, that ought to restrain any attempt to deride the putative inadequacy of the text's representation of the painting, even if it was as inaccurate as Brown claims.

[[image:bubble-shades.jpg|thumb|Bubble Shades|120px|right]]
a:21, b:11 - '''she wore dark green bubble shades''' 
This is the sixties, after all...

{{CL49 PbP}}

Chapter 1

2013-01-04T07:02:02Z

Dezama125:

{{CL49 PbP Text}}

Title Page: '''The Crying of Lot 49''' 
In property auctions, numbered "lots" of property or tangible objects are "cried" by an auctioneer.
*There's a line in ''Ulysses'' that bears an odd coincidence to the title: "The lacquey by the door of Dillon's auctionrooms shook his handbell twice again and viewed himself in the chalked mirror of the cabinet. Dilly Dedalus, loitering by the curbstone, heard the beats of the bell, the cries of the auctioneer within. Four and nine. Those lovely curtains." (Ulysses, 304) Given that ''Gravity's Rainbow'', written at the same time as CoL49, contains numerous Joyce references (mainly in the character of Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck), it's possible that this is a nod.

*For a discussion of some other things the title may or may not allude to, see the article [[7 x 7|'''''7 x 7''''']].

a: 9, b: 1 - '''Oedipa''' 
Oedipus was the mythical king of Thebes who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oedipus Wikipedia] Oedipus the King, aka Oedipus Rex, is a Greek tragedy written by Sophocles and first performed in 428 BC. Many critics, including Aristotle, consider it the greatest tragedy ever written. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oedipus_the_King Wikipedia]

*Whether Oedipa has anything to do with Oedipus is an open question. Some critics find zero connection and note that the name indicates that names are only words, and not necessarily full of meaning (mysteries without answers being a theme in CoL49). Others have teased various interpretations from Sophocles' play to connect its protagonist to Pynchon's. So far, no single explanation is remotely concrete or thoroughly convincing. [[User:Bleakhaus|Bleakhaus]]

*''See also'' Emma Miller, "The Naming of Oedipa Maas: Feminizing the Divine Pursuit of Knowledge in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49" ([https://www.pynchon.net/owap/article/view/12/67 Link])

*A number of fragments further discussing Oedipa's name are in the [[Talk:Chapter_1|Discussion page]].

a: 9, b: 1 - '''Maas''' 
For more discussion of the name, see below.

a: 9, b: 1 - '''kirsch''' 
a clear cherry brandy from Germany. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirsch Wikipedia]
*many references to Germany, German words or German history run through Chapter 1, and indeed the entire novel. Pynchon scholar David Cowart posits that "Pynchon seems to have had a German period, a post-German period, and a neo-Continental or global period. During his German phase he produced his first three novels... His next work, the long-awaited ''Vineland'', represents a new phase in which the almost obsessive attention to German more seems to have faded." ''Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History'' (2012), at p. 59.

a: 9, b: 1 - '''Pierce Inverarity''' 
Inverarity is a village in Scotland.
*The name sounds a bit like a portmanteau of "inverse polarity" (electronic terminology appears in Pynchon's short stories and later in CoL49).
*Perhaps worth noting that when Pynchon & Company (an actual East Coast Brokerage house owned in part by Pynchon's relations) fell apart in 1931, E.A. Pierce (a larger financial institution) picked up that company's holdings. See [http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F50910FE3E5F11738DDDAC0A94DC405B818FF1D3 New York Times April 25, 1931].

a: 9, b: 1 - '''California real estate mogul''' 
Many of the terms and concepts in ''The Crying of Lot 49'' are derived from laws concerning property and investment.
*The ancestors of Thomas Ruggles Pynchon [apparentlty the fifth Pynchon to be so named] had much involvement in real estate and property laws. See "the Petition of the Springfield Aquaduct" ([http://books.google.com/books?id=asAOAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA51&dq=Stearns+pynchon+springfield&as_brr=1#PPP1,M1 Link]), pages 44 - 53. Also see "Popular Law Library" [http://tinyurl.com/2gb8aa at page 95].

a: 10, b: 1 - '''Mazatlán''' 
City in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, located on the Pacific coast of Mexico, east from the southernmost tip of the Baja California peninsula.
*Perhaps worth mentioning that a large wave of German immigrants arrived in the mid 1800s, developing Mazatlán into a thriving commercial seaport. Additionally, Mazatlán played a role in the California gold rush, with people traveling by boat from Mazatlán to San Francisco.
*Pynchon apparently lived in Mexico off and on in the 1960s and 70s.

a: 10, b: 1 - '''Cornell University''' 
Pynchon attended Cornell, where he studied engineering physics, but left after two years to serve in the U.S. Navy. In 1957, Pynchon returned with a focus in English, a BA he received in 1959. "The Small Rain", Pynchon's first published story, was printed in the ''Cornell Writer'' in May, 1959.

a: 10, b: 1 - '''Bartók Concerto for Orchestra''' 
Five-movement musical work finished in 1943 by Hungarian composer Béla Bartók (1881 - 1945), after his native exile to the United States in response to the rise of the Nazi party. Bartók is one of a number of references to the theme of "exile" in this first chapter.

*The critic Charles Hollander suggests that the fourth movement is neither "dry" nor "disconsolate," and that Pynchon deliberately reversed the facts to bring attention to Bartók's status as a political exile. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concerto_for_Orchestra_(Bart%C3%B3k)#Fourth_movement Wikipedia: Bartok Concerto] [http://www.vheissu.info/art/art_eng_49_hollander.htm Hollander Essay]
*"Dry and disconsolate" are not facts but opinions, although the consensus opinion might be "facts". Pynchon may have described the movement as it sounded to him (or his character).
*For more, see the [[Talk:Chapter_1|Discussion page]].

a: 10, b: 1 - '''Jay Gould''' 
(1836 – 1892) Infamous American financier (known as the "Mephistopheles of Wall Street"), who became a leading American railroad builder and speculator in the mid 19th century. In 1869, the Fisk-Gould Scandal (also known as Black Friday) spread financial panic as a result of Gould and fellow financier James Fisk's efforts to corner the gold market. Further political scandals and unfair dealings have cemented his reputation (both throughout his life and during the century after his death) as one of the most unethical of the 19th century American robber barons. It is worth note that the bust of Jay Gould is the "only ikon in the house" of Pierce Inverarity, and that Oedipa expressed the fear that it (on a shelf over the bed) would "someday topple on them". [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Gould Wikipedia: Gould] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_%281869%29 Wikipedia: Black Friday]

<div id="warpe">a: 10, b: 2 - '''Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek and McMingus'''</div>
Law firm representing Pierce Inverarity.

*"Warpe," possible reference to the municipality of Warpe located in the district of Nienburg, in Lower Saxony, Germany (Germany and Nazism being referenced thoroughly in Chapter 1). --[[User:Dezama125|Dezama125]] ([[User talk:Dezama125|talk]]) 10:39, 1 January 2013 (PST) Please see my addition to ''Kubitschek'' below. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warpe Wikipedia]

*"Kubitschek" is possibly drawn from Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira (1902 - 1976), a Brazilian social reformer and 24th President of Brazil (1956 - 1961) who went into a self-imposed exile after a military coup d'état, which had later been claimed to have been taking as a preemptive measure to deter an "inevitable communist revolution" (the coup having been tacitly (and directly) assisted and supported by the United States government and the CIA). Further possible references to "exile" as well as United States foreign policy. --[[User:Dezama125|Dezama125]] ([[User talk:Dezama125|talk]]) 10:39, 1 January 2013 (PST)Also, in some pictures, Kubitschek bears a strong resemblance to Bela Lugosi, so the first two dialects Pierce does in his phone call, Transylvanian and Negro, relate to the last two names of the partners of the lawfirm representing him. The phone call may have started from the comic idea of pretending to be calling from the office of the lawfirm: "I'll pretend to be Kubitschek, then McMingus will get on the phone." Of course, this exemplifies Pierce's ''warped'' sense of humor (which Oedipa shares---see her comment immediately preceding the reference to the lawfirm, "You're so sick, Oedipa.") ''Wistful'' well describes her mood during the day after receiving the letter. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juscelino_Kubitschek Wikipedia: Kubitschek][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_1964_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat Wikipedia: 1964 Brazilian Coup]

*"McMingus" is a probable nod toward Jazz legend Charles Mingus (1922 - 1979). Pynchon is a lifelong Jazz fan, and references Jazz in most (all?) of his works. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Mingus Wikipedia]

*Pynchon's penchant for absurd, punning law firm names is continued in [http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=S#salitieri ''Gravity's Rainbow''] with Salitieri, Poore, Nash, De Brutus and Short.

a: 10, b: 2 - '''Metzger''' 
Co-executor of Inverarity's will and signatory of the letter Oedipa receives in Chapter 1. Metzger is German for "butcher".
*Could also be a reference to Wolfgang Metzger (1899 - 1979), a German psychologist who served as one of the main representatives of Gestalt psychology, a theory that proposes that the operational principle of the brain is holistic, parallel, and analog, with self-organizing tendencies; or, that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This concept will recur later in the chapter, under the term "Triptych". Additionally, the introduction of Dr Hilarius, a German psychologist, will strengthen this association. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Metzger Wikipedia: Metzger][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology Wikipedia: Gestalt].

*[http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metzgerpost Metzgerpost] ("butcher post") was an early type of mail service in the western regions of the Holy Roman Empire, superseded by the Thurn und Taxis-dominated imperial system. 

*Compare '''Meztger''' to [http://www.csp.org/chrestomathy/unfolding_self.html '''Ralph Metzner'''], co-author with [http://www.timothyleary.us/ '''Timothy Leary'''] and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ram_Dass '''Richard Alpert'''], also known as [http://www.ramdass.org/ '''Ram Dass'''], of [http://tinyurl.com/337xqe '''The Psychedelic Experience''']. 

a: 10, b: 2 - '''Kinneret-Among-The-Pines''' 
Fictional California town that Oedipa Maas resides in.
*Yam Kinneret (Sea of Kinnereth) is the modern Hebrew name for the Sea of Galilee, Israel's largest freshwater lake. Upon the shores of Galilee, much of the ministry of Christ was said to have occurred, among which include His Sermon on the Mount, as well as the miracles of His walking on water, calming a storm, and feeding the multitude with five loaves of bread and two fish. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_of_Galilee Wikipedia]. During the years Pynchon was working on 'The Crying of Lot 49, College buddy [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Fariña '''Richard Farina'''] lived in [http://ci.carmel.ca.us/ '''Carmel by the Sea''']. However, the clue that Mucho Maas worked “further along the Peninsula” points more to the regions near Palo Alto & Stanford, such as San Mateo.

a: 10, b: 2 - '''settecento''' 
Italian: seven hundred. It is the standard Italian term for the 18th century (the 1700s). It is used in English mostly to refer to art-historical and architectural movements and styles of that period. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settecento Wikipedia]

a: 10, b: 2 - '''variorum''' 
A work containing all known varients of a text whereby all variations and emendations are set side-by-side to track textual decisions. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variorum Wikipedia]

a: 10, b: 2 - '''Vivaldi Kazoo Concerto''' 
Kazoos are mentioned many time in Pynchon's novels. ''Gravity's Rainbow'' similarly references "Haydn's "Kazoo" Quartet in G-Flat Minor, Op. 76". [http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Pages_706-717 GR, 711].

a: 10, b: 2 - '''Boyd Beaver''' 
A typical Pynchonesque name that appears just this once.
*The name bears a resemblance to Zoyd Wheeler, the protagonist of ''Vineland'', though he played the keyboard.

a: 11, b: 2 - '''Wendell ("Mucho") Maas''' 
"Mucho más" is common Spanish phrase, meaning "much more." Mucho Maas reappears in [http://vineland.pynchonwiki.com/wiki ''Vineland''].

:''Maas'' is also Dutch for ''mesh'' and ''loophole'' (in the architectural and the figurative sense as well), which may be related to the book's treatement of webs or networks.

:The near-likeness "mass" becomes an important word/concept in ''Gravity's Rainbow'' and, especially, ''Against The Day'', although the associative meanings do not seem to mesh! [[User:MKOHUT|MKOHUT]] 13:42, 11 July 2007 (PDT)

a: 11, b: 2 - '''Pachuco dialect''' 
Pachucos were Mexican American youth who developed their own subculture during the 1930s and 1940s in the Southwestern United States. They wore distinctive clothes (such as Zoot Suits) and spoke their own dialect (Caló). [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachuco Wikipedia] Zoot suits appear a few times in [http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ ''Gravity's Rainbow''].

a: 11, b: 2 - '''chingas and maricones''' 
Spanish slang words. "Chingas" is a conjugation of the word "chingar" (slang for "to fuck"), translating "chingas" as "[you] fuck" (or, better, just a plural of "chinga"). "Maricones" refers to the term "maricón" (based on the word "marica" or "male homosexual") which is equivalent to the English insult "faggot".

a: 11, b: 3 - '''Lamont Cranston''' 
[[image:The-Shadow_1939.jpg|right|thumb|150px|The Shadow comic]]One identity adopted by The Shadow, a character of pulp fiction, radio shows, and comic books. Cranston was a wealthy young man about town. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow Wikipedia]

a: 11, b: 3 - '''Commissioner Weston... Professor Quackenbush''' 
Police Commissioner Weston was the Shadow's friend and running mate. There is a Professor Quackenbush in two Three Stooges shorts "Half-Wits Holiday" and "Pies and Guys", as well as a Dr. Hackenbush in the Marx Bros. film, ''A Day at the Races''.

a: 13 b: 4 -'''I don't believe in any of it, Oed''' 
The short form of Oedipa "Oed" means "boring" in German.

a: 13, b: 4 - '''Mucho shaved his ... throw them further off''' 
All of the references in this section refer to the stereotypical (often Italian) used car salesman with greased back hair, a very short mustache, and huge lapels on his suit.

[[Image:jacklemmon.jpg|120px|thumb|left|Jack Lemmon and his hair in the 60s]]a: 13, b: 4 - '''used only water, combing it like Jack Lemmon''' 
American comedic actor (1925-2001).

a: 13, b: 4 - '''creampuff''' 
A very well maintained used car. 

a: 16, b: 7 - '''Dr. Hilarius, her shrink or psychotherapist''' 
[[Image:Hilarius.jpg|right|thumb|St. Hilarius|150px]]Pope Saint Hilarius was Pope of the Roman Catholic Church from 461 to 468. He was canonized as a saint after his death. As archdeacon under Pope Leo I, he fought vigorously for the rights of the Roman See and vigorously opposed the condemnation of Flavian of Constantinople at the Second Council of Ephesus in 449 to settle the question of Eutyches. According to a letter to the Empress Pulcheria, collected among the letter of Leo I, Hilarus apologizes for not delivering to her the pope's letter after the synod.

Shrink is a shortened form of headshrinker, which is '50s slang. The OED cites 'shrink' in this text of 1966, as the first recorded written use of it as a slang term. Which must be why Pynchon defined it in the text.

a: 17, b: 8 - '''LSD-25, mescaline, psilocybin''' 
These hallucinogenic drugs are also mentioned in ''Gravity's Rainbow'', while LSD gets a special mention as an agent of spiritual awareness in ''Vineland''. See notes for [http://cl49.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Chapter_6 '''She Loves You''] on page a: 143, b: 117 of CoL49 wiki, where Mucho Maas is expressing ideas about psychedelics concordant with the writings of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldous_Huxley '''Aldous Huxley'''.] Peyote's magical potential is rendered on pages 392-394 of Against the Day, in wholy favorable terms, with the connection of divinatory powers and envisioning agents such as [http://www.britannica.com/eb/topic-405965/Native-American-Church '''Hikuli'''] displayed in a very favorable light.

It remains an open question as to whether and to what extent Pynchon took or was influenced by them. ''See also'' "Smoking Dope with Thomas Pynchon: A Sixties Memoir" ([http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Smoking_Dope_with_Thomas_Pynchon link]).

a: 18, b:8 - '''lapses from orthodoxy''' 
Orthodox Freudian psychotherapy involved the therapist literally trying not to impose himself at all on the patient. That's why the therapist is often shown sitting behind the patient. The goal is to be a blank canvas and have the patient paint his problems on the therapist, thereby bringing them into consciousness.

[[Image:rorschach1.jpg|150px|thumb|right|The first of the ten cards in the Rorschach inkblot test]]
a: 18, b: 8 - '''Rorschach blot''' 
The Rorschach inkblot test is a method of psychological evaluation. Psychologists use this test to try to examine the personality characteristics and emotional functioning of their patients. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rorschach_inkblot_test Wikipedia]

[[Image:rorschachcomic1.png|thumb|150px|right|Rorschach, a comic book character in ''Watchmen'']]
a: 18, b: 8 - '''a face is symmetrical like a Rorschach blot''' 
In the graphic novel, ''Watchmen'', written by Alan Moore, there is a character named Rorschach who wears a mask with a Rorscach blot on the front. Moore is a self-professed Pynchon fan: he referenced ''V.'' in ''V for Vendetta'' and has mentioned ''Gravity's Rainbow'' in interviews. It is possible, not to say probable, that Moore was inspired by this line.

a: 18, b: 8 - '''TAT picture''' 
The TAT is popularly known as the picture interpretation technique because it uses a standard series of 31 provocative yet ambiguous pictures about which the subject must tell a story. It was developed by American psychologists in the 1930s. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thematic_Apperception_Test Wikipedia]

a: 18, b: 9 - '''Fu-Manchu''' 
Dr. Fu Manchu is a fictional character, an evil genius of Chinese origin, who first featured in a series of novels by Birmingham author Sax Rohmer during the first half of the 20th century. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu_Manchu Wikipedia]

a: 18, b: 9 - '''Perry Mason''' 
a fictional defense attorney who originally appeared in detective fiction by Erle Stanley Gardner. Mason was portrayed by Raymond Burr in a television series which ran on CBS from 1957 to 1966. The typical plot involves Perry Mason unmasking the actual murderer in a final dramatic courtroom showdown. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Mason Wikipedia]

a: 19, b: 9 - '''''The Profession v. Perry Mason...''''' 
Roseman may be trying to undermine Perry Mason by arguing that the dramatic courtroom twists in the TV show are actually uncommon in the American legal system.

[[Image:remediosvaro.jpg|thumb|175px|''Bornando el manto terrestre'', 1961|left]]
a: 21, b: 11 - '''Bornando el Manto Terrestre''' 
Remedios Varo (1908 - 1963) was a surrealist painter. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remedios_Varo Wikipedia]

Bill Brown [http://www.notbored.org/crying.html notes] that "Pynchon saw Bordando el Manto Terrestre when, as part of the first full retrospective of the painter's work, it was displayed at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City in 1964, a year after her death at the age of 55. Painted in 1961, el Manto (oil on masonite, roughly 40 by 48 inches) is the central panel in an autobiographical triptych. It is possible that Pynchon, writing ''Lot 49'' in 1965, recalled the painting from memory or incomplete notes, and not with a reproduction of it set in front of him. He gets ''a lot'' wrong." --[[User:Dezama125|Dezama125]] ([[User talk:Dezama125|talk]]) 12:45, 1 January 2013 (PST)Brown is quoting Janet A. Kaplan, author of ''Remedios Varo: Unexpected Journeys'' about when Pynchon probably saw the painting. I mention that because Brown's article gets most of what he claims Pynchon got wrong wrong. (I have added italics to "a lot" here per Brown's original, so that the reader may get some sense of his wit.) I will adopt the numbering of his points in my response to them.

1. First, Brown makes the mistake of forgetting point of view, which is Oedipa's throughout. However you read what's going on in the painting, whether Oedipa gets it right is far less important than what it means to her. The Rapunzel/captive maiden trope, it is clear, preceded seeing the painting for Oedipa. She makes a connection between that idea about herself and the painting---she can't be ''wrong'' to do so. So Brown's statement that "nothing [in the painting] suggest that the girls . . . are prisoners" is hardly to the point. Having proved that "Pynchon" got it wrong, he then goes on to adopt the idea (from Varo, by way of Kaplan) that one of the girls---though not a prisoner---"escapes." . . . Next, while Brown is right that the tower in the painting is not circular (this may be one of the few things he does get right), it is not definitely octagonal. The floor pattern suggests that there are eight sides, but the fact that there are six women embroidering, and that the small tower in the foreground, which seems to be a miniature twin of the main tower, looks hexagonal, at least raise the possibility that it is six-sided. Finally, of the two faces visible, Brown says that they are "clearly ''smiling''." I leave it to the reader to decide if that is right---to me one of them has a very slight smile, and one looks merely neutral, as if concentrating on her work.

2. I don't see what's wrong with the term "slit windows." It's not patent that someone in the room couldn't see out of them if the fabric of the mantle of the earth wasn't also being fed out of them. You couldn't see much, true, because they are ''slits'', but does that mean they aren't ''windows''? If Kaplan is referring to the slits, as Brown suggests, when she mentions "battlements," I think ''that'' is a misleading term, but I'm not sure whether the error is hers or Brown's. (Battlements are those notches in top of a medieval castle towers, whose function was to allow people to look out (!) from behind a protecting wall as well as to be able to shoot arrows at an enemy surrounding the castle.) Brown does notice the echo of the shape of the alcove in the background with that of the imaginary window that allows us to see inside the tower. Though his point that the window is "dream-like" rather than simply a visual convention may seem strained applied to the painting, the sense of receding, echoing frames is alluded to later in the book, when Oedipa meets Genghis Cohen (p. a94), and in the ''book'' it does acquire a dreamlike quality. I'm afraid, however, that much of his discussion of the windows seems as though Brown is trying to score points against Pynchon.

3. Brown doesn't see the fabric spilling out of the slits as " 'filling' ''any'' void, nor does it manage to 'contain' the whole world." Again, his reading of the image is tendentious. The black clouds that form the background of the painting surely could represent "the void"; and the fact that the embroidered fabric falls away from the tower into a spherical shape suggest that the world is being pictured. Anyway, the title refers to the "earth's mantle" (''el manto terrestre'')---what is the mistake in assuming that the earth is the world? (Brown's citing the other meaning of ''bordando''---''circumnavigating'' as well as ''embroidering''---while worth pondering, seems to be a non sequitur.) His reading of the bodies of water as filling gaps in the embroidery done by the young women is not the only way to view the image: If they are embroidering all of the features that the elaborate the plain stuff of the mantle (buildings, people, trees, etc.), the bodies of water could just as well be their work. If the young woman on the left can plot her escape by embroidering an image of herself reunited with her lover, then one has to consider whether it is merely a message she is sending to him or whether she is ''creating the world'' in which she will rejoin him, as is seen in the next panel of the triptych. (Note that the houses and trees embroidered by the young woman on the right emerge from the slit as "mere embroidery" on fabric, but that as the material flows down, they become ''real'' houses and trees.)

4. Brown is correct that Pynchon doesn't mention the other two figures in the painting, the central figure who holds a book and stirs the vessel from which flows the thread that the young women use to embroider, and the small figure playing a wind instrument in an alcove in the background. (By the way, Brown is wrong that the instrument may be a recorder. It could either be a shawm or a cornett, the first, a medieval ancestor of the oboe, the second, a kind of trumpet made of wood covered with leather.) Clearly, the other figures aren't mentioned because Oedipa identifies with the embroiderers. The text doesn't mention the ship sailing on a body of water in the distance or any number of other details; it doesn't describe the other panels of the triptych. I hope not to belabor the point, but again, what's most important to the reader is what's most important to Oedipa. Brown could be right that there is some reason why the spooky central figure isn't mentioned, but that can never be anything more than speculative. It is true that Pynchon's writing invites this kind of speculation, and naturally, as a student of Derrida, Brown is going to look for what's left out as much what's there.

All in all, Brown's conclusion seems wrongheaded: "''None'' of this [the detail of the painting] is adequately captured, [and] indeed, most of it [is] changed to ''the opposite'' of what it had previously been, by Pynchon's recollection." My sense of what Derrida says is that the author's intentionality has little to do with the text; in all fairness, that ought to restrain any attempt to deride the putative inadequacy of the text's representation of the painting.

[[image:bubble-shades.jpg|thumb|Bubble Shades|120px|right]]
a:21, b:11 - '''she wore dark green bubble shades''' 
This is the sixties, after all...

{{CL49 PbP}}

Chapter 1

2013-01-02T06:08:39Z

Dezama125:

{{CL49 PbP Text}}

Title Page: '''The Crying of Lot 49''' 
In property auctions, numbered "lots" of property or tangible objects are "cried" by an auctioneer.
*There's a line in ''Ulysses'' that bears an odd coincidence to the title: "The lacquey by the door of Dillon's auctionrooms shook his handbell twice again and viewed himself in the chalked mirror of the cabinet. Dilly Dedalus, loitering by the curbstone, heard the beats of the bell, the cries of the auctioneer within. Four and nine. Those lovely curtains." (Ulysses, 304) Given that ''Gravity's Rainbow'', written at the same time as CoL49, contains numerous Joyce references (mainly in the character of Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck), it's possible that this is a nod.

*For a discussion of some other things the title may or may not allude to, see the article [[7 x 7|'''''7 x 7''''']].

a: 9, b: 1 - '''Oedipa''' 
Oedipus was the mythical king of Thebes who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oedipus Wikipedia] Oedipus the King, aka Oedipus Rex, is a Greek tragedy written by Sophocles and first performed in 428 BC. Many critics, including Aristotle, consider it the greatest tragedy ever written. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oedipus_the_King Wikipedia]

*Whether Oedipa has anything to do with Oedipus is an open question. Some critics find zero connection and note that the name indicates that names are only words, and not necessarily full of meaning (mysteries without answers being a theme in CoL49). Others have teased various interpretations from Sophocles' play to connect its protagonist to Pynchon's. So far, no single explanation is remotely concrete or thoroughly convincing. [[User:Bleakhaus|Bleakhaus]]

*''See also'' Emma Miller, "The Naming of Oedipa Maas: Feminizing the Divine Pursuit of Knowledge in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49" ([https://www.pynchon.net/owap/article/view/12/67 Link])

*A number of fragments further discussing Oedipa's name are in the [[Talk:Chapter_1|Discussion page]].

a: 9, b: 1 - '''Maas''' 
For more discussion of the name, see below.

a: 9, b: 1 - '''kirsch''' 
a clear cherry brandy from Germany. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirsch Wikipedia]
*many references to Germany, German words or German history run through Chapter 1, and indeed the entire novel. Pynchon scholar David Cowart posits that "Pynchon seems to have had a German period, a post-German period, and a neo-Continental or global period. During his German phase he produced his first three novels... His next work, the long-awaited ''Vineland'', represents a new phase in which the almost obsessive attention to German more seems to have faded." ''Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History'' (2012), at p. 59.

a: 9, b: 1 - '''Pierce Inverarity''' 
Inverarity is a village in Scotland.
*The name sounds a bit like a portmanteau of "inverse polarity" (electronic terminology appears in Pynchon's short stories and later in CoL49).
*Perhaps worth noting that when Pynchon & Company (an actual East Coast Brokerage house owned in part by Pynchon's relations) fell apart in 1931, E.A. Pierce (a larger financial institution) picked up that company's holdings. See [http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F50910FE3E5F11738DDDAC0A94DC405B818FF1D3 New York Times April 25, 1931].

a: 9, b: 1 - '''California real estate mogul''' 
Many of the terms and concepts in ''The Crying of Lot 49'' are derived from laws concerning property and investment.
*The ancestors of Thomas Ruggles Pynchon [apparentlty the fifth Pynchon to be so named] had much involvement in real estate and property laws. See "the Petition of the Springfield Aquaduct" ([http://books.google.com/books?id=asAOAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA51&dq=Stearns+pynchon+springfield&as_brr=1#PPP1,M1 Link]), pages 44 - 53. Also see "Popular Law Library" [http://tinyurl.com/2gb8aa at page 95].

a: 10, b: 1 - '''Mazatlán''' 
City in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, located on the Pacific coast of Mexico, east from the southernmost tip of the Baja California peninsula.
*Perhaps worth mentioning that a large wave of German immigrants arrived in the mid 1800s, developing Mazatlán into a thriving commercial seaport. Additionally, Mazatlán played a role in the California gold rush, with people traveling by boat from Mazatlán to San Francisco.
*Pynchon apparently lived in Mexico off and on in the 1960s and 70s.

a: 10, b: 1 - '''Cornell University''' 
Pynchon attended Cornell, where he studied engineering physics, but left after two years to serve in the U.S. Navy. In 1957, Pynchon returned with a focus in English, a BA he received in 1959. "The Small Rain", Pynchon's first published story, was printed in the ''Cornell Writer'' in May, 1959.

a: 10, b: 1 - '''Bartók Concerto for Orchestra''' 
Five-movement musical work finished in 1943 by Hungarian composer Béla Bartók (1881 - 1945), after his native exile to the United States in response to the rise of the Nazi party. Bartók is one of a number of references to the theme of "exile" in this first chapter.

*The critic Charles Hollander suggests that the fourth movement is neither "dry" nor "disconsolate," and that Pynchon deliberately reversed the facts to bring attention to Bartók's status as a political exile. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concerto_for_Orchestra_(Bart%C3%B3k)#Fourth_movement Wikipedia: Bartok Concerto] [http://www.vheissu.info/art/art_eng_49_hollander.htm Hollander Essay]
*"Dry and disconsolate" are not facts but opinions, although the consensus opinion might be "facts". Pynchon may have described the movement as it sounded to him (or his character).
*For more, see the [[Talk:Chapter_1|Discussion page]].

a: 10, b: 1 - '''Jay Gould''' 
(1836 – 1892) Infamous American financier (known as the "Mephistopheles of Wall Street"), who became a leading American railroad builder and speculator in the mid 19th century. In 1869, the Fisk-Gould Scandal (also known as Black Friday) spread financial panic as a result of Gould and fellow financier James Fisk's efforts to corner the gold market. Further political scandals and unfair dealings have cemented his reputation (both throughout his life and during the century after his death) as one of the most unethical of the 19th century American robber barons. It is worth note that the bust of Jay Gould is the "only ikon in the house" of Pierce Inverarity, and that Oedipa expressed the fear that it (on a shelf over the bed) would "someday topple on them". [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Gould Wikipedia: Gould] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_%281869%29 Wikipedia: Black Friday]

<div id="warpe">a: 10, b: 2 - '''Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek and McMingus'''</div>
Law firm representing Pierce Inverarity.

*"Warpe," possible reference to the municipality of Warpe located in the district of Nienburg, in Lower Saxony, Germany (Germany and Nazism being referenced thoroughly in Chapter 1). --[[User:Dezama125|Dezama125]] ([[User talk:Dezama125|talk]]) 10:39, 1 January 2013 (PST) Please see my addition to ''Kubitschek'' below. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warpe Wikipedia]

*"Kubitschek" is possibly drawn from Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira (1902 - 1976), a Brazilian social reformer and 24th President of Brazil (1956 - 1961) who went into a self-imposed exile after a military coup d'état, which had later been claimed to have been taking as a preemptive measure to deter an "inevitable communist revolution" (the coup having been tacitly (and directly) assisted and supported by the United States government and the CIA). Further possible references to "exile" as well as United States foreign policy. --[[User:Dezama125|Dezama125]] ([[User talk:Dezama125|talk]]) 10:39, 1 January 2013 (PST)Also, in some pictures, Kubitschek bears a strong resemblance to Bela Lugosi, so the first two dialects Pierce does in his phone call, Transylvanian and Negro, relate to the last two names of the partners of the lawfirm representing him. The phone call may have started from the comic idea of pretending to be calling from the office of the lawfirm: "I'll pretend to be Kubitschek, then McMingus will get on the phone." Of course, this exemplifies Pierce's ''warped'' sense of humor (which Oedipa shares---see her comment immediately preceding the reference to the lawfirm, "You're so sick, Oedipa.") ''Wistful'' well describes her mood during the day after receiving the letter. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juscelino_Kubitschek Wikipedia: Kubitschek][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_1964_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat Wikipedia: 1964 Brazilian Coup]

*"McMingus" is a probable nod toward Jazz legend Charles Mingus (1922 - 1979). Pynchon is a lifelong Jazz fan, and references Jazz in most (all?) of his works. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Mingus Wikipedia]

*Pynchon's penchant for absurd, punning law firm names is continued in [http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=S#salitieri ''Gravity's Rainbow''] with Salitieri, Poore, Nash, De Brutus and Short.

a: 10, b: 2 - '''Metzger''' 
Co-executor of Inverarity's will and signatory of the letter Oedipa receives in Chapter 1. Metzger is German for "butcher".
*Could also be a reference to Wolfgang Metzger (1899 - 1979), a German psychologist who served as one of the main representatives of Gestalt psychology, a theory that proposes that the operational principle of the brain is holistic, parallel, and analog, with self-organizing tendencies; or, that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This concept will recur later in the chapter, under the term "Triptych". Additionally, the introduction of Dr Hilarius, a German psychologist, will strengthen this association. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Metzger Wikipedia: Metzger][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology Wikipedia: Gestalt].

*[http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metzgerpost Metzgerpost] ("butcher post") was an early type of mail service in the western regions of the Holy Roman Empire, superseded by the Thurn und Taxis-dominated imperial system. 

*Compare '''Meztger''' to [http://www.csp.org/chrestomathy/unfolding_self.html '''Ralph Metzner'''], co-author with [http://www.timothyleary.us/ '''Timothy Leary'''] and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ram_Dass '''Richard Alpert'''], also known as [http://www.ramdass.org/ '''Ram Dass'''], of [http://tinyurl.com/337xqe '''The Psychedelic Experience''']. 

a: 10, b: 2 - '''Kinneret-Among-The-Pines''' 
Fictional California town that Oedipa Maas resides in.
*Yam Kinneret (Sea of Kinnereth) is the modern Hebrew name for the Sea of Galilee, Israel's largest freshwater lake. Upon the shores of Galilee, much of the ministry of Christ was said to have occurred, among which include His Sermon on the Mount, as well as the miracles of His walking on water, calming a storm, and feeding the multitude with five loaves of bread and two fish. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_of_Galilee Wikipedia]. During the years Pynchon was working on 'The Crying of Lot 49, College buddy [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Fariña '''Richard Farina'''] lived in [http://ci.carmel.ca.us/ '''Carmel by the Sea''']. However, the clue that Mucho Maas worked “further along the Peninsula” points more to the regions near Palo Alto & Stanford, such as San Mateo.

a: 10, b: 2 - '''settecento''' 
Italian: seven hundred. It is the standard Italian term for the 18th century (the 1700s). It is used in English mostly to refer to art-historical and architectural movements and styles of that period. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settecento Wikipedia]

a: 10, b: 2 - '''variorum''' 
A work containing all known varients of a text whereby all variations and emendations are set side-by-side to track textual decisions. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variorum Wikipedia]

a: 10, b: 2 - '''Vivaldi Kazoo Concerto''' 
Kazoos are mentioned many time in Pynchon's novels. ''Gravity's Rainbow'' similarly references "Haydn's "Kazoo" Quartet in G-Flat Minor, Op. 76". [http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Pages_706-717 GR, 711].

a: 10, b: 2 - '''Boyd Beaver''' 
A typical Pynchonesque name that appears just this once.
*The name bears a resemblance to Zoyd Wheeler, the protagonist of ''Vineland'', though he played the keyboard.

a: 11, b: 2 - '''Wendell ("Mucho") Maas''' 
"Mucho más" is common Spanish phrase, meaning "much more." Mucho Maas reappears in [http://vineland.pynchonwiki.com/wiki ''Vineland''].

:''Maas'' is also Dutch for ''mesh'' and ''loophole'' (in the architectural and the figurative sense as well), which may be related to the book's treatement of webs or networks.

:The near-likeness "mass" becomes an important word/concept in ''Gravity's Rainbow'' and, especially, ''Against The Day'', although the associative meanings do not seem to mesh! [[User:MKOHUT|MKOHUT]] 13:42, 11 July 2007 (PDT)

a: 11, b: 2 - '''Pachuco dialect''' 
Pachucos were Mexican American youth who developed their own subculture during the 1930s and 1940s in the Southwestern United States. They wore distinctive clothes (such as Zoot Suits) and spoke their own dialect (Caló). [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachuco Wikipedia] Zoot suits appear a few times in [http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ ''Gravity's Rainbow''].

a: 11, b: 2 - '''chingas and maricones''' 
Spanish slang words. "Chingas" is a conjugation of the word "chingar" (slang for "to fuck"), translating "chingas" as "[you] fuck" (or, better, just a plural of "chinga"). "Maricones" refers to the term "maricón" (based on the word "marica" or "male homosexual") which is equivalent to the English insult "faggot".

a: 11, b: 3 - '''Lamont Cranston''' 
[[image:The-Shadow_1939.jpg|right|thumb|150px|The Shadow comic]]One identity adopted by The Shadow, a character of pulp fiction, radio shows, and comic books. Cranston was a wealthy young man about town. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow Wikipedia]

a: 11, b: 3 - '''Commissioner Weston... Professor Quackenbush''' 
Police Commissioner Weston was the Shadow's friend and running mate. There is a Professor Quackenbush in two Three Stooges shorts "Half-Wits Holiday" and "Pies and Guys", as well as a Dr. Hackenbush in the Marx Bros. film, ''A Day at the Races''.

a: 13 b: 4 -'''I don't believe in any of it, Oed''' 
The short form of Oedipa "Oed" means "boring" in German.

a: 13, b: 4 - '''Mucho shaved his ... throw them further off''' 
All of the references in this section refer to the stereotypical (often Italian) used car salesman with greased back hair, a very short mustache, and huge lapels on his suit.

[[Image:jacklemmon.jpg|120px|thumb|left|Jack Lemmon and his hair in the 60s]]a: 13, b: 4 - '''used only water, combing it like Jack Lemmon''' 
American comedic actor (1925-2001).

a: 13, b: 4 - '''creampuff''' 
A very well maintained used car. 

a: 16, b: 7 - '''Dr. Hilarius, her shrink or psychotherapist''' 
[[Image:Hilarius.jpg|right|thumb|St. Hilarius|150px]]Pope Saint Hilarius was Pope of the Roman Catholic Church from 461 to 468. He was canonized as a saint after his death. As archdeacon under Pope Leo I, he fought vigorously for the rights of the Roman See and vigorously opposed the condemnation of Flavian of Constantinople at the Second Council of Ephesus in 449 to settle the question of Eutyches. According to a letter to the Empress Pulcheria, collected among the letter of Leo I, Hilarus apologizes for not delivering to her the pope's letter after the synod.

Shrink is a shortened form of headshrinker, which is '50s slang. The OED cites 'shrink' in this text of 1966, as the first recorded written use of it as a slang term. Which must be why Pynchon defined it in the text.

a: 17, b: 8 - '''LSD-25, mescaline, psilocybin''' 
These hallucinogenic drugs are also mentioned in ''Gravity's Rainbow'', while LSD gets a special mention as an agent of spiritual awareness in ''Vineland''. See notes for [http://cl49.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Chapter_6 '''She Loves You''] on page a: 143, b: 117 of CoL49 wiki, where Mucho Maas is expressing ideas about psychedelics concordant with the writings of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldous_Huxley '''Aldous Huxley'''.] Peyote's magical potential is rendered on pages 392-394 of Against the Day, in wholy favorable terms, with the connection of divinatory powers and envisioning agents such as [http://www.britannica.com/eb/topic-405965/Native-American-Church '''Hikuli'''] displayed in a very favorable light.

It remains an open question as to whether and to what extent Pynchon took or was influenced by them. ''See also'' "Smoking Dope with Thomas Pynchon: A Sixties Memoir" ([http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Smoking_Dope_with_Thomas_Pynchon link]).

a: 18, b:8 - '''lapses from orthodoxy''' 
Orthodox Freudian psychotherapy involved the therapist literally trying not to impose himself at all on the patient. That's why the therapist is often shown sitting behind the patient. The goal is to be a blank canvas and have the patient paint his problems on the therapist, thereby bringing them into consciousness.

[[Image:rorschach1.jpg|150px|thumb|right|The first of the ten cards in the Rorschach inkblot test]]
a: 18, b: 8 - '''Rorschach blot''' 
The Rorschach inkblot test is a method of psychological evaluation. Psychologists use this test to try to examine the personality characteristics and emotional functioning of their patients. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rorschach_inkblot_test Wikipedia]

[[Image:rorschachcomic1.png|thumb|150px|right|Rorschach, a comic book character in ''Watchmen'']]
a: 18, b: 8 - '''a face is symmetrical like a Rorschach blot''' 
In the graphic novel, ''Watchmen'', written by Alan Moore, there is a character named Rorschach who wears a mask with a Rorscach blot on the front. Moore is a self-professed Pynchon fan: he referenced ''V.'' in ''V for Vendetta'' and has mentioned ''Gravity's Rainbow'' in interviews. It is possible, not to say probable, that Moore was inspired by this line.

a: 18, b: 8 - '''TAT picture''' 
The TAT is popularly known as the picture interpretation technique because it uses a standard series of 31 provocative yet ambiguous pictures about which the subject must tell a story. It was developed by American psychologists in the 1930s. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thematic_Apperception_Test Wikipedia]

a: 18, b: 9 - '''Fu-Manchu''' 
Dr. Fu Manchu is a fictional character, an evil genius of Chinese origin, who first featured in a series of novels by Birmingham author Sax Rohmer during the first half of the 20th century. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu_Manchu Wikipedia]

a: 18, b: 9 - '''Perry Mason''' 
a fictional defense attorney who originally appeared in detective fiction by Erle Stanley Gardner. Mason was portrayed by Raymond Burr in a television series which ran on CBS from 1957 to 1966. The typical plot involves Perry Mason unmasking the actual murderer in a final dramatic courtroom showdown. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Mason Wikipedia]

a: 19, b: 9 - '''''The Profession v. Perry Mason...''''' 
Roseman may be trying to undermine Perry Mason by arguing that the dramatic courtroom twists in the TV show are actually uncommon in the American legal system.

[[Image:remediosvaro.jpg|thumb|175px|''Bornando el manto terrestre'', 1961|left]]
a: 21, b: 11 - '''Bornando el Manto Terrestre''' 
Remedios Varo (1908 - 1963) was a surrealist painter. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remedios_Varo Wikipedia]

Bill Brown [http://www.notbored.org/crying.html notes] that "Pynchon saw Bordando el Manto Terrestre when, as part of the first full retrospective of the painter's work, it was displayed at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City in 1964, a year after her death at the age of 55. Painted in 1961, el Manto (oil on masonite, roughly 40 by 48 inches) is the central panel in an autobiographical triptych. It is possible that Pynchon, writing ''Lot 49'' in 1965, recalled the painting from memory or incomplete notes, and not with a reproduction of it set in front of him. He gets ''a lot'' wrong." --[[User:Dezama125|Dezama125]] ([[User talk:Dezama125|talk]]) 12:45, 1 January 2013 (PST)Brown is quoting Janet A. Kaplan, author of ''Remedios Varo: Unexpected Journeys'' about when Pynchon probably saw the painting. I mention that because Brown's article gets most of what he claims Pynchon got wrong wrong. (I have added italics to "a lot" here per Brown's original, so that the reader may get some sense of his wit.) I will adopt the numbering of his points in my response to them.

1. First, Brown makes the mistake of forgetting point of view, which is Oedipa's throughout. However you read what's going on in the painting, whether Oedipa gets it right is far less important than what it means to her. The Rapunzel/captive maiden trope, it is clear, preceded seeing the painting for Oedipa. She makes a connection between that idea about herself and the painting---she can't be ''wrong'' to do so. So Brown's statement that "nothing [in the painting] suggest that the girls . . . are prisoners" is hardly to the point. Having proved that "Pynchon" got it wrong, he then goes on to adopt the idea (from Varo, by way of Kaplan) that one of the girls---though not a prisoner---"escapes." . . . Next, while Brown is right that the tower in the painting is not circular (this may be one of the few things he does get right), it is not definitely octagonal. The floor pattern suggests that there are eight sides, but the fact that there are six women embroidering, and that the small tower in the foreground, which seems to be a miniature twin of the main tower, looks hexagonal, at least raise the possibility that it is six-sided. Finally, of the two faces visible, Brown says that they are "clearly ''smiling''." I leave it to the reader to decide if that is right---to me one of them has a very slight smile, and one looks merely neutral, as if concentrating on her work.

2. I don't see what's wrong with the term "slit windows." It's not patent that someone in the room couldn't see out of them if the fabric of the mantle of the earth wasn't also being fed out of them. You couldn't see much, true, because they are ''slits'', but does that mean they aren't ''windows''? If Kaplan is referring to the slits, as Brown suggests, when she mentions "battlements," I think ''that'' is a misleading term, but I'm not sure whether the error is hers or Brown's. (Battlements are those notches in top of a medieval castle towers, whose function was to allow people to look out (!) from behind a protecting wall as well as to be able to shoot arrows at an enemy surrounding the castle.) Brown does notice the echo of the shape of the alcove in the background with that of the imaginary window that allows us to see inside the tower. Though his point that the window is "dream-like" rather than simply a visual convention may seem strained applied to the painting, the sense of receding, echoing frames is alluded to later in the book, when Oedipa meets Genghis Cohen (p. a94), and in the ''book'' it does acquire a dreamlike quality. I'm afraid, however, that much of his discussion of the windows seems as though Brown is trying to score points against Pynchon.

3. Brown doesn't see the fabric spilling out of the slits as " 'filling' ''any'' void, nor does it manage to 'contain' the whole world." Again, his reading of the image is tendentious. The black clouds that form the background of the painting surely could represent "the void"; and the fact that the embroidered fabric falls away from the tower into a spherical shape suggest that the world is being pictured. Anyway, the title refers to the "earth's mantle" (''el manto terrestre'')---what is the mistake in assuming that the earth is the world? (Brown's citing the other meaning of ''bordando''---''circumnavigating'' as well as ''embroidering''---while worth pondering, seems to be a non sequitur.) His reading of the bodies of water as filling gaps in the embroidery done by the young women is not the only way to view the image: If they are embroidering all of the features that the elaborate the plain stuff of the mantle (buildings, people, trees, etc.), the bodies of water could just as well be their work. If the young woman on the left can plot her escape by embroidering an image of herself reunited with her lover, then one has to consider whether it is merely a message she is sending to him or whether she is ''creating the world'' in which she will rejoin him, as is seen in the next panel of the triptych.

4. Brown is correct that Pynchon doesn't mention the other two figures in the painting, the central figure who holds a book and stirs the vessel from which flows the thread that the young women use to embroider, and the small figure playing a wind instrument in an alcove in the background. (By the way, Brown is wrong that the instrument may be a recorder. It could either be a shawm or a cornett, the first, a medieval ancestor of the oboe, the second, a kind of trumpet made of wood covered with leather.) Clearly, the other figures aren't mentioned because Oedipa identifies with the embroiderers. The text doesn't mention the ship sailing on a body of water in the distance or any number of other details; it doesn't describe the other panels of the triptych. I hope not to belabor the point, but again, what's most important to the reader is what's most important to Oedipa. Brown could be right that there is some reason why the spooky central figure isn't mentioned, but that can never be anything more than speculative. It is true that Pynchon's writing invites this kind of speculation, and naturally, as a student of Derrida, Brown is going to look for what's left out as much what's there.

All in all, Brown's conclusion seems wrongheaded: "''None'' of this [the detail of the painting] is adequately captured, [and] indeed, most of it [is] changed to ''the opposite'' of what it had previously been, by Pynchon's recollection." My sense of what Derrida says is that the author's intentionality has little to do with the text; in all fairness, that ought to restrain any attempt to deride the putative inadequacy of the text's representation of the painting.

[[image:bubble-shades.jpg|thumb|Bubble Shades|120px|right]]
a:21, b:11 - '''she wore dark green bubble shades''' 
This is the sixties, after all...

{{CL49 PbP}}

Chapter 1

2013-01-02T04:09:26Z

Dezama125:

{{CL49 PbP Text}}

Title Page: '''The Crying of Lot 49''' 
In property auctions, numbered "lots" of property or tangible objects are "cried" by an auctioneer.
*There's a line in ''Ulysses'' that bears an odd coincidence to the title: "The lacquey by the door of Dillon's auctionrooms shook his handbell twice again and viewed himself in the chalked mirror of the cabinet. Dilly Dedalus, loitering by the curbstone, heard the beats of the bell, the cries of the auctioneer within. Four and nine. Those lovely curtains." (Ulysses, 304) Given that ''Gravity's Rainbow'', written at the same time as CoL49, contains numerous Joyce references (mainly in the character of Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck), it's possible that this is a nod.

*For a discussion of some other things the title may or may not allude to, see the article [[7 x 7|'''''7 x 7''''']].

a: 9, b: 1 - '''Oedipa''' 
Oedipus was the mythical king of Thebes who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oedipus Wikipedia] Oedipus the King, aka Oedipus Rex, is a Greek tragedy written by Sophocles and first performed in 428 BC. Many critics, including Aristotle, consider it the greatest tragedy ever written. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oedipus_the_King Wikipedia]

*Whether Oedipa has anything to do with Oedipus is an open question. Some critics find zero connection and note that the name indicates that names are only words, and not necessarily full of meaning (mysteries without answers being a theme in CoL49). Others have teased various interpretations from Sophocles' play to connect its protagonist to Pynchon's. So far, no single explanation is remotely concrete or thoroughly convincing. [[User:Bleakhaus|Bleakhaus]]

*''See also'' Emma Miller, "The Naming of Oedipa Maas: Feminizing the Divine Pursuit of Knowledge in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49" ([https://www.pynchon.net/owap/article/view/12/67 Link])

*A number of fragments further discussing Oedipa's name are in the [[Talk:Chapter_1|Discussion page]].

a: 9, b: 1 - '''Maas''' 
For more discussion of the name, see below.

a: 9, b: 1 - '''kirsch''' 
a clear cherry brandy from Germany. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirsch Wikipedia]
*many references to Germany, German words or German history run through Chapter 1, and indeed the entire novel. Pynchon scholar David Cowart posits that "Pynchon seems to have had a German period, a post-German period, and a neo-Continental or global period. During his German phase he produced his first three novels... His next work, the long-awaited ''Vineland'', represents a new phase in which the almost obsessive attention to German more seems to have faded." ''Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History'' (2012), at p. 59.

a: 9, b: 1 - '''Pierce Inverarity''' 
Inverarity is a village in Scotland.
*The name sounds a bit like a portmanteau of "inverse polarity" (electronic terminology appears in Pynchon's short stories and later in CoL49).
*Perhaps worth noting that when Pynchon & Company (an actual East Coast Brokerage house owned in part by Pynchon's relations) fell apart in 1931, E.A. Pierce (a larger financial institution) picked up that company's holdings. See [http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F50910FE3E5F11738DDDAC0A94DC405B818FF1D3 New York Times April 25, 1931].

a: 9, b: 1 - '''California real estate mogul''' 
Many of the terms and concepts in ''The Crying of Lot 49'' are derived from laws concerning property and investment.
*The ancestors of Thomas Ruggles Pynchon [apparentlty the fifth Pynchon to be so named] had much involvement in real estate and property laws. See "the Petition of the Springfield Aquaduct" ([http://books.google.com/books?id=asAOAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA51&dq=Stearns+pynchon+springfield&as_brr=1#PPP1,M1 Link]), pages 44 - 53. Also see "Popular Law Library" [http://tinyurl.com/2gb8aa at page 95].

a: 10, b: 1 - '''Mazatlán''' 
City in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, located on the Pacific coast of Mexico, east from the southernmost tip of the Baja California peninsula.
*Perhaps worth mentioning that a large wave of German immigrants arrived in the mid 1800s, developing Mazatlán into a thriving commercial seaport. Additionally, Mazatlán played a role in the California gold rush, with people traveling by boat from Mazatlán to San Francisco.
*Pynchon apparently lived in Mexico off and on in the 1960s and 70s.

a: 10, b: 1 - '''Cornell University''' 
Pynchon attended Cornell, where he studied engineering physics, but left after two years to serve in the U.S. Navy. In 1957, Pynchon returned with a focus in English, a BA he received in 1959. "The Small Rain", Pynchon's first published story, was printed in the ''Cornell Writer'' in May, 1959.

a: 10, b: 1 - '''Bartók Concerto for Orchestra''' 
Five-movement musical work finished in 1943 by Hungarian composer Béla Bartók (1881 - 1945), after his native exile to the United States in response to the rise of the Nazi party. Bartók is one of a number of references to the theme of "exile" in this first chapter.

*The critic Charles Hollander suggests that the fourth movement is neither "dry" nor "disconsolate," and that Pynchon deliberately reversed the facts to bring attention to Bartók's status as a political exile. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concerto_for_Orchestra_(Bart%C3%B3k)#Fourth_movement Wikipedia: Bartok Concerto] [http://www.vheissu.info/art/art_eng_49_hollander.htm Hollander Essay]
*"Dry and disconsolate" are not facts but opinions, although the consensus opinion might be "facts". Pynchon may have described the movement as it sounded to him (or his character).
*For more, see the [[Talk:Chapter_1|Discussion page]].

a: 10, b: 1 - '''Jay Gould''' 
(1836 – 1892) Infamous American financier (known as the "Mephistopheles of Wall Street"), who became a leading American railroad builder and speculator in the mid 19th century. In 1869, the Fisk-Gould Scandal (also known as Black Friday) spread financial panic as a result of Gould and fellow financier James Fisk's efforts to corner the gold market. Further political scandals and unfair dealings have cemented his reputation (both throughout his life and during the century after his death) as one of the most unethical of the 19th century American robber barons. It is worth note that the bust of Jay Gould is the "only ikon in the house" of Pierce Inverarity, and that Oedipa expressed the fear that it (on a shelf over the bed) would "someday topple on them". [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Gould Wikipedia: Gould] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_%281869%29 Wikipedia: Black Friday]

<div id="warpe">a: 10, b: 2 - '''Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek and McMingus'''</div>
Law firm representing Pierce Inverarity.

*"Warpe," possible reference to the municipality of Warpe located in the district of Nienburg, in Lower Saxony, Germany (Germany and Nazism being referenced thoroughly in Chapter 1). --[[User:Dezama125|Dezama125]] ([[User talk:Dezama125|talk]]) 10:39, 1 January 2013 (PST) Please see my addition to ''Kubitschek'' below. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warpe Wikipedia]

*"Kubitschek" is possibly drawn from Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira (1902 - 1976), a Brazilian social reformer and 24th President of Brazil (1956 - 1961) who went into a self-imposed exile after a military coup d'état, which had later been claimed to have been taking as a preemptive measure to deter an "inevitable communist revolution" (the coup having been tacitly (and directly) assisted and supported by the United States government and the CIA). Further possible references to "exile" as well as United States foreign policy. --[[User:Dezama125|Dezama125]] ([[User talk:Dezama125|talk]]) 10:39, 1 January 2013 (PST)Also, in some pictures, Kubitschek bears a strong resemblance to Bela Lugosi, so the first two dialects Pierce does in his phone call, Transylvanian and Negro, relate to the last two names of the partners of the lawfirm representing him. The phone call may have started from the comic idea of pretending to be calling from the office of the lawfirm: "I'll pretend to be Kubitschek, then McMingus will get on the phone." Of course, this exemplifies Pierce's ''warped'' sense of humor (which Oedipa shares---see her comment immediately preceding the reference to the lawfirm, "You're so sick, Oedipa.") ''Wistful'' well describes her mood during the day after receiving the letter. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juscelino_Kubitschek Wikipedia: Kubitschek][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_1964_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat Wikipedia: 1964 Brazilian Coup]

*"McMingus" is a probable nod toward Jazz legend Charles Mingus (1922 - 1979). Pynchon is a lifelong Jazz fan, and references Jazz in most (all?) of his works. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Mingus Wikipedia]

*Pynchon's penchant for absurd, punning law firm names is continued in [http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=S#salitieri ''Gravity's Rainbow''] with Salitieri, Poore, Nash, De Brutus and Short.

a: 10, b: 2 - '''Metzger''' 
Co-executor of Inverarity's will and signatory of the letter Oedipa receives in Chapter 1. Metzger is German for "butcher".
*Could also be a reference to Wolfgang Metzger (1899 - 1979), a German psychologist who served as one of the main representatives of Gestalt psychology, a theory that proposes that the operational principle of the brain is holistic, parallel, and analog, with self-organizing tendencies; or, that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This concept will recur later in the chapter, under the term "Triptych". Additionally, the introduction of Dr Hilarius, a German psychologist, will strengthen this association. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Metzger Wikipedia: Metzger][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology Wikipedia: Gestalt].

*[http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metzgerpost Metzgerpost] ("butcher post") was an early type of mail service in the western regions of the Holy Roman Empire, superseded by the Thurn und Taxis-dominated imperial system. 

*Compare '''Meztger''' to [http://www.csp.org/chrestomathy/unfolding_self.html '''Ralph Metzner'''], co-author with [http://www.timothyleary.us/ '''Timothy Leary'''] and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ram_Dass '''Richard Alpert'''], also known as [http://www.ramdass.org/ '''Ram Dass'''], of [http://tinyurl.com/337xqe '''The Psychedelic Experience''']. 

a: 10, b: 2 - '''Kinneret-Among-The-Pines''' 
Fictional California town that Oedipa Maas resides in.
*Yam Kinneret (Sea of Kinnereth) is the modern Hebrew name for the Sea of Galilee, Israel's largest freshwater lake. Upon the shores of Galilee, much of the ministry of Christ was said to have occurred, among which include His Sermon on the Mount, as well as the miracles of His walking on water, calming a storm, and feeding the multitude with five loaves of bread and two fish. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_of_Galilee Wikipedia]. During the years Pynchon was working on 'The Crying of Lot 49, College buddy [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Fariña '''Richard Farina'''] lived in [http://ci.carmel.ca.us/ '''Carmel by the Sea''']. However, the clue that Mucho Maas worked “further along the Peninsula” points more to the regions near Palo Alto & Stanford, such as San Mateo.

a: 10, b: 2 - '''settecento''' 
Italian: seven hundred. It is the standard Italian term for the 18th century (the 1700s). It is used in English mostly to refer to art-historical and architectural movements and styles of that period. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settecento Wikipedia]

a: 10, b: 2 - '''variorum''' 
A work containing all known varients of a text whereby all variations and emendations are set side-by-side to track textual decisions. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variorum Wikipedia]

a: 10, b: 2 - '''Vivaldi Kazoo Concerto''' 
Kazoos are mentioned many time in Pynchon's novels. ''Gravity's Rainbow'' similarly references "Haydn's "Kazoo" Quartet in G-Flat Minor, Op. 76". [http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Pages_706-717 GR, 711].

a: 10, b: 2 - '''Boyd Beaver''' 
A typical Pynchonesque name that appears just this once.
*The name bears a resemblance to Zoyd Wheeler, the protagonist of ''Vineland'', though he played the keyboard.

a: 11, b: 2 - '''Wendell ("Mucho") Maas''' 
"Mucho más" is common Spanish phrase, meaning "much more." Mucho Maas reappears in [http://vineland.pynchonwiki.com/wiki ''Vineland''].

:''Maas'' is also Dutch for ''mesh'' and ''loophole'' (in the architectural and the figurative sense as well), which may be related to the book's treatement of webs or networks.

:The near-likeness "mass" becomes an important word/concept in ''Gravity's Rainbow'' and, especially, ''Against The Day'', although the associative meanings do not seem to mesh! [[User:MKOHUT|MKOHUT]] 13:42, 11 July 2007 (PDT)

a: 11, b: 2 - '''Pachuco dialect''' 
Pachucos were Mexican American youth who developed their own subculture during the 1930s and 1940s in the Southwestern United States. They wore distinctive clothes (such as Zoot Suits) and spoke their own dialect (Caló). [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachuco Wikipedia] Zoot suits appear a few times in [http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ ''Gravity's Rainbow''].

a: 11, b: 2 - '''chingas and maricones''' 
Spanish slang words. "Chingas" is a conjugation of the word "chingar" (slang for "to fuck"), translating "chingas" as "[you] fuck" (or, better, just a plural of "chinga"). "Maricones" refers to the term "maricón" (based on the word "marica" or "male homosexual") which is equivalent to the English insult "faggot".

a: 11, b: 3 - '''Lamont Cranston''' 
[[image:The-Shadow_1939.jpg|right|thumb|150px|The Shadow comic]]One identity adopted by The Shadow, a character of pulp fiction, radio shows, and comic books. Cranston was a wealthy young man about town. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow Wikipedia]

a: 11, b: 3 - '''Commissioner Weston... Professor Quackenbush''' 
Police Commissioner Weston was the Shadow's friend and running mate. There is a Professor Quackenbush in two Three Stooges shorts "Half-Wits Holiday" and "Pies and Guys", as well as a Dr. Hackenbush in the Marx Bros. film, ''A Day at the Races''.

a: 13 b: 4 -'''I don't believe in any of it, Oed''' 
The short form of Oedipa "Oed" means "boring" in German.

a: 13, b: 4 - '''Mucho shaved his ... throw them further off''' 
All of the references in this section refer to the stereotypical (often Italian) used car salesman with greased back hair, a very short mustache, and huge lapels on his suit.

[[Image:jacklemmon.jpg|120px|thumb|left|Jack Lemmon and his hair in the 60s]]a: 13, b: 4 - '''used only water, combing it like Jack Lemmon''' 
American comedic actor (1925-2001).

a: 13, b: 4 - '''creampuff''' 
A very well maintained used car. 

a: 16, b: 7 - '''Dr. Hilarius, her shrink or psychotherapist''' 
[[Image:Hilarius.jpg|right|thumb|St. Hilarius|150px]]Pope Saint Hilarius was Pope of the Roman Catholic Church from 461 to 468. He was canonized as a saint after his death. As archdeacon under Pope Leo I, he fought vigorously for the rights of the Roman See and vigorously opposed the condemnation of Flavian of Constantinople at the Second Council of Ephesus in 449 to settle the question of Eutyches. According to a letter to the Empress Pulcheria, collected among the letter of Leo I, Hilarus apologizes for not delivering to her the pope's letter after the synod.

Shrink is a shortened form of headshrinker, which is '50s slang. The OED cites 'shrink' in this text of 1966, as the first recorded written use of it as a slang term. Which must be why Pynchon defined it in the text.

a: 17, b: 8 - '''LSD-25, mescaline, psilocybin''' 
These hallucinogenic drugs are also mentioned in ''Gravity's Rainbow'', while LSD gets a special mention as an agent of spiritual awareness in ''Vineland''. See notes for [http://cl49.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Chapter_6 '''She Loves You''] on page a: 143, b: 117 of CoL49 wiki, where Mucho Maas is expressing ideas about psychedelics concordant with the writings of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldous_Huxley '''Aldous Huxley'''.] Peyote's magical potential is rendered on pages 392-394 of Against the Day, in wholy favorable terms, with the connection of divinatory powers and envisioning agents such as [http://www.britannica.com/eb/topic-405965/Native-American-Church '''Hikuli'''] displayed in a very favorable light.

It remains an open question as to whether and to what extent Pynchon took or was influenced by them. ''See also'' "Smoking Dope with Thomas Pynchon: A Sixties Memoir" ([http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Smoking_Dope_with_Thomas_Pynchon link]).

a: 18, b:8 - '''lapses from orthodoxy''' 
Orthodox Freudian psychotherapy involved the therapist literally trying not to impose himself at all on the patient. That's why the therapist is often shown sitting behind the patient. The goal is to be a blank canvas and have the patient paint his problems on the therapist, thereby bringing them into consciousness.

[[Image:rorschach1.jpg|150px|thumb|right|The first of the ten cards in the Rorschach inkblot test]]
a: 18, b: 8 - '''Rorschach blot''' 
The Rorschach inkblot test is a method of psychological evaluation. Psychologists use this test to try to examine the personality characteristics and emotional functioning of their patients. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rorschach_inkblot_test Wikipedia]

[[Image:rorschachcomic1.png|thumb|150px|right|Rorschach, a comic book character in ''Watchmen'']]
a: 18, b: 8 - '''a face is symmetrical like a Rorschach blot''' 
In the graphic novel, ''Watchmen'', written by Alan Moore, there is a character named Rorschach who wears a mask with a Rorscach blot on the front. Moore is a self-professed Pynchon fan: he referenced ''V.'' in ''V for Vendetta'' and has mentioned ''Gravity's Rainbow'' in interviews. It is possible, not to say probable, that Moore was inspired by this line.

a: 18, b: 8 - '''TAT picture''' 
The TAT is popularly known as the picture interpretation technique because it uses a standard series of 31 provocative yet ambiguous pictures about which the subject must tell a story. It was developed by American psychologists in the 1930s. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thematic_Apperception_Test Wikipedia]

a: 18, b: 9 - '''Fu-Manchu''' 
Dr. Fu Manchu is a fictional character, an evil genius of Chinese origin, who first featured in a series of novels by Birmingham author Sax Rohmer during the first half of the 20th century. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu_Manchu Wikipedia]

a: 18, b: 9 - '''Perry Mason''' 
a fictional defense attorney who originally appeared in detective fiction by Erle Stanley Gardner. Mason was portrayed by Raymond Burr in a television series which ran on CBS from 1957 to 1966. The typical plot involves Perry Mason unmasking the actual murderer in a final dramatic courtroom showdown. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Mason Wikipedia]

a: 19, b: 9 - '''''The Profession v. Perry Mason...''''' 
Roseman may be trying to undermine Perry Mason by arguing that the dramatic courtroom twists in the TV show are actually uncommon in the American legal system.

[[Image:remediosvaro.jpg|thumb|175px|''Bornando el manto terrestre'', 1961|left]]
a: 21, b: 11 - '''Bornando el Manto Terrestre''' 
Remedios Varo (1908 - 1963) was a surrealist painter. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remedios_Varo Wikipedia]

Bill Brown [http://www.notbored.org/crying.html notes] that "Pynchon saw Bordando el Manto Terrestre when, as part of the first full retrospective of the painter's work, it was displayed at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City in 1964, a year after her death at the age of 55. Painted in 1961, el Manto (oil on masonite, roughly 40 by 48 inches) is the central panel in an autobiographical triptych. It is possible that Pynchon, writing ''Lot 49'' in 1965, recalled the painting from memory or incomplete notes, and not with a reproduction of it set in front of him. He gets ''a lot'' wrong." --[[User:Dezama125|Dezama125]] ([[User talk:Dezama125|talk]]) 12:45, 1 January 2013 (PST)Brown is quoting Janet A. Kaplan, author of ''Remedios Varo: Unexpected Journeys'' about when Pynchon probably saw the painting. I mention that because Brown's article gets most of what he claims Pynchon got wrong wrong. (I have added italics to "a lot" here per Brown's original, so that the reader may get some sense of his wit.) I will adopt the numbering of his points in my response to them.

1. First, Brown makes the mistake of forgetting point of view, which is Oedipa's throughout. However you read what's going on in the painting, whether Oedipa gets it right is far less important than what it means to her. The Rapunzel/captive maiden trope, it is clear, preceded seeing the painting for Oedipa. She makes a connection between that idea about herself and the painting---she can't be ''wrong'' to do so. So Brown's statement that "nothing [in the painting] suggest that the girls . . . are prisoners" is hardly to the point. Having proved that "Pynchon" got it wrong, he then goes on to adopt the idea (from Varo, by way of Kaplan) that one of the girls---though not a prisoner---"escapes." . . . Next, while Brown is right that the tower in the painting is not circular (this may be one of the few things he does get right), it is not definitely octagonal. The floor pattern suggests that there are eight sides, but the fact that there are six women embroidering, and that the small tower in the foreground, which seems to be a miniature twin of the main tower, looks hexagonal, at least raise the possibility that it is six-sided. Finally, of the two faces visible, Brown says that they are "clearly ''smiling''." I leave it to the reader to decide if that is right---to me one of them has a very slight smile, and one looks merely neutral, as if concentrating on her work.

2. I don't see what's wrong with the term "slit windows." It's not patent that someone in the room couldn't see out of them if the fabric of the mantle of the earth wasn't also being fed out of them. You couldn't see much, true, because they are ''slits'', but does that mean they aren't ''windows''? If Kaplan is referring to the slits, as Brown suggests, when she mentions "battlements," I think ''that'' is a misleading term, but I'm not sure whether the error is hers or Brown's. (Battlements are those notches in top of a medieval castle towers, whose function was to allow people to look out (!) from behind a protecting wall as well as to be able to shoot arrows at an enemy surrounding the castle.) Brown does notice the echo of the shape of the alcove in the background with that of the imaginary window that allows us to see inside the tower. Though his point that the window is "dream-like" rather than simply a visual convention may seem strained applied to the painting, the sense of receding, echoing frames is alluded to later in the book, when Oedipa meets Genghis Cohen (p. a94), and in the ''book'' it does acquire a dreamlike quality. I'm afraid, however, that much of his discussion of the windows seems as though Brown is trying to score points against Pynchon.

3. Brown doesn't see the fabric spilling out of the slits as " 'filling' ''any'' void, nor does it manage to 'contain' the whole world." Again, his reading of the image is tendentious. The black clouds that form the background of the painting surely could represent "the void"; and the fact that the embroidered fabric falls away from the tower into a spherical shape suggest that the world is being pictured. Anyway, the title refers to the "earth's mantle" (''el manto terrestre'')---what is the mistake in assuming that the earth is the world? (Brown's citing the other meaning of ''bordando''---''circumnavigating'' as well as ''embroidering''---while worth pondering, seems to be a non sequitur.) His reading of the bodies of water as filling gaps in the embroidery done by the young women is not the only way to view the image: If they are embroidering all of the features that the elaborate the plain stuff of the mantle (buildings, people, trees, etc.), the bodies of water could just as well be their work. If the young woman at the right can plot her escape by embroidering an image of herself reunited with her lover, then one has to consider whether it is merely a message she is sending to him or whether she is ''creating the world'' in which she will rejoin him, as is seen in the next panel of the triptych.

4. Brown is correct that Pynchon doesn't mention the other two figures in the painting, the central figure who holds a book and stirs the vessel from which flows the thread that the young women use to embroider, and the small figure playing a wind instrument in an alcove in the background. (By the way, Brown is wrong that the instrument may be a recorder. It could either be a shawm or a cornett, the first, a medieval ancestor of the oboe, the second, a kind of trumpet made of wood covered with leather.) Clearly, the other figures aren't mentioned because Oedipa identifies with the embroiderers. The text doesn't mention the ship sailing on a body of water in the distance or any number of other details; it doesn't describe the other panels of the triptych. I hope not to belabor the point, but again, what's most important to the reader is what's most important to Oedipa. Brown could be right that there is some reason why the spooky central figure isn't mentioned, but that can never be anything more than speculative. It is true that Pynchon's writing invites this kind of speculation, and naturally, as a student of Derrida, Brown is going to look for what's left out as much what's there.

All in all, Brown's conclusion seems wrongheaded: "''None'' of this [the detail of the painting] is adequately captured, [and] indeed, most of it [is] changed to ''the opposite'' of what it had previously been, by Pynchon's recollection." My sense of what Derrida says is that the author's intentionality has little to do with the text; in all fairness, that ought to restrain any attempt to deride the putative inadequacy of the text's representation of the painting.

[[image:bubble-shades.jpg|thumb|Bubble Shades|120px|right]]
a:21, b:11 - '''she wore dark green bubble shades''' 
This is the sixties, after all...

{{CL49 PbP}}

Chapter 1

2013-01-01T20:45:39Z

Dezama125:

{{CL49 PbP Text}}

Title Page: '''The Crying of Lot 49''' 
In property auctions, numbered "lots" of property or tangible objects are "cried" by an auctioneer.
*There's a line in ''Ulysses'' that bears an odd coincidence to the title: "The lacquey by the door of Dillon's auctionrooms shook his handbell twice again and viewed himself in the chalked mirror of the cabinet. Dilly Dedalus, loitering by the curbstone, heard the beats of the bell, the cries of the auctioneer within. Four and nine. Those lovely curtains." (Ulysses, 304) Given that ''Gravity's Rainbow'', written at the same time as CoL49, contains numerous Joyce references (mainly in the character of Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck), it's possible that this is a nod.

*For a discussion of some other things the title may or may not allude to, see the article [[7 x 7|'''''7 x 7''''']].

a: 9, b: 1 - '''Oedipa''' 
Oedipus was the mythical king of Thebes who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oedipus Wikipedia] Oedipus the King, aka Oedipus Rex, is a Greek tragedy written by Sophocles and first performed in 428 BC. Many critics, including Aristotle, consider it the greatest tragedy ever written. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oedipus_the_King Wikipedia]

*Whether Oedipa has anything to do with Oedipus is an open question. Some critics find zero connection and note that the name indicates that names are only words, and not necessarily full of meaning (mysteries without answers being a theme in CoL49). Others have teased various interpretations from Sophocles' play to connect its protagonist to Pynchon's. So far, no single explanation is remotely concrete or thoroughly convincing. [[User:Bleakhaus|Bleakhaus]]

*''See also'' Emma Miller, "The Naming of Oedipa Maas: Feminizing the Divine Pursuit of Knowledge in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49" ([https://www.pynchon.net/owap/article/view/12/67 Link])

*A number of fragments further discussing Oedipa's name are in the [[Talk:Chapter_1|Discussion page]].

a: 9, b: 1 - '''Maas''' 
For more discussion of the name, see below.

a: 9, b: 1 - '''kirsch''' 
a clear cherry brandy from Germany. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirsch Wikipedia]
*many references to Germany, German words or German history run through Chapter 1, and indeed the entire novel. Pynchon scholar David Cowart posits that "Pynchon seems to have had a German period, a post-German period, and a neo-Continental or global period. During his German phase he produced his first three novels... His next work, the long-awaited ''Vineland'', represents a new phase in which the almost obsessive attention to German more seems to have faded." ''Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History'' (2012), at p. 59.

a: 9, b: 1 - '''Pierce Inverarity''' 
Inverarity is a village in Scotland.
*The name sounds a bit like a portmanteau of "inverse polarity" (electronic terminology appears in Pynchon's short stories and later in CoL49).
*Perhaps worth noting that when Pynchon & Company (an actual East Coast Brokerage house owned in part by Pynchon's relations) fell apart in 1931, E.A. Pierce (a larger financial institution) picked up that company's holdings. See [http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F50910FE3E5F11738DDDAC0A94DC405B818FF1D3 New York Times April 25, 1931].

a: 9, b: 1 - '''California real estate mogul''' 
Many of the terms and concepts in ''The Crying of Lot 49'' are derived from laws concerning property and investment.
*The ancestors of Thomas Ruggles Pynchon [apparentlty the fifth Pynchon to be so named] had much involvement in real estate and property laws. See "the Petition of the Springfield Aquaduct" ([http://books.google.com/books?id=asAOAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA51&dq=Stearns+pynchon+springfield&as_brr=1#PPP1,M1 Link]), pages 44 - 53. Also see "Popular Law Library" [http://tinyurl.com/2gb8aa at page 95].

a: 10, b: 1 - '''Mazatlán''' 
City in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, located on the Pacific coast of Mexico, east from the southernmost tip of the Baja California peninsula.
*Perhaps worth mentioning that a large wave of German immigrants arrived in the mid 1800s, developing Mazatlán into a thriving commercial seaport. Additionally, Mazatlán played a role in the California gold rush, with people traveling by boat from Mazatlán to San Francisco.
*Pynchon apparently lived in Mexico off and on in the 1960s and 70s.

a: 10, b: 1 - '''Cornell University''' 
Pynchon attended Cornell, where he studied engineering physics, but left after two years to serve in the U.S. Navy. In 1957, Pynchon returned with a focus in English, a BA he received in 1959. "The Small Rain", Pynchon's first published story, was printed in the ''Cornell Writer'' in May, 1959.

a: 10, b: 1 - '''Bartók Concerto for Orchestra''' 
Five-movement musical work finished in 1943 by Hungarian composer Béla Bartók (1881 - 1945), after his native exile to the United States in response to the rise of the Nazi party. Bartók is one of a number of references to the theme of "exile" in this first chapter.

*The critic Charles Hollander suggests that the fourth movement is neither "dry" nor "disconsolate," and that Pynchon deliberately reversed the facts to bring attention to Bartók's status as a political exile. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concerto_for_Orchestra_(Bart%C3%B3k)#Fourth_movement Wikipedia: Bartok Concerto] [http://www.vheissu.info/art/art_eng_49_hollander.htm Hollander Essay]
*"Dry and disconsolate" are not facts but opinions, although the consensus opinion might be "facts". Pynchon may have described the movement as it sounded to him (or his character).
*For more, see the [[Talk:Chapter_1|Discussion page]].

a: 10, b: 1 - '''Jay Gould''' 
(1836 – 1892) Infamous American financier (known as the "Mephistopheles of Wall Street"), who became a leading American railroad builder and speculator in the mid 19th century. In 1869, the Fisk-Gould Scandal (also known as Black Friday) spread financial panic as a result of Gould and fellow financier James Fisk's efforts to corner the gold market. Further political scandals and unfair dealings have cemented his reputation (both throughout his life and during the century after his death) as one of the most unethical of the 19th century American robber barons. It is worth note that the bust of Jay Gould is the "only ikon in the house" of Pierce Inverarity, and that Oedipa expressed the fear that it (on a shelf over the bed) would "someday topple on them". [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Gould Wikipedia: Gould] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_%281869%29 Wikipedia: Black Friday]

<div id="warpe">a: 10, b: 2 - '''Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek and McMingus'''</div>
Law firm representing Pierce Inverarity.

*"Warpe," possible reference to the municipality of Warpe located in the district of Nienburg, in Lower Saxony, Germany (Germany and Nazism being referenced thoroughly in Chapter 1). --[[User:Dezama125|Dezama125]] ([[User talk:Dezama125|talk]]) 10:39, 1 January 2013 (PST) Please see my addition to ''Kubitschek'' below. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warpe Wikipedia]

*"Kubitschek" is possibly drawn from Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira (1902 - 1976), a Brazilian social reformer and 24th President of Brazil (1956 - 1961) who went into a self-imposed exile after a military coup d'état, which had later been claimed to have been taking as a preemptive measure to deter an "inevitable communist revolution" (the coup having been tacitly (and directly) assisted and supported by the United States government and the CIA). Further possible references to "exile" as well as United States foreign policy. --[[User:Dezama125|Dezama125]] ([[User talk:Dezama125|talk]]) 10:39, 1 January 2013 (PST)Also, in some pictures, Kubitschek bears a strong resemblance to Bela Lugosi, so the first two dialects Pierce does in his phone call, Transylvanian and Negro, relate to the last two names of the partners of the lawfirm representing him. The phone call may have started from the comic idea of pretending to be calling from the office of the lawfirm: "I'll pretend to be Kubitschek, then McMingus will get on the phone." Of course, this exemplifies Pierce's ''warped'' sense of humor (which Oedipa shares---see her comment immediately preceding the reference to the lawfirm, "You're so sick, Oedipa.") ''Wistful'' well describes her mood during the day after receiving the letter. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juscelino_Kubitschek Wikipedia: Kubitschek][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_1964_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat Wikipedia: 1964 Brazilian Coup]

*"McMingus" is a probable nod toward Jazz legend Charles Mingus (1922 - 1979). Pynchon is a lifelong Jazz fan, and references Jazz in most (all?) of his works. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Mingus Wikipedia]

*Pynchon's penchant for absurd, punning law firm names is continued in [http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=S#salitieri ''Gravity's Rainbow''] with Salitieri, Poore, Nash, De Brutus and Short.

a: 10, b: 2 - '''Metzger''' 
Co-executor of Inverarity's will and signatory of the letter Oedipa receives in Chapter 1. Metzger is German for "butcher".
*Could also be a reference to Wolfgang Metzger (1899 - 1979), a German psychologist who served as one of the main representatives of Gestalt psychology, a theory that proposes that the operational principle of the brain is holistic, parallel, and analog, with self-organizing tendencies; or, that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This concept will recur later in the chapter, under the term "Triptych". Additionally, the introduction of Dr Hilarius, a German psychologist, will strengthen this association. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Metzger Wikipedia: Metzger][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology Wikipedia: Gestalt].

*[http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metzgerpost Metzgerpost] ("butcher post") was an early type of mail service in the western regions of the Holy Roman Empire, superseded by the Thurn und Taxis-dominated imperial system. 

*Compare '''Meztger''' to [http://www.csp.org/chrestomathy/unfolding_self.html '''Ralph Metzner'''], co-author with [http://www.timothyleary.us/ '''Timothy Leary'''] and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ram_Dass '''Richard Alpert'''], also known as [http://www.ramdass.org/ '''Ram Dass'''], of [http://tinyurl.com/337xqe '''The Psychedelic Experience''']. 

a: 10, b: 2 - '''Kinneret-Among-The-Pines''' 
Fictional California town that Oedipa Maas resides in.
*Yam Kinneret (Sea of Kinnereth) is the modern Hebrew name for the Sea of Galilee, Israel's largest freshwater lake. Upon the shores of Galilee, much of the ministry of Christ was said to have occurred, among which include His Sermon on the Mount, as well as the miracles of His walking on water, calming a storm, and feeding the multitude with five loaves of bread and two fish. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_of_Galilee Wikipedia]. During the years Pynchon was working on 'The Crying of Lot 49, College buddy [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Fariña '''Richard Farina'''] lived in [http://ci.carmel.ca.us/ '''Carmel by the Sea''']. However, the clue that Mucho Maas worked “further along the Peninsula” points more to the regions near Palo Alto & Stanford, such as San Mateo.

a: 10, b: 2 - '''settecento''' 
Italian: seven hundred. It is the standard Italian term for the 18th century (the 1700s). It is used in English mostly to refer to art-historical and architectural movements and styles of that period. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settecento Wikipedia]

a: 10, b: 2 - '''variorum''' 
A work containing all known varients of a text whereby all variations and emendations are set side-by-side to track textual decisions. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variorum Wikipedia]

a: 10, b: 2 - '''Vivaldi Kazoo Concerto''' 
Kazoos are mentioned many time in Pynchon's novels. ''Gravity's Rainbow'' similarly references "Haydn's "Kazoo" Quartet in G-Flat Minor, Op. 76". [http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Pages_706-717 GR, 711].

a: 10, b: 2 - '''Boyd Beaver''' 
A typical Pynchonesque name that appears just this once.
*The name bears a resemblance to Zoyd Wheeler, the protagonist of ''Vineland'', though he played the keyboard.

a: 11, b: 2 - '''Wendell ("Mucho") Maas''' 
"Mucho más" is common Spanish phrase, meaning "much more." Mucho Maas reappears in [http://vineland.pynchonwiki.com/wiki ''Vineland''].

:''Maas'' is also Dutch for ''mesh'' and ''loophole'' (in the architectural and the figurative sense as well), which may be related to the book's treatement of webs or networks.

:The near-likeness "mass" becomes an important word/concept in ''Gravity's Rainbow'' and, especially, ''Against The Day'', although the associative meanings do not seem to mesh! [[User:MKOHUT|MKOHUT]] 13:42, 11 July 2007 (PDT)

a: 11, b: 2 - '''Pachuco dialect''' 
Pachucos were Mexican American youth who developed their own subculture during the 1930s and 1940s in the Southwestern United States. They wore distinctive clothes (such as Zoot Suits) and spoke their own dialect (Caló). [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachuco Wikipedia] Zoot suits appear a few times in [http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ ''Gravity's Rainbow''].

a: 11, b: 2 - '''chingas and maricones''' 
Spanish slang words. "Chingas" is a conjugation of the word "chingar" (slang for "to fuck"), translating "chingas" as "[you] fuck" (or, better, just a plural of "chinga"). "Maricones" refers to the term "maricón" (based on the word "marica" or "male homosexual") which is equivalent to the English insult "faggot".

a: 11, b: 3 - '''Lamont Cranston''' 
[[image:The-Shadow_1939.jpg|right|thumb|150px|The Shadow comic]]One identity adopted by The Shadow, a character of pulp fiction, radio shows, and comic books. Cranston was a wealthy young man about town. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow Wikipedia]

a: 11, b: 3 - '''Commissioner Weston... Professor Quackenbush''' 
Police Commissioner Weston was the Shadow's friend and running mate. There is a Professor Quackenbush in two Three Stooges shorts "Half-Wits Holiday" and "Pies and Guys", as well as a Dr. Hackenbush in the Marx Bros. film, ''A Day at the Races''.

a: 13 b: 4 -'''I don't believe in any of it, Oed''' 
The short form of Oedipa "Oed" means "boring" in German.

a: 13, b: 4 - '''Mucho shaved his ... throw them further off''' 
All of the references in this section refer to the stereotypical (often Italian) used car salesman with greased back hair, a very short mustache, and huge lapels on his suit.

[[Image:jacklemmon.jpg|120px|thumb|left|Jack Lemmon and his hair in the 60s]]a: 13, b: 4 - '''used only water, combing it like Jack Lemmon''' 
American comedic actor (1925-2001).

a: 13, b: 4 - '''creampuff''' 
A very well maintained used car. 

a: 16, b: 7 - '''Dr. Hilarius, her shrink or psychotherapist''' 
[[Image:Hilarius.jpg|right|thumb|St. Hilarius|150px]]Pope Saint Hilarius was Pope of the Roman Catholic Church from 461 to 468. He was canonized as a saint after his death. As archdeacon under Pope Leo I, he fought vigorously for the rights of the Roman See and vigorously opposed the condemnation of Flavian of Constantinople at the Second Council of Ephesus in 449 to settle the question of Eutyches. According to a letter to the Empress Pulcheria, collected among the letter of Leo I, Hilarus apologizes for not delivering to her the pope's letter after the synod.

Shrink is a shortened form of headshrinker, which is '50s slang. The OED cites 'shrink' in this text of 1966, as the first recorded written use of it as a slang term. Which must be why Pynchon defined it in the text.

a: 17, b: 8 - '''LSD-25, mescaline, psilocybin''' 
These hallucinogenic drugs are also mentioned in ''Gravity's Rainbow'', while LSD gets a special mention as an agent of spiritual awareness in ''Vineland''. See notes for [http://cl49.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Chapter_6 '''She Loves You''] on page a: 143, b: 117 of CoL49 wiki, where Mucho Maas is expressing ideas about psychedelics concordant with the writings of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldous_Huxley '''Aldous Huxley'''.] Peyote's magical potential is rendered on pages 392-394 of Against the Day, in wholy favorable terms, with the connection of divinatory powers and envisioning agents such as [http://www.britannica.com/eb/topic-405965/Native-American-Church '''Hikuli'''] displayed in a very favorable light.

It remains an open question as to whether and to what extent Pynchon took or was influenced by them. ''See also'' "Smoking Dope with Thomas Pynchon: A Sixties Memoir" ([http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Smoking_Dope_with_Thomas_Pynchon link]).

a: 18, b:8 - '''lapses from orthodoxy''' 
Orthodox Freudian psychotherapy involved the therapist literally trying not to impose himself at all on the patient. That's why the therapist is often shown sitting behind the patient. The goal is to be a blank canvas and have the patient paint his problems on the therapist, thereby bringing them into consciousness.

[[Image:rorschach1.jpg|150px|thumb|right|The first of the ten cards in the Rorschach inkblot test]]
a: 18, b: 8 - '''Rorschach blot''' 
The Rorschach inkblot test is a method of psychological evaluation. Psychologists use this test to try to examine the personality characteristics and emotional functioning of their patients. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rorschach_inkblot_test Wikipedia]

[[Image:rorschachcomic1.png|thumb|150px|right|Rorschach, a comic book character in ''Watchmen'']]
a: 18, b: 8 - '''a face is symmetrical like a Rorschach blot''' 
In the graphic novel, ''Watchmen'', written by Alan Moore, there is a character named Rorschach who wears a mask with a Rorscach blot on the front. Moore is a self-professed Pynchon fan: he referenced ''V.'' in ''V for Vendetta'' and has mentioned ''Gravity's Rainbow'' in interviews. It is possible, not to say probable, that Moore was inspired by this line.

a: 18, b: 8 - '''TAT picture''' 
The TAT is popularly known as the picture interpretation technique because it uses a standard series of 31 provocative yet ambiguous pictures about which the subject must tell a story. It was developed by American psychologists in the 1930s. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thematic_Apperception_Test Wikipedia]

a: 18, b: 9 - '''Fu-Manchu''' 
Dr. Fu Manchu is a fictional character, an evil genius of Chinese origin, who first featured in a series of novels by Birmingham author Sax Rohmer during the first half of the 20th century. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu_Manchu Wikipedia]

a: 18, b: 9 - '''Perry Mason''' 
a fictional defense attorney who originally appeared in detective fiction by Erle Stanley Gardner. Mason was portrayed by Raymond Burr in a television series which ran on CBS from 1957 to 1966. The typical plot involves Perry Mason unmasking the actual murderer in a final dramatic courtroom showdown. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Mason Wikipedia]

a: 19, b: 9 - '''''The Profession v. Perry Mason...''''' 
Roseman may be trying to undermine Perry Mason by arguing that the dramatic courtroom twists in the TV show are actually uncommon in the American legal system.

[[Image:remediosvaro.jpg|thumb|175px|''Bornando el manto terrestre'', 1961|left]]
a: 21, b: 11 - '''Bornando el Manto Terrestre''' 
Remedios Varo (1908 - 1963) was a surrealist painter. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remedios_Varo Wikipedia]

Bill Brown [http://www.notbored.org/crying.html notes] that "Pynchon saw Bordando el Manto Terrestre when, as part of the first full retrospective of the painter's work, it was displayed at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City in 1964, a year after her death at the age of 55. Painted in 1961, el Manto (oil on masonite, roughly 40 by 48 inches) is the central panel in an autobiographical triptych. It is possible that Pynchon, writing ''Lot 49'' in 1965, recalled the painting from memory or incomplete notes, and not with a reproduction of it set in front of him. He gets ''a lot'' wrong." --[[User:Dezama125|Dezama125]] ([[User talk:Dezama125|talk]]) 12:45, 1 January 2013 (PST)Brown is quoting Janet A. Kaplan, author of ''Remedios Varo: Unexpected Joureys'' about when Pynchon probably saw the painting. I mention that because Brown's article gets most of what he claims Pynchon got wrong wrong. (I have added italics to "a lot" per Brown's original, so that the reader may get some sense of his wit.) I will adopt the numbering of Brown's points.

1. First, Brown makes the mistake of forgetting point of view, which is Oedipa's throughout. However you read what's going on in the painting, whether Oedipa gets it right is far less important than what it means to her. The Rapunzel/captive maiden trope, it is clear, preceded seeing the painting for Oedipa. She makes a connection between that idea about herself and the painting---she can't be ''wrong'' to do so. So Brown's statement that "nothing [in the painting] suggest that the girls . . . are prisoners" is hardly to the point. Having proved that "Pynchon" got it wrong, he then goes on to adopt the idea (from Varo, by way of Kaplan) that one of the girls---though not a prisoner---"escapes." . . . Next, while Brown is right that the tower in the painting is not circular (this may be one of the few things he does get right), it is not definitely octagonal. The floor pattern suggests that there are eight sides, but the the fact that there are six women embroidering, and the small tower in the foreground, which seems to be a miniature twin of the main tower, looks hexagonal, at least raise the possibility that it is six-sided. Finally, of the two faces visible, Brown says that they are "clearly ''smiling''." I leave it to the reader to decide if that is right---to me one of them has a very slight smile, and one looks merely neutral, as if concentrating on her work.

2. I don't see what's wrong with the term "slit windows." It's not patent that someone in the room couldn't see out of them if the fabric of the mantle of the earth wasn't also being fed out of them. You couldn't see much, true, because they are ''slits'', but does that mean they aren't ''windows''? If Kaplan is referring to the slits, as Brown suggests, when she mentions "battlements," I think ''that'' is a misleading term, but I'm not sure whether the error is hers or Brown's. (Battlements are those notches in top of a medieval castle towers, whose function was to allow people to look out (!) from behind a protecting wall as well as to be able to shoot arrows at an enemy surrounding the castle.) I'm afraid the whole discussion of the windows seems as though he is trying to score points against Pynchon.

3. Brown doesn't see the fabric spilling out of the slits as " 'filling' ''any'' void, nor does it manage to 'contain' the whole world." Again, his reading of the image is tendentious. The black clouds that form the background of the painting surely could represent "the void"; and the fact that the embroidered fabric falls away from the tower into a spherical shape suggest that the world is being pictured. Anyway, the title refers to the "earth's mantle" (''el manto terrestre'')---what is the mistake in assuming that the earth is the world? (Brown's citing the other meaning of ''bordando''---circumnavigating as well as embroidering---while worth pondering, seems to be a non sequitur.) His reading of the bodies of water as filling gaps in the embroidery done by the young women is not the only way to view the image: If they are embroidering all of the features that the elaborate the plain stuff of the mantle (buildings, people, trees, etc.), the bodies of water could just as well be their work. If the young woman at the right can plot her escape by embroidering an image of herself reunited with her lover, then one has to consider whether it is merely a message she is sending to him or whether she is ''creating the world'' in which she will rejoin him, as is seen in the next panel of the triptych.

4. Brown is correct that Pynchon doesn't mention the other two figures in the painting, the central figure who holds a book and stirs the vessel from which flows the thread that the yound women use to embroider, and the small figure playing a wind instrument in an alcove in the background. (By the way, Brown is wrong that the instrument may be a recorder. It could either be a shawm or a cornett, the first, a medieval ancestor of the oboe, the second, a kind of trumpet made of wood covered with leather.) Clearly, the other figures aren't mentioned because Oedipa identifies with the embroiderers. The text doesn't mention the ship sailing on a body of water in the distance or any number of other details; it doesn't describe the other panels of the triptych. I hope not to belabor the point, but again, what's most important to the reader is what's most important to Oedipa. Brown does notice the echo of the shape of the alcove in the background with that of the imaginary window that allows us to see inside the tower and its effect of. Though his point that the window is "dream-like" rather than simply a visual convention may seem tendentious applied to the painting, the sense of receding, echoing frames is alluded to later in the book, when Oedipa meets Genghis Cohen (p. a94), and in the ''book'', I agree, it does acquire a dreamlike quality.

All in all, Brown's conclusion seems wrongheaded: "''None'' of this is adequately captured, indeed, most of it changed to ''the opposite'' of what it had previously been, by Pynchon's recollection."

[[image:bubble-shades.jpg|thumb|Bubble Shades|120px|right]]
a:21, b:11 - '''she wore dark green bubble shades''' 
This is the sixties, after all...

{{CL49 PbP}}

Chapter 1

2013-01-01T18:39:30Z

Dezama125:

{{CL49 PbP Text}}

Title Page: '''The Crying of Lot 49''' 
In property auctions, numbered "lots" of property or tangible objects are "cried" by an auctioneer.
*There's a line in ''Ulysses'' that bears an odd coincidence to the title: "The lacquey by the door of Dillon's auctionrooms shook his handbell twice again and viewed himself in the chalked mirror of the cabinet. Dilly Dedalus, loitering by the curbstone, heard the beats of the bell, the cries of the auctioneer within. Four and nine. Those lovely curtains." (Ulysses, 304) Given that ''Gravity's Rainbow'', written at the same time as CoL49, contains numerous Joyce references (mainly in the character of Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck), it's possible that this is a nod.

*For a discussion of some other things the title may or may not allude to, see the article [[7 x 7|'''''7 x 7''''']].

a: 9, b: 1 - '''Oedipa''' 
Oedipus was the mythical king of Thebes who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oedipus Wikipedia] Oedipus the King, aka Oedipus Rex, is a Greek tragedy written by Sophocles and first performed in 428 BC. Many critics, including Aristotle, consider it the greatest tragedy ever written. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oedipus_the_King Wikipedia]

*Whether Oedipa has anything to do with Oedipus is an open question. Some critics find zero connection and note that the name indicates that names are only words, and not necessarily full of meaning (mysteries without answers being a theme in CoL49). Others have teased various interpretations from Sophocles' play to connect its protagonist to Pynchon's. So far, no single explanation is remotely concrete or thoroughly convincing. [[User:Bleakhaus|Bleakhaus]]

*''See also'' Emma Miller, "The Naming of Oedipa Maas: Feminizing the Divine Pursuit of Knowledge in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49" ([https://www.pynchon.net/owap/article/view/12/67 Link])

*A number of fragments further discussing Oedipa's name are in the [[Talk:Chapter_1|Discussion page]].

a: 9, b: 1 - '''Maas''' 
For more discussion of the name, see below.

a: 9, b: 1 - '''kirsch''' 
a clear cherry brandy from Germany. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirsch Wikipedia]
*many references to Germany, German words or German history run through Chapter 1, and indeed the entire novel. Pynchon scholar David Cowart posits that "Pynchon seems to have had a German period, a post-German period, and a neo-Continental or global period. During his German phase he produced his first three novels... His next work, the long-awaited ''Vineland'', represents a new phase in which the almost obsessive attention to German more seems to have faded." ''Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History'' (2012), at p. 59.

a: 9, b: 1 - '''Pierce Inverarity''' 
Inverarity is a village in Scotland.
*The name sounds a bit like a portmanteau of "inverse polarity" (electronic terminology appears in Pynchon's short stories and later in CoL49).
*Perhaps worth noting that when Pynchon & Company (an actual East Coast Brokerage house owned in part by Pynchon's relations) fell apart in 1931, E.A. Pierce (a larger financial institution) picked up that company's holdings. See [http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F50910FE3E5F11738DDDAC0A94DC405B818FF1D3 New York Times April 25, 1931].

a: 9, b: 1 - '''California real estate mogul''' 
Many of the terms and concepts in ''The Crying of Lot 49'' are derived from laws concerning property and investment.
*The ancestors of Thomas Ruggles Pynchon [apparentlty the fifth Pynchon to be so named] had much involvement in real estate and property laws. See "the Petition of the Springfield Aquaduct" ([http://books.google.com/books?id=asAOAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA51&dq=Stearns+pynchon+springfield&as_brr=1#PPP1,M1 Link]), pages 44 - 53. Also see "Popular Law Library" [http://tinyurl.com/2gb8aa at page 95].

a: 10, b: 1 - '''Mazatlán''' 
City in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, located on the Pacific coast of Mexico, east from the southernmost tip of the Baja California peninsula.
*Perhaps worth mentioning that a large wave of German immigrants arrived in the mid 1800s, developing Mazatlán into a thriving commercial seaport. Additionally, Mazatlán played a role in the California gold rush, with people traveling by boat from Mazatlán to San Francisco.
*Pynchon apparently lived in Mexico off and on in the 1960s and 70s.

a: 10, b: 1 - '''Cornell University''' 
Pynchon attended Cornell, where he studied engineering physics, but left after two years to serve in the U.S. Navy. In 1957, Pynchon returned with a focus in English, a BA he received in 1959. "The Small Rain", Pynchon's first published story, was printed in the ''Cornell Writer'' in May, 1959.

a: 10, b: 1 - '''Bartók Concerto for Orchestra''' 
Five-movement musical work finished in 1943 by Hungarian composer Béla Bartók (1881 - 1945), after his native exile to the United States in response to the rise of the Nazi party. Bartók is one of a number of references to the theme of "exile" in this first chapter.

*The critic Charles Hollander suggests that the fourth movement is neither "dry" nor "disconsolate," and that Pynchon deliberately reversed the facts to bring attention to Bartók's status as a political exile. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concerto_for_Orchestra_(Bart%C3%B3k)#Fourth_movement Wikipedia: Bartok Concerto] [http://www.vheissu.info/art/art_eng_49_hollander.htm Hollander Essay]
*"Dry and disconsolate" are not facts but opinions, although the consensus opinion might be "facts". Pynchon may have described the movement as it sounded to him (or his character).
*For more, see the [[Talk:Chapter_1|Discussion page]].

a: 10, b: 1 - '''Jay Gould''' 
(1836 – 1892) Infamous American financier (known as the "Mephistopheles of Wall Street"), who became a leading American railroad builder and speculator in the mid 19th century. In 1869, the Fisk-Gould Scandal (also known as Black Friday) spread financial panic as a result of Gould and fellow financier James Fisk's efforts to corner the gold market. Further political scandals and unfair dealings have cemented his reputation (both throughout his life and during the century after his death) as one of the most unethical of the 19th century American robber barons. It is worth note that the bust of Jay Gould is the "only ikon in the house" of Pierce Inverarity, and that Oedipa expressed the fear that it (on a shelf over the bed) would "someday topple on them". [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Gould Wikipedia: Gould] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_%281869%29 Wikipedia: Black Friday]

<div id="warpe">a: 10, b: 2 - '''Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek and McMingus'''</div>
Law firm representing Pierce Inverarity.

*"Warpe," possible reference to the municipality of Warpe located in the district of Nienburg, in Lower Saxony, Germany (Germany and Nazism being referenced thoroughly in Chapter 1). --[[User:Dezama125|Dezama125]] ([[User talk:Dezama125|talk]]) 10:39, 1 January 2013 (PST) Please see my addition to ''Kubitschek'' below. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warpe Wikipedia]

*"Kubitschek" is possibly drawn from Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira (1902 - 1976), a Brazilian social reformer and 24th President of Brazil (1956 - 1961) who went into a self-imposed exile after a military coup d'état, which had later been claimed to have been taking as a preemptive measure to deter an "inevitable communist revolution" (the coup having been tacitly (and directly) assisted and supported by the United States government and the CIA). Further possible references to "exile" as well as United States foreign policy. --[[User:Dezama125|Dezama125]] ([[User talk:Dezama125|talk]]) 10:39, 1 January 2013 (PST)Also, in some pictures, Kubitschek bears a strong resemblance to Bela Lugosi, so the first two dialects Pierce does in his phone call, Transylvanian and Negro, relate to the last two names of the partners of the lawfirm representing him. The phone call may have started from the comic idea of pretending to be calling from the office of the lawfirm: "I'll pretend to be Kubitschek, then McMingus will get on the phone." Of course, this exemplifies Pierce's ''warped'' sense of humor (which Oedipa shares---see her comment immediately preceding the reference to the lawfirm, "You're so sick, Oedipa.") ''Wistful'' well describes her mood during the day after receiving the letter. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juscelino_Kubitschek Wikipedia: Kubitschek][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_1964_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat Wikipedia: 1964 Brazilian Coup]

*"McMingus" is a probable nod toward Jazz legend Charles Mingus (1922 - 1979). Pynchon is a lifelong Jazz fan, and references Jazz in most (all?) of his works. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Mingus Wikipedia]

*Pynchon's penchant for absurd, punning law firm names is continued in [http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=S#salitieri ''Gravity's Rainbow''] with Salitieri, Poore, Nash, De Brutus and Short.

a: 10, b: 2 - '''Metzger''' 
Co-executor of Inverarity's will and signatory of the letter Oedipa receives in Chapter 1. Metzger is German for "butcher".
*Could also be a reference to Wolfgang Metzger (1899 - 1979), a German psychologist who served as one of the main representatives of Gestalt psychology, a theory that proposes that the operational principle of the brain is holistic, parallel, and analog, with self-organizing tendencies; or, that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This concept will recur later in the chapter, under the term "Triptych". Additionally, the introduction of Dr Hilarius, a German psychologist, will strengthen this association. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Metzger Wikipedia: Metzger][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology Wikipedia: Gestalt].

*[http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metzgerpost Metzgerpost] ("butcher post") was an early type of mail service in the western regions of the Holy Roman Empire, superseded by the Thurn und Taxis-dominated imperial system. 

*Compare '''Meztger''' to [http://www.csp.org/chrestomathy/unfolding_self.html '''Ralph Metzner'''], co-author with [http://www.timothyleary.us/ '''Timothy Leary'''] and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ram_Dass '''Richard Alpert'''], also known as [http://www.ramdass.org/ '''Ram Dass'''], of [http://tinyurl.com/337xqe '''The Psychedelic Experience''']. 

a: 10, b: 2 - '''Kinneret-Among-The-Pines''' 
Fictional California town that Oedipa Maas resides in.
*Yam Kinneret (Sea of Kinnereth) is the modern Hebrew name for the Sea of Galilee, Israel's largest freshwater lake. Upon the shores of Galilee, much of the ministry of Christ was said to have occurred, among which include His Sermon on the Mount, as well as the miracles of His walking on water, calming a storm, and feeding the multitude with five loaves of bread and two fish. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_of_Galilee Wikipedia]. During the years Pynchon was working on 'The Crying of Lot 49, College buddy [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Fariña '''Richard Farina'''] lived in [http://ci.carmel.ca.us/ '''Carmel by the Sea''']. However, the clue that Mucho Maas worked “further along the Peninsula” points more to the regions near Palo Alto & Stanford, such as San Mateo.

a: 10, b: 2 - '''settecento''' 
Italian: seven hundred. It is the standard Italian term for the 18th century (the 1700s). It is used in English mostly to refer to art-historical and architectural movements and styles of that period. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settecento Wikipedia]

a: 10, b: 2 - '''variorum''' 
A work containing all known varients of a text whereby all variations and emendations are set side-by-side to track textual decisions. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variorum Wikipedia]

a: 10, b: 2 - '''Vivaldi Kazoo Concerto''' 
Kazoos are mentioned many time in Pynchon's novels. ''Gravity's Rainbow'' similarly references "Haydn's "Kazoo" Quartet in G-Flat Minor, Op. 76". [http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Pages_706-717 GR, 711].

a: 10, b: 2 - '''Boyd Beaver''' 
A typical Pynchonesque name that appears just this once.
*The name bears a resemblance to Zoyd Wheeler, the protagonist of ''Vineland'', though he played the keyboard.

a: 11, b: 2 - '''Wendell ("Mucho") Maas''' 
"Mucho más" is common Spanish phrase, meaning "much more." Mucho Maas reappears in [http://vineland.pynchonwiki.com/wiki ''Vineland''].

:''Maas'' is also Dutch for ''mesh'' and ''loophole'' (in the architectural and the figurative sense as well), which may be related to the book's treatement of webs or networks.

:The near-likeness "mass" becomes an important word/concept in ''Gravity's Rainbow'' and, especially, ''Against The Day'', although the associative meanings do not seem to mesh! [[User:MKOHUT|MKOHUT]] 13:42, 11 July 2007 (PDT)

a: 11, b: 2 - '''Pachuco dialect''' 
Pachucos were Mexican American youth who developed their own subculture during the 1930s and 1940s in the Southwestern United States. They wore distinctive clothes (such as Zoot Suits) and spoke their own dialect (Caló). [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachuco Wikipedia] Zoot suits appear a few times in [http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ ''Gravity's Rainbow''].

a: 11, b: 2 - '''chingas and maricones''' 
Spanish slang words. "Chingas" is a conjugation of the word "chingar" (slang for "to fuck"), translating "chingas" as "[you] fuck" (or, better, just a plural of "chinga"). "Maricones" refers to the term "maricón" (based on the word "marica" or "male homosexual") which is equivalent to the English insult "faggot".

a: 11, b: 3 - '''Lamont Cranston''' 
[[image:The-Shadow_1939.jpg|right|thumb|150px|The Shadow comic]]One identity adopted by The Shadow, a character of pulp fiction, radio shows, and comic books. Cranston was a wealthy young man about town. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow Wikipedia]

a: 11, b: 3 - '''Commissioner Weston... Professor Quackenbush''' 
Police Commissioner Weston was the Shadow's friend and running mate. There is a Professor Quackenbush in two Three Stooges shorts "Half-Wits Holiday" and "Pies and Guys", as well as a Dr. Hackenbush in the Marx Bros. film, ''A Day at the Races''.

a: 13 b: 4 -'''I don't believe in any of it, Oed''' 
The short form of Oedipa "Oed" means "boring" in German.

a: 13, b: 4 - '''Mucho shaved his ... throw them further off''' 
All of the references in this section refer to the stereotypical (often Italian) used car salesman with greased back hair, a very short mustache, and huge lapels on his suit.

[[Image:jacklemmon.jpg|120px|thumb|left|Jack Lemmon and his hair in the 60s]]a: 13, b: 4 - '''used only water, combing it like Jack Lemmon''' 
American comedic actor (1925-2001).

a: 13, b: 4 - '''creampuff''' 
A very well maintained used car. 

a: 16, b: 7 - '''Dr. Hilarius, her shrink or psychotherapist''' 
[[Image:Hilarius.jpg|right|thumb|St. Hilarius|150px]]Pope Saint Hilarius was Pope of the Roman Catholic Church from 461 to 468. He was canonized as a saint after his death. As archdeacon under Pope Leo I, he fought vigorously for the rights of the Roman See and vigorously opposed the condemnation of Flavian of Constantinople at the Second Council of Ephesus in 449 to settle the question of Eutyches. According to a letter to the Empress Pulcheria, collected among the letter of Leo I, Hilarus apologizes for not delivering to her the pope's letter after the synod.

Shrink is a shortened form of headshrinker, which is '50s slang. The OED cites 'shrink' in this text of 1966, as the first recorded written use of it as a slang term. Which must be why Pynchon defined it in the text.

a: 17, b: 8 - '''LSD-25, mescaline, psilocybin''' 
These hallucinogenic drugs are also mentioned in ''Gravity's Rainbow'', while LSD gets a special mention as an agent of spiritual awareness in ''Vineland''. See notes for [http://cl49.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Chapter_6 '''She Loves You''] on page a: 143, b: 117 of CoL49 wiki, where Mucho Maas is expressing ideas about psychedelics concordant with the writings of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldous_Huxley '''Aldous Huxley'''.] Peyote's magical potential is rendered on pages 392-394 of Against the Day, in wholy favorable terms, with the connection of divinatory powers and envisioning agents such as [http://www.britannica.com/eb/topic-405965/Native-American-Church '''Hikuli'''] displayed in a very favorable light.

It remains an open question as to whether and to what extent Pynchon took or was influenced by them. ''See also'' "Smoking Dope with Thomas Pynchon: A Sixties Memoir" ([http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Smoking_Dope_with_Thomas_Pynchon link]).

a: 18, b:8 - '''lapses from orthodoxy''' 
Orthodox Freudian psychotherapy involved the therapist literally trying not to impose himself at all on the patient. That's why the therapist is often shown sitting behind the patient. The goal is to be a blank canvas and have the patient paint his problems on the therapist, thereby bringing them into consciousness.

[[Image:rorschach1.jpg|150px|thumb|right|The first of the ten cards in the Rorschach inkblot test]]
a: 18, b: 8 - '''Rorschach blot''' 
The Rorschach inkblot test is a method of psychological evaluation. Psychologists use this test to try to examine the personality characteristics and emotional functioning of their patients. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rorschach_inkblot_test Wikipedia]

[[Image:rorschachcomic1.png|thumb|150px|right|Rorschach, a comic book character in ''Watchmen'']]
a: 18, b: 8 - '''a face is symmetrical like a Rorschach blot''' 
In the graphic novel, ''Watchmen'', written by Alan Moore, there is a character named Rorschach who wears a mask with a Rorscach blot on the front. Moore is a self-professed Pynchon fan: he referenced ''V.'' in ''V for Vendetta'' and has mentioned ''Gravity's Rainbow'' in interviews. It is possible, not to say probable, that Moore was inspired by this line.

a: 18, b: 8 - '''TAT picture''' 
The TAT is popularly known as the picture interpretation technique because it uses a standard series of 31 provocative yet ambiguous pictures about which the subject must tell a story. It was developed by American psychologists in the 1930s. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thematic_Apperception_Test Wikipedia]

a: 18, b: 9 - '''Fu-Manchu''' 
Dr. Fu Manchu is a fictional character, an evil genius of Chinese origin, who first featured in a series of novels by Birmingham author Sax Rohmer during the first half of the 20th century. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu_Manchu Wikipedia]

a: 18, b: 9 - '''Perry Mason''' 
a fictional defense attorney who originally appeared in detective fiction by Erle Stanley Gardner. Mason was portrayed by Raymond Burr in a television series which ran on CBS from 1957 to 1966. The typical plot involves Perry Mason unmasking the actual murderer in a final dramatic courtroom showdown. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Mason Wikipedia]

a: 19, b: 9 - '''''The Profession v. Perry Mason...''''' 
Roseman may be trying to undermine Perry Mason by arguing that the dramatic courtroom twists in the TV show are actually uncommon in the American legal system.

[[Image:remediosvaro.jpg|thumb|175px|''Bornando el manto terrestre'', 1961|left]]
a: 21, b: 11 - '''Bornando el Manto Terrestre''' 
Remedios Varo (1908 - 1963) was a surrealist painter. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remedios_Varo Wikipedia]

Bill Brown [http://www.notbored.org/crying.html notes] that "Pynchon saw Bordando el Manto Terrestre when, as part of the first full retrospective of the painter's work, it was displayed at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City in 1964, a year after her death at the age of 55. Painted in 1961, el Manto (oil on masonite, roughly 40 by 48 inches) is the central panel in an autobiographical triptych. It is possible that Pynchon, writing ''Lot 49'' in 1965, recalled the painting from memory or incomplete notes, and not with a reproduction of it set in front of him. He gets a lot wrong."

[[image:bubble-shades.jpg|thumb|Bubble Shades|120px|right]]
a:21, b:11 - '''she wore dark green bubble shades''' 
This is the sixties, after all...

{{CL49 PbP}}

Talk:Chapter 1

2013-01-01T18:06:54Z

Dezama125: /* Bartok */

==Oedipa's name, further discussion==

:Some suggest the Oedipus reference is to an incident earlier in the king's career, having to do, in fact, with the way he became king of Thebes. Oedipus famously solved the riddle of the Sphinx and heroically freed Thebes of her curse (cf. the deeds of young Theseus, the labors of Herakles, etc.). Sophocles' play has an older Oedipus finally figuring out the riddle of his own birth, over-confident in his own ability to figure things out. Oedipus is the riddle-solver, by definition. And doesn't it make sense to think of Oedipa as a riddle-solver? Q.E.D. Now the riddle is sometimes said to be "what walks on four feet in the morning, two feet in the afternoon, and three feet at night?" The answer is man (baby=4; man=2; old man with cane = 3), which is where this gets interesting: one of the legendary precepts engraved on the temple of Apollo at Delphi is "gnothi seauton", "know yourself". This almost certainly is taken to mean not (as we might tend to think) that we should discover ourselves as individuals, but rather that we should know our own nature, i.e. the nature of mankind, i.e. "know that you are mortal". Oedipus solves the riddle of the Sphinx with the answer "man", but he doesn't know himself as a man, fallible and doomed--count no man blessed until he's dead, Greeks were fond of saying--not until the peak of his powers, walking on two legs, so to speak. His story doesn't end there: he wanders the earth blind after putting out his eyes (death would be too good for himself), and eventually as an old man settles on Athens as a place to die, knowing that his spirit will be a powerful force in the land of his death (see Soph., Oedipus at Colonus). This is the essence of a hero for the Greeks, a mortal who remains powerful in death, as is reflected in their practice of hero-cult offerings at grave sites (compare, say, Xtian saints' relics, bones thought to have power). As an old man, Oedipus is like a holy prophet (compare the blind sage Tieresias, or the legendary blind poet Homer), a man who sees without eyes (compare what Paul Atreides becomes in the second Dune novel). So, does Oedipa ascend to some deeper understanding by the end of the novel? Wait and see.

:Oedipa's name is probably pronounced in the American fashion, ED-i-pa, not British fashion, EED-i-pa, because Mucho uses the short form "Oed," which almost has to be ED.

:A further comic level in the name Oedipa: It looks like a feminization of ''Oedipus,'' which is a Latin name derived from the Greek ''Oidipous.'' While ''-pus'' has the look of a word-ending that might alternate between masculine and feminine forms, like proper names ''Julius/Julia'' or adjectives ''sanctus/sanctum/sancta,'' in fact it stands in for Greek ''-pous,'' meaning "foot," a form that doesn't alternate. (All feet are the same gender no matter who's wearing them.) Whoever coined the name Oedipa pretended to know a little more than they really did.

Additionally, there is the Freudian concept of the Oedipal Complex. Basically, a son loves his mother (in an unconscious sexual way) and is jealous of his father and wants to kill him and have his mom all to himself. The daughter version of this is called the Electra Complex. In the Electra Complex the daughter is upset that she has no penis and is jealous of her father's penis and becomes angry at him ("penis envy").

Psychological concepts run rampant throughout '''''The Crying of Lot 49''''', usually parodied as if they were being reflected back in a funhouse mirror. When the novel was issued in 1966, many parodies concerning psychotherapy were in progress, noteably 1967's inspired [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062153/ '''The Presidents's Analyst''']. At the center of this parody, the patient saves the doctor from himself.

Viewing [http://classics.mit.edu/Sophocles/oedipus.html '''''Oedipus Rex'''''] as an early [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whodunit '''Whodunit"'''], as our author does in '''''CoL49''''', one remembers that the plot resolution of 'Oedipus Rex' reveals our proto-typical gumshoe realizing he was the [http://m-w.com/dictionary/perp '''perp''''] all along, Oedipus is the detective that swears vengance on Oedipus the criminal. Oedipus is blinded by his revelation. Revelation, Illumination, the "Knowing" that came to so many who took on hip new therapys in the '60's, sometimes the blindness that came from seeing too much, all elements in the story. . . .

== Bartok==
Hollander's reference to Bartók is rather superficial. Most Hungarian listeners can identify the "serenade theme" in Movement Four as the chorus of a popular irredentist song, nostalgic enough as it was written after Hungary's dismemberment in the Treaty of Trianon (1920), when Transylvania was attached to Romania (see the reference to the "Transylvanian Consulate" on the next page). So even if not "dry", it definitely sounds "disconsolate", an expression of desperate homesickness. Musicologists cannot quite pin down why Bartók chose to paraphrase such a trivial song; the most recent theory is that by giving it a Romanian rhythmic twist, he expressed his nostalgia for the multicultural Greater Hungary thad had been lost forever. (Sorry but I can only give a Hungarian link; [http://www.muzsika.net/cikknezo.php3?cikk_id=2089 the musical sheet is at the bottom].) I think the main theme here is ''intrusion'' rather than ''exile'' as the serenade tune is disrupted by the Shostakovichian "drunken gang".

The emotional impact (affect) of the tune in question---presumably the first subject of the fourth movement, first three pitches E, F-sharp, A-sharp---is more to the point than what it might have meant to most Hungarians or to Bartók. Played by several different woodwinds in succession, the adjective ''disconsolate'' is, as Pynchon unusually for a writer usually is on musical matters, exactly right.--[[User:Dezama125|Dezama125]] ([[User talk:Dezama125|talk]]) 10:06, 1 January 2013 (PST)