PE Check123 Chapter 2 - Thomas Pynchon Wiki | Bleeding Edge

Chapter 2

Revision as of 11:05, 20 September 2013 by Froberger (Talk | contribs)

Please keep these annotations SPOILER-FREE by not revealing information from later pages in the novel.

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Page 9

leading edge
Rhymes with "Bleeding Edge."

LexisNexis, HotBot, AltaVista
Early search engines, before Google became popular.

Page 10

certified badass
In an essay, Pynchon once defined a badass:

"There is a long folk history of this figure, the Badass. He is usually male, and while sometimes earning the quizzical tolerance of women, is almost universally admired by men for two basic virtues: he is Bad, and he is Big. Bad meaning not morally evil, necessarily, more like able to work mischief on a large scale. What is important here is the amplifying of scale, the multiplication of effect." From Pynchon, Is it O.K. to be a Luddite?

hashslingrz
A hash slinger is a cook or food server in a cheap restaurant, especially one who is discourteous or inattentive to customers. However "hash" has a very different meaning on the Internet:

From Webopedia:

Producing hash values for accessing data or for security. A hash value (or simply hash), also called a message digest, is a number generated from a string of text. The hash is substantially smaller than the text itself, and is generated by a formula in such a way that it is extremely unlikely that some other text will produce the same hash value. Hashes play a role in security systems where they're used to ensure that transmitted messages have not been tampered with. The sender generates a hash of the message, encrypts it, and sends it with the message itself. The recipient then decrypts both the message and the hash, produces another hash from the received message, and compares the two hashes. If they're the same, there is a very high probability that the message was transmitted intact. Hashing is also a common method of accessing data records. Consider, for example, a list of names:

  • John Smith
  • Sarah Jones
  • Roger Adams

To create an index, called a hash table, for these records, you would apply a formula to each name to produce a unique numeric value. So you might get something like:

  • 1345873 John smith
  • 3097905 Sarah Jones
  • 4060964 Roger Adams

Then to search for the record containing Sarah Jones, you just need to reapply the formula, which directly yields the index key to the record. This is much more efficient than searching through all the records till the matching record is found.

Page 11

Except maybe for 666
"This calls for wisdom. Let the person who has insight calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man. That number is 666." (Revelation 13:18)

Also, for what it's worth, most biblical scholars agree that 666 is in fact gematria for Nero.

paranoia's the garlic in life's kitchen . . .
Maybe we can add this to the Proverbs for Paranoids in Gravity's Rainbow?

Page 12

Horst Loeffler
"Loeffler" is the German name of a bird, the Eurasian Spoonbill. Wikipedia

Significance = god only knows. Benvolio (talk)

tramp container vessel M/V Aristide Olt
A "tramp" vessel means that a ship has no fixed schedule or published ports of call. "Hungarian" may be a joke as Hungary, a landlocked country, has no ports. Aristide Olt was a stage name used by Bela Lugosi when he made silent films in Hungary. Source The Marshall Islands is an island country located in the northern Pacific Ocean, part of the larger island group of Micronesia.

Page 13

Sony VX2000

Page 14

Duck stamps
Pynchon mentions rare stamps and stamp collecting in many of his works. Bill Gross is a a billionaire fund manager who owns a leading stamp collection. Apparently duck stamp collecting is a real thing. Robert Steiner is an American artist known as the master of duck-themed stamp artwork. An article on Steiner

"the 301 point 83"
301.83 is the classification number of borderline personality disorder in the World Health Organization's International Classification of Diseases (ICD).

Page 16

the Perejil Massacre
Also called the "Parsley Massacre." A 1937 massacre of Haitians living on the border, ordered by Dominican President Rafael Trujillo. It resulted in the death of 20,000 ethnic Haitians.

According to Wikipedia, Dominican soldiers would hold up a sprig of parsley to someone and ask "What is this?"; how the person would pronounce the Spanish word for parsley (perejil) would determine his/her fate. French and Haitian Creole pronounce the word differently than Dominicans, so if the person could pronounce "perejil" with a trill, the person was considered to be Dominican and allowed to live, but if the person pronounced "perejil" without the trill, the person was considered to be Haitian and executed.

Manzanillo Bay . . . Pepillo Salcedo
This is a port in the Dominican Republic.

Love, exciting and new, as they used to sing on The Love Boat
The Love Boat was an American TV show (1977-86) about a cruise ship. The first words of the theme song were "Love, exciting and new . . ." You can hear it here.

Page 17

mitzah
In Judaism, a biblical commandment. Also, more colloquially, a good deed.

real estate injustice
By way of explanation to readers unfamiliar with NYC real estate, many people live in apartment buildings where rent is controlled and managed by co-op boards, which can have large amounts of control over things like transferring the property. NYC is famous for long, protracted legal battles involving co-op boards, divorces, and/or trusts. RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) is a law used to combat organized crime.

Page 18

Eight Circle
in Dante's Inferno, the eighth circle of hell was reserved for those who commit fraud or treachery.

Page 19

Bad Accountant
Perhaps an allusion to the 1992 NC-17 film starring Harvey Kietel, a gritty crime-drama with heavy religious overtones about a corrupt NYC policeman's struggles to change his ways.



Chapter 1
pp. 1-7
Chapter 2
pp. 8-19
Chapter 3
pp. 20-29
Chapter 4
pp. 30-40
Chapter 5
pp. 41-52
Chapter 6
pp. 53-67
Chapter 7
pp. 68-79
Chapter 8
pp. 80-86
Chapter 9
pp. 87-95
Chapter 10
pp. 96-111
Chapter 11
pp. 112-120
Chapter 12
pp. 121-133
Chapter 13
pp. 134-144
Chapter 14
pp. 145-159
Chapter 15
pp. 160-171
Chapter 16
pp. 172-184
Chapter 17
pp. 185-197
Chapter 18
pp. 198-210
Chapter 19
pp. 211-218
Chapter 20
pp. 219-229
Chapter 21
pp. 230-238
Chapter 22
pp. 239-246
Chapter 23
pp. 247-255
Chapter 24
pp. 256-264
Chapter 25
pp. 265-273
Chapter 26
pp. 274-287
Chapter 27
pp. 288-300
Chapter 28
pp. 301-313
Chapter 29
pp. 314-326
Chapter 30
pp. 327-337
Chapter 31
pp. 338-346
Chapter 32
pp. 347-353
Chapter 33
pp. 354-364
Chapter 34
pp. 365-382
Chapter 35
pp. 383-394
Chapter 36
pp. 395-407
Chapter 37
pp. 408-422
Chapter 38
pp. 423-438
Chapter 39
pp. 439-447
Chapter 40
pp. 448-462
Chapter 41
pp. 463-477
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