Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon (1997)
Read Professor Irwin Corey's acceptance speech for Pynchon's 1974 National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow.
Also, have a look at Douglas Kløvedal Lannark's exhaustive documenting of "love" in Gravity's Rainbow.
Etymologies
Amelia & The Italian Waggon-smith
Milk-Maid Amelia runs off with an Italian Waggon-smith and they go to live in Massapequa. Well, Amy Fisher, the Long Island Lolita, was involved with Massapequan Joey Buttafuoco. Buttafuoco was a co-proprietor of an auto-body shop, making him what you might call a "Waggon-Smith." (Ms. Fisher met him at his body-shop, where her car was being repaired. The body shop, which has now moved or closed, had a pretty good reputation before the Fisher affair.
Baldwin (where the body shop was located), Massapequa, and Ms. Fisher's town of Merrick are all within 20 miles of Pynchon's Glen Cove, Oyster Bay and East Norwich (of which his grandfather was a surveyor), although to a Long Islander, those 20 miles seem like much more. [Thanks to Dave Marc & Eliot Kieval]
Ethelmer
Contributed to the Pynchon List by Spencer Thiel:
2-HydroxyETHYL MERcaptan, also known as beta-mercaptoethanol is a substance that breaks sulfide bonds. It is most commonly used by hairstylists for perms and by molecular biologists. If anyone has ever had a perm, it is the stuff that stinks to high heaven (I think it is what causes rotten eggs to smell). Last year, while working at a research lab at UCLA, I dropped a bottle and the building had to be evacuated b/c of the smell.
This compound is used to denature proteins, thus causing them to lose their structure, activity, etc. The only relevance to Pynchon I can think of is that this compound contributes greatly to the process of entropy.
In response to which Bruce Sublett speculated:
I'll pop for a combination of Old English and Old French: Ethel (AEthel=prince or lordling: OE) and Mer (Fr. "Sea"). Ergo, Elthelmer = "prince of the sea."
Macaroni
From Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable:
A coxcomb (Ital, un maccherone). The word is derived from the Macaroni Club, instituted in London about 1760 by a set of flashy men who had traveled in Italy, and introduced at Almack's subscription table the new-fangled Italian food, macaroni. The Macaronis were exquisite fops; vicious, insolent, fond of gambling, drinking and duelling, and were (c.1773) the curse of Vauxhall Gardens.
Mr. Snow
Contributed by Christine Karatnytsky
Enoch Snow is a the name of one of the secondary characters in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, Carousel. The model of respectable and reliable manhood, Mr. Snow's function as a character is to serve as a foil for the scoundrel Billy Bigelow. Snow is a fisherman who pilots a "round-bottomed boat" (cf. 242.32--a keel is a flat-bottomed boat) and is the object of affection of Carrie Pipperidge, who sings, "When I Marry Mr. Snow."
Tenebrae
From Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable:
(Lat., darkness, gloom). In the Western Church the Mattins and Lauds of the following day sung on the Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of Holy Week. The lights [wicks--GET IT?] of 15 candles are extinguished one by one at the end of each psalm, the last after the Benedictus. The Miserere is then sung in darkness. The ritual goes back to the 8th century and symbolizes dramatically Christ's Passion and Death.
Wicks Cherrycoke
The name "Wicks" could be name-connected with the Wiccans, practitioners of white magic (wicce) in the Middle Ages in Britain. Wicca, or Wicce, was (and is) an ancient religion of love for life and nature. In prehistoric times, people respected the great forces of Nature and celebrated the cycles of the seasons and the moon. They saw divinity in the sun and moon, in the Earth Herself, and in all life. The creative energies of the universe were personified: feminine and masculine principles became Goddesses and Gods. These were not semi-abstract, superhuman figures set apart from nature: they were embodied in earth and sky, women and men, and even plants and animals.
This Wiccan connection resonates nicely with Ethelmer, as there were most likely a number of Wiccan alderman with this or similar names in Britain in the Middle Ages. Of course, there is "LeSpark" to light the fire under Cherrycoke's raconteur-aspect. Tenebrae also derives from these ancient times, before the Age of Reason, when magick reigned.
Zarpazo
A notorious bandit Zarpazo, during "la violencia," a series of internal wars in Colombia from 1946-1965
