Difference between revisions of "P"

Latest revision as of 15:24, 6 October 2009

Packer's Inn
31; where Professor Vanderjuice is staying while visiting the Chicago Fair, "right in the middle of the Stockyards"

Paco
375; trumpet player

Padzhitnoff, Igor ("Padzy")
123; Randolph St. Cosmo's "mysterious Russian counterpart"; "semi-mythical aeronaut" 761; disappearance in 1914, 1022; c.f. Alexey Pazhitnov, inventor of Tetris.

Païsi
904; the "archimandrite" (a title in the Eastern Orthodox Church for a superior abbot who has the supervision of several abbots and monasteries appointed by a bishop. Wikipedia entry)

Palacio del Cristal, El
378; in Guanajuato; the London Crystal Palace is mentioned in Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow

Palmer House
30; this refers to the second of three Palmer House Hotels at the corner of State and Monroe Streets in Chicago. The first (known as "The Palmer") was built as a wedding present from Potter Palmer to his bride Bertha Honoré. It opened on September 26, 1871, but burned down just thirteen days later October 9,1871 in the Great Chicago Fire. Palmer immediately set to work rebuilding, and with a $1.7 million signature loan (believed to be the largest individual loan ever secured at the time) constructed one of the fanciest hotels in post-fire Chicago. Designed by architect John M. Van Osdel, the new hotel was seven stories. Its amenities included oversized rooms, luxurious decor, and sumptuous meals served in grand style. The floor of its barber shop was reputedly tiled with silver dollars. Constructed mainly of iron and brick, the hotel was widely advertised as "the World's only Fire Proof Hotel". Famous visitors included presidential hopefuls James Garfield, Grover Cleveland, Ulysses S. Grant, William Jennings Bryan and William McKinley; writers Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde; and actress Sarah Bernhardt. It was completed in 1875. Between 1924 and 1927 a new, larger hotel was built on the same site. Wikipedia entry

Palmer raids
1075; After World War I there was a Red Scare among many Americans. There are many explanations for this: rampant inflation, a tough job market, strikes, race riots, and the public’s need for a scapegoat. When Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s home was bombed he immediately believed it was the Communists and went after all of them. In November of 1919, and December of 1920 the U.S. Department of Justice under Palmer’s direction conducted raids in a number of prominent cities. Many persons were arrested without warrants, and without being given proper rights. Over five thousand people were arrested, and a total of two hundred and forty nine people were deported. After these raids and unlawful arrests, Palmer was called before the House Rules Committee and Senate Judiciary Committee and convicted of using Government funds in an improper way causing the end of the first Red Scare. [1]

Pancho
991; cucuji' beetle that is Frank's soul

Pankhurst Holloway Brooch

933; designed "brooch of honor" for veterans of Holloway prison; Pankhurst was a campaigner in the suffragette movement in the United Kingdom, and a prominent left communist. She directed a campaign that included massed rallies, hunger strikes and physical action. In 1908, her sister Christabel was sentenced to a period in Holloway prison for her political actions. Sylvia Pankhurst was more or less the official artist for the British suffragette movement, the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). She used the colors to create not only banners but also memorabilia for the public, including badges and tea sets. In his 1979 biography of his mother, Sylvia Pankhurst, Artist and Crusader, Richard Pankhurst mentions several times his mother's use of the official colors of the movement in her designs. For example, in describing the famous Holloway brooch, given to those who had been imprisoned for the sake of the cause, Pankhurst notes that his mother "designed it in the Suffragette colours, purple, white and green." Wikipedia entry

pantechnicon
611; Pantechnicon is an old British word for a furniture removal van. It was originally coined in 1830 as the name of a craft shop or bazaar, in Motcomb Street in Belgravia, London; the name is Greek for "pertaining to all the arts or crafts". The shop soon closed down and the building was turned into a furniture warehouse, but the name was kept. Vehicles transporting furniture to and from the building, known as pantechnicon vans, soon came to be known simply as pantechnicons. Wikipedia

Pan-Turanian
756; Pan-Turanism is a political movement aiming at uniting the various Turkic peoples of the Russian empire. The name is derived from Turan an ancient Persian name for the land to the east of Iran.

Paramorphoscope
"'induced paramorphism,'" 114; "paramorphic distortions," 249; 435; 436; paramorfico, 570; used to view map of Shambhala, 609;

Paranoia
33; "counter-transformer" 34; 54; 94; "Something" 132; 180; paranoia querulans (litigious paranoia), 455, 1050; Ostend as "western anchors of a continental system" 567; "silent army of operatives" from Hell, 586; 624; 681;

Paris Commune
372;

Parry, Hubert
49; Blake's Jerusalem Wikpedia Entry

Parsons-Short Auxetophone
228; used to record "all T.W.I.T.-sanctioned sittings"

Pasha, Fehim (1873 - 1908)
830; "old head of espionage" in Turkey; chief of the secret police under the Ottoman sultan Abdül-Hamid II; When, on July 24, 1908, the sultan yielded to the demands of the Young Turks, issued an irade, restoring the constitution of 1876, and ordered the election of a chamber of deputies. Various other reforms, notably the abolition of the spy system and the censorship, were announced soon afterwards. Some of the more unpopular officials associated with the old regime were assassinated, among them Fehim Pasha, the former head of the espionage department, who had been exiled to Brusa in 1907 at the request of the British and German ambassadors. 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica

Patio Method
374; silver extraction method

Patrizia
728; with Dally in Venice

Pearls
Pearl Street, in lower Manhattan financial district, location of Vibe Corp., 333-34; "pearl-gray bowlers, 399;

Peary, Robert Edwin (1856-1920)
149; Peary was an American explorer who claimed to have been the first person, on April 6, 1909, to reach the geographic North Pole; Wikipedia entry

Federico Peliti

758; Federico Peliti (1844-1914) was born near Turin, in Northern Italy, and went to India in 1868 as a caterer to the Viceroy, the Earl of Mayo. After the assassination of the Viceroy, he established himself as an independent caterer and hotel director, with establishments in Calcutta and Simla. His Simla restaurant is mentioned in Rudyard Kipling's short story "The Phantom Reekshaw" (1880). He had been trained as a sculptor in his youth, and while sculpting from time to time as a hobby, he became a more and more passionate photographer as time went on. A great part of his production now belongs to the Calcografia Nazionale in Rome. [2]

pelota games
7; Pelota (in Basque and Catalan, pilota; in French pelote, from Latin pila) is a name for a variety of court sports played with a ball using one's hand, a racket, a wooden bat (pala), or a basket propulsor, against a wall (frontón in Spanish, frontoi in Basque, frontó in Catalan) or, more traditionally, with two teams face to face separated by a line on the ground or a net.

Penhallow, Constance
127; Iceland spar magnates, in Iceland; Hallow means to reserve as holy.

Penhallow, Hunter
127; grandson of Constance; witnessing the destruction of the city, 154; "English painter type" 575; one of the Trespassers? 576; switch to nocturnes, 580; in Venice with Dally, 729; "failing to retrieve memories" (c.f. Lew Basnight's similar condition...), 798; one of his paintings, "The Iron Gateway," hanging in Ca' Spongiatosta, 867; with Dally in London, 892;

pennsilvoney
Phonetic play on the Italian word pensione, inexpensive lodging, usually with shared bathroom, or dormitory style.

permanent siege
19;

perpetual-motion machine
6; Perpetual motion refers to a condition in which an object continues to move indefinitely without being driven by an external source of energy. Wikipedia entry

Peter and Paul Fortress
595; in Russia

pétroleurs of Paris
19;

P.E.T.N.
182; PETN (Pentaerythritol Tetranitrate, also known as Penthrite) is one of the strongest known high explosives, with a relative effectiveness factor (R.E. factor) of 1.66. It is more sensitive to shock or friction than TNT or tetryl, and it is never used alone as a booster; Wikipedia entry

Peychaud, Monsieur
368; It is said that the Sazerac drink was invented by Antoine Amadie Peychaud, a Creole apothecary who moved to New Orleans from the West Indies and set up shop in the French Quarter in the early 1800s. He dispensed a proprietary mix of aromatic bitters from an old family recipe, to relieve the ails of his clients (Peychaud's Bitters are still made in New Orleans and sold today, and are an essential component of any truly complete bar), and around the 1830s he became famous for a toddy he made for his friends. It consisted of French brandy mixed with his secret blend of bitters, a splash of water and a bit of sugar. According to legend he served his drink in the large end of an egg cup that was called a coquetier in French, and some say that the Americanized pronunciation of this as "cocktail" gave this type of drink its name (unlikely as that may be); (From The Gumbo Pages. Read on...)

Philippe
655; in Swiss Alps, drilling with Reef; alumnus of Petit Roquette child's prison, 658;

Philolaus of Tarentum (ca. 470 BC - ca. 385 BC)
1021; postulated an Anti-Earth (Antichthon); a Greek Pythagorean and Presocratic. From Wikipedia:

A popular misconception about Philolaus is that he supposed that a sphere of the fixed stars, the five planets, the Sun, Moon and Earth, all moved round his Central Fire, but as these made up only nine revolving bodies, he conceived in accordance with his number theory a tenth, which he called Counter-Earth. This fallacy grows largely out of Aristole's attempt to lampoon his ideas in his book, Metaphysics.

In reality, Philolaus' ideas predated the idea of spheres by hundreds of years, and the Counter-Earth was conceived to explain his revolutionary ideas about the lack of up or down in space to the Pythagorean community. He never recognized the fixed stars as any kind of sphere or object. Wikipedia entry;

From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Aristotle suggests that [the Counter-Earth] was introduced to raise the number of heavenly bodies around the central fire from nine to ten, which the Pythagoreans regarded as the perfect number (Arist., Metaph. 986a8-12). Some scholars have objected that, if we count the central fire, the introduction of the counter earth makes eleven bodies in Philolaus' system (Kingsley 1995, 174); the ancient evidence consistently talks in terms of bodies arranged or moving around the central fire, however, and obviously the central fire cannot be counted as one of these (Aetius 2.7.7; Arist., Fr. 203 and Metaph. 986a10), so that Aristotle's explanation retains considerable plausibility.

[...]

Thus an obvious objection to the system is that we never observe the central fire at the center of the universe. Philolaus explained this by supposing that the earth rotates once on its axis as it orbits the central fire, so that our side of the earth is always turned away from the central fire and hence we never see it. This is also why we never see the counter earth, which is evidently supposed to move at the same speed as the earth.

Philosopher's Stone
77; The philosopher's stone, in Latin philosophi lapis, is a legendary substance that supposedly could turn inexpensive metals such as lead into gold ("chrysopoeia") and/or create an elixir that would make humans younger, thus delaying death. It was a longtime "holy grail" of Western alchemy; Wikipedia entry

Philosophic Mercury
77; Mercury minus "everything not essential"

Phosgene
953; means "born of light" - Chlorine + CO

Photography
Detailed references...

picnic
4; 82; 138; 503;

Piggot's
678;

Pigs
Circe, 117; "pigs can fly" 427; "Pitch Integrity Guard" 421; 847; 1051;

Pike's Peak
112; Wikipedia entry

Pinkerton, Allan (1819-1884)
43; Allan Pinkerton was a U.S. detective and spy, best known for creating the Pinkerton Agency, the first detective agency.; "The Unsleeping Eye" 51; 112; 171; Wikipedia entry

Pino and Rocco
854; back in Venice;

Piper, Leonora
medium/psychic, 228; Leonora Piper's spiritualistic abilities (or extrasensory perception — the exact nature of her powers was, maybe naturally, unresolved) convinced William James of the truth in Spiritualism; James dubbed her "the white crow."

Piprake, Giles
866; colleague of Ratty McHugh in Venice

Pityu
914; telepathic waiter at Café-Restaurant Otthon.

Pivoine, Professeur
851; "neighborhood couturier of flesh wounds" in Nice;

Plafond Luminex
687;

plasmic hysteresis
555;

Plebecula
1076; Reef's and Yashmeen's baby

Plush, Fiona
894; model for Arturo Naunt sculpture

Pluto
"Chthonica, Princess of Plutonia," 117; "plutes," 93; "some Plutonian bargain," 154; "plutes," "some ruler of some underwoekd," 231; 362; see also, Satan

podpol'niki
663; "underground men" in Russia

Policarpe
527, member of Young Congo in Ostend same hotel as Kit;1077, acquaintance of Kit's, with Dally in Paris

Polo, Marco (1254-1324)
432; the Venetian, greatest of medieval travellers. Venetian genealogies and traditions of uncertain value trace the Polo family to Sebenico in Dalmatia, and before the end of the 11th century one Domenico Polo is found in the great council of the republic (1094). But the ascertained line of the traveller begins only with his grandfather.

Polo was the first traveller to trace a route across the whole longitude of Asia, naming and describing kingdom after kingdom which he had seen; the first to speak of the new and brilliant court which had been established at Peking; the first to reveal China in all its wealth and vastness, and to tell of the nations on its borders; the first to tell more of Tibet than its name, to speak of Burma, of Laos, of Siam, of Cochin-China, of Japan, of Java, of Sumatra and of other islands of the archipelago, of the Nicobar and Andaman Islands, of Ceylon and its sacred peak, of India but as a country seen and partially explored; the first in medieval times to give any distinct account of the secluded Christian Empire of Abyssinia, and of the semi-Christian island of Sokotra, and to speak, however dimly, of Zanzibar, and of the vast and distant Madagascar; whilst he carries us also to the remotely opposite region of Siberia and the Arctic shores, to speak of dog-sledges, white bears and reindeerriding Tunguses; From the 11th Edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica; 569;

Ponghill, Brad
174; youngest brother of Burke

Ponghill, Buddy
174; brother of Burke

Ponghill, Burke
172; Editor of the Lodazal Weekly Tidings

Ponko, Father
957; hegumen at convent, with the Tetractys tattoed on his forehead

Porfirio, Don (1830-1915)
923; José de la Cruz Porfirio Díaz Mori (sometimes Díaz Mory) was a Mexican-American War volunteer, French Intervention hero, and President. He ruled Mexico from 1876 to 1880 and from 1884 to 1911.

Poussin
590; In 1896, both Charles-Jean de la Vallée Poussin (1866-1962) of Belgium and Jacques-Salomon Hadamard (1865-1963) of France independently proved the Prime Number Theorem which states that as n approaches infinity, π(n) approaches nln n, where π(n) is the number of positive prime numbers not greater than n.

Poutine
468; little girl in Mayva's ice-cream parlor, Cone Amor; also the name of a French-Canadian dish.

Prance, Lieutenant Dwight
761; "scholar of geography and languages at Cambridge"; working for Whitehall, 778;

Prandtl, Ludwig
603; Bavarian physicist (1875–1953) who made key contributions to aerodynamics, most famously the discovery of the "boundary layer" (an zone of still air around a moving object, the physical phenomenon behind the dust which accumulates on fan blades; at Gottingen, 911;

Priest, Judas
656;

Prime Number Theorem
590, 597; a theorem giving an approximation to the number of prime numbers less than any given integer N. The specific theorem most commonly invoked under this name is the result by Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855), who in an 1849 letter to Johann Franz Encke (1791–1865) proved that the number of primes less than N is approximately given by the integral from 2 to N of 1 over the natural logarithm of x. (Earlier, at the age of 15, Gauss had proposed that the number of primes less than N was approximately N divided by the natural logarithm of N.) Jacques Hadamard (1865–1963) and Charles De la Vallée Poussin (1866–1962) both proved this result independently in 1896. Knowing this result, one can prove that the Nth prime number is roughly N log N, for sufficiently large N. The Riemann hypothesis is equivalent to the assertion that the difference between Gauss's later estimate and the true value is never greater than cN^1/2log N, for some number c. Wolfram MathWorld entry

Princess Casamassima, The
6; an Italian Romance; The Princess Casamassima is a novel by Henry James, first published as a serial in The Atlantic Monthly in 1885-1886 and then as a book in 1886. It is the story of an intelligent but confused young London bookbinder, Hyacinth Robinson, who becomes involved in radical politics and a terrorist assassination plot. Wikipedia entry

Privett, Nate
24; White City Investigations, 43; in Denver, 179; retired to Lincolnwood, 1041;

Propaganda of Deed
81; Propaganda of the deed is an anarchist doctrine that promotes the practical application of anarchist ideas in hopes that such actions will set an example and inspire others. A violent variant of the concept was popular around the world in the late 19th century. According to the 19th century take, it was thought that a spectacular action, such as a political assassination, would ignite a revolutionary fervor among the working classes. Peter Kropotkin, an early proponent of propaganda by the deed, wrote that "A single deed is better propaganda than a thousand pamphlets." From the InfoShop Open Wiki

Prokladka, Colonel Yevgeny
754; Auberon Halfcourt's "Russian opposite number"

Promio, Albert (1868-1928)
854; French filmmaker "and his crew from Lumière of Paris" - his film, shot from a gondola, in the Malibran theatre; Lumière operator, often known as just A. Promio, mistakenly called Eugène Promio in some sources (also Georges, Albert etc.). In 1897, he made the first traveling shot of cinema history by placing his camera on a gondola in Venice, Italy.

Provecho, Dwayne
379; in cell with Frank Traverse and Ewball; in Mexico, 642;

"girl anthropologist" 275; Frank Traverse's "favorite back-east girl anthropologist" 922; Turnstone's Fiancé, 996;

Prudge, Oleander
263; hash-slinger at Nonpareil Eating House;

Premulkoff, Namaz
752; escaped prisoner in Samarkand

Psitticide
387; the murder of a parrot: (Latin order Psittaciformes = parrot). "The commandante, sensing psitticide in the air, came hurrying up."

Pugnax
5; (Latin: pugnax = fond of fighting) sentient canine aboard The Inconvenience; 17; Also, there's a bird called the Ruff (Philomachus pugnax) which is a medium-sized wader; cuisine, 111; 143; Buddha nature, 412; security of Inconvenience left to, 443; "sophisticated defensive system" 550;

Pullman Strike
177; Wikipedia entry

Putyanin
755; "cavalry rogue" who said he'd had Vanya's girlfriend Feodora in St. Petersburg;

Pynchon, Edwin
possibly inventor of an airship, the "Albatross"; DISCUSSION

Pynchon, Thomas Ruggles, M. A. [not Jr.]
Scovill Professor of Chemistry and the Natural Sciences, Trinity College, Hartford [CT] and author of Introduction to Chemical Physics, Designed for the Use of Academies, High Schools, and Colleges. Illustrated with Numerous Engravings, and Containing Copious Lists of Experiments with Directions for Preparing Them. New Edition, Revised and Enlarged. (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1873).

The book contains chapters on Heat, Light, Electricity, Electro-Magnetism, Magneto-Electricity, Thermo-Electricity and Chemical Forces, and it is set in a typeface that is wonderfully reminiscent of the one used in the first edition of Mason & Dixon.

Available for full view and download at Google Books.

Pythagoras
500; Pythagoreans, 633; mathematician, philosopher and mystic (c. 569 BCE–c. 475 BCE). Born in Samos, Ionia, he traveled in Egypt and eventually founded a school in Croton, located in what is now southern Italy. He is the earliest person known to have given a systematic proof of the geometrical proposition now called the Pythagorean Theorem; he or his close followers discovered the irrational numbers and the three-dimensional shape called the dodecahedron. Furthermore, Pythagoras coined the term cosmos to express the order and patterning of nature, was the first to give observations showing that the Earth is spherical, and performed significant early experiments in judging how humans perceive sound. Any of these accomplishments would have earned Pythagoras an honorable place in the history of science, but his behavior and that of his followers contained "deep ironies and contradictions," to use Carl Sagan's phrase. Pythagorean doctrine taught that knowledge should be kept secret from the masses, and moreover that the only way to understand the Cosmos was inner contemplation of mathematical ideas without observation or experiment. This attitude stands in stark contrast to the practical approach of Thales (c. 624 BCE - c. 547), Democritus (c. 460 BCE - c. 370 BCE) and other Ionians who grounded their speculations much more fully in observation. Elaborated and immortalized by Plato (c. 428 BCE - c. 348 BCE), the Pythagorean doctrine became a font of anti-rationalism. MacTutor biography; Pythagorean Theory of Music and Color; Pythagorean Numbers; 749; and music, 940; 957;