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p 397 "thinking... only about getting home, fucking somebody, fucking her into some submission": 'scuse me if this is getting too personal; but I have trouble identifying with Franz right here. I wonder if anyone else can speak to this; to me the times that I have had sex with someone while someone else (or someone else's *image*) in my thoughts, have been notable only because they were unpleasant, not fulfilling, etc. But it seems like this night is being portrayed as the erotic acme of Franz's life. Is this just meant as an illustration of how sexually frustrated he is?

p. 398 "A film. How else? Isn't that what they made of my child, a film?" (and, in the next paragraph, he calls Ilse a "movie-child"): I think this means, "instead of a real person, 'Ilse' is an entertainment for Franz [created by Weissman]". It's interesting that she is a "movie-child", when on the previous page he referred to those who share her date of conception as "shadow-children".

p. 398 "Zwölfkinder": is this a real place?

p. 398 "Storks are asleep among two- and three-legged horses, rusted gearworks and splintered roof of the carousel, their heads jittering with air-currents and yellow Africa, dainty black snakes a hundred feet below meandering in the sunlight across the rocks and dry pans." A few things about this sentence: I liked reading from the real storks to the fake horses, that made a nice transition in my thoughts; does anyone know what symbolism storks would hold here? (Kai?); what the hell is going on after the word "air-currents"? This is where the sentence stops making sense for me.

p. 398 "The plaster witch, wire mesh visible at her breasts and haunches, leans near the oven, her poke at corroded Hansel in perpetual arrest.": Pökler is playing a role in the Hansel-and-Gretel drama going on in GR; but I don't think it corresponds to any character in Grimm. He is the nameless engineer who designed the witch's oven.

p. 398 "Gretel's eyes lock wide open, never a blink, crystal-heavy lashes batting...": Doesn't quite make sense that her eyelashes are batting when her eyes are locked wide open... Is this saying that Pökler (or the narrator) is imagining the batting?

p. 398 "languets and flues": Ok, my dictionary defines a flue as an organ pipe; but the only definition for "languet" (a definition to conjure with) is, "something resembling the tongue in shape or use". What is tonguelike on an organ?

p. 398 "Did you ever go on holiday to Zwölfkinder?": In the coming paragraphs Franz will be talking about Leni; I couldn't figure out for a while who was being addressed here but now I'm fairly sure it's Leni.

p. 398 "She must have always been a child on somebody's list": "she" is Leni; what does this sentence mean?

p. 399 "arguing with his own ghost from ten years ago": Franz considers himself to have outgrown left politics -- do we ever see him in his leftist phase? I hadn't thought of him that way before.

p. 400 "a street... that had something he thought he needed": What is there that he needs? The sentence "Over the years... the coordinates switched from Cartesian x and y... to polar azimuth and range of the weapon as deployed", makes it sound to me almost as if he were visualizing a target for the rocket, aiming it in his dreams *inward*, into Berlin or into his own head. Or he is visualizing his enemies in power, aiming the rocket at him? Because get this: "if he faced exactly along a certain compass-bearing [i.e. polar azimuth] his prayer would be heard: he'd be safe." This reading I am suggesting seems like a stretch but it's the only way I can get all this to make sense. Any other suggestions? This is one of those really confusing paragraphs that come along now and then.

p. 401 "Major Weissman was one of several gray eminences...": though we have, obviously, already encountered Weissman, I think this is chronologically speaking, the earliest we have seen him in Germany. I like the comparison of Weissman's attitude toward Pökler, to Pökler's attitude toward his wife. And you get the sense that Pökler understands what is going on without being fully aware of it. The tense of the last paragraph is a bit funny; "Pökler might not have had the will" -- it seems to me like this "might" doesn't make sense at the moment we are hearing Franz thinking.

p. 401 "to leap like a chess knight...": a reference to Der Springer?

p. 401 "technologique": why French?

p. 402 "But Leni was wrong": picking up from the middle of p. 400, where the digression started, "But really he did *not* obey like a corpse." I read the statement that "Pökler was an extension of the Rocket", as saying he is in this wholeheartedly, not simply as a result of Weissman's manipulation...

p. 403 "ready to accept Hitler on the basis of Demian-metaphysics": my memory of Demian is a bit hazy -- anyone care to expand on it?

p. 405 "What disaster had he dared to look back on?": I think it is Nazi Germany. -- Though "look back on" is not an exact fit.

p. 405 "He reverted that season to childhood...": Nice portrait of a frustrated-little-kid fantasy -- I especially like the picture of him sitting on the pot, feeling "that pleasant anticipation..." and thinking of how Leni would be humiliated before his greatness.

p. 405 "nightmares he had to find his own way up out of... draw back into the redoubt of waking Pökler": "his own way", because Leni is no longer by his side to care for him. A "redoubt" is a fortress, and I like that image. Anyone care to tell me what ephedrine is/ why it's used here?

p. 406 "something here, among the paper": i.e. the plans for the A-4. The Rocket is death, is Blicker. Extinction is seductive because it offers hope of salvation from loneliness and failure; Pökler's status as a living human is bound up in being more afraid of dying than attracted to the promise of nullity.

p. 406 "a dependable working motor, one the military could use in the field to kill people": Franz has lost a bit of his delusional armor here; notice that he does not say "one that we could use to go to Venus".

p. 407 "There has been this strange connection between the German mind and the rapid flashing of successive stills to counterfeit movement, for at least two centuries": I don't quite get the syntax here -- when I read it I keep expecting it to say, "There has been this strange connection in the German mind between the rapid flashing of successive stills to counterfeit movement and...", and then I realize I'm not reading the book.

p. 407 "He entered his own cubicle and saw her...": how many years has it been since he saw her last?

p. 409 "rapprochement": It seems to me like Pynchon uses this word really frequently -- does it have a special historical significance in the context of WWII or is it just a word he's fond of?