Difference between revisions of "ATD 1063-1085"

Revision as of 21:29, 26 March 2007

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

Page 1063

Rue du Départ
Street in Montparnasse, Paris. The name means "street of departing or setting out." Piet Mondrian had a studio at No. 26. A film titled Rue du Départ starring Gérard Depardieu was released in 1986.

Page 1064

Page 1065

Reynaldo Hahn
1875-1947, French composer chiefly known for art songs.

Ciboulette
???French: chive.

C'est pas Paris, c'est sa banlieue
French: It isn't Paris, it's a suburb of Paris.

Page 1066

"J'ai Deux Amants"
French: I have two lovers.

Sacha Guitry
1885-1957, French film actor and director.

ain't you that La Jarretière?
In V. she died graphically around the time of the World War. Her stage name is French: The Garter.

succès de scandale
French, literally: success of scandal. In this case, the hype that the show needed to put customers in the seats.

Mon Dieu! . . . que les hommes sont bêtes
French: My God, how stupid men are.

Fossettes l'Enflammeuse
French: Dimples, the Inflamer. "Fossettes" has verbal echoes (as foreshadowing sound, so to speak) of [Bob] Fosse, much later American choreographer and director.

Jean-Raoul Oeuillade
The surname is the name of a restaurant and a wine grape. It also appears to be a French misspelling of œillade = wink, leer.

Dimples
R. Wilshire knows you can print a one-word title in bigger letters than a whole phrase.

Solange St.-Emilion
'Solange' is the name of a saint; and St Emilion is a wine - a claret.

Casse-cou . . . n'importe quoi!
Daredevil, that's me. / This little don't-give-a-damn. / Daredevil, husband, your women, / All the other men, no matter who!

Page 1067

"It won't be a stylish marriage"
Quoting from the popular song "Daisy Bell."

Last alluded to on P.647, just before the gunfight that wasn't, with Frank and Stray in El Paso. Difficult relationships seem to bring out this ditty.

Page 1068

Page 1069

Italo-Turkish War
Over control of Libya, 1911-12, important precursor of the Balkan Wars. An Italian flyer dropped history's first aerial bomb on Turkish troops.

una picchiata
Italian: a nosedive as translated in text?

Page 1070

Andiamo
Italian: Let's go.

Macchè
Italian: Naw.

Page 1071

a Certain Word that would not quite exist for another year or two
Of course it' 'Fascism'.

Page 1072

in uniform all the time. Eagles . . . a prominent motif
eagles have been referred to often as predators in ATD.

abrazo
Spanish: embrace.

teleferiche
Cars suspended from cables, cableways.

Page 1073

agnolotti
Italian, literally: priests' hats. A filled pasta similar to ravioli.

risotto
The renowned northern Italian rice dish.

tagliarini
Long, thin, narrow noodles.

Nebbiolo
A wine grape originating in northern Italy.

Page 1074

...Reef, Stray and Ljubica returned to the U.S. pretending to be Italian immigrants.
Somebody dropped the ball here; obviously this should read "Reef, Yash and Ljubica." But Yashmeen had never before been in the United States.

Even Homer nods.

Ljubica was born outside, and had never been in, the US !

I, for Idiot
Another character assuming the character of an idiot—a minor theme of AtD.

I, also, in 'the immigrants they were pretending to be'
...soon obliterated.

"The Obliterator"
A figure almost of legend, who causes unwelcome entries in your file to vanish without trace. But a member of the wiki was once friends with a bureaucrat, in a university registrar's office, who knew the "oblit" code. Like "The Obliterator," she used her power only for good.

Page 1075

Red Scare . . . Palmer raids
Public and media panic over the ideas of communists, other leftists and Anarchists led to a government crackdown on these elements in the years after the World War. Alexander M. Palmer, U.S. Attorney General under Woodrow Wilson, was a leading figure in the campaign. The Red Scare led more or less directly to the supremacy of the F.B.I., which some may view as "the control of the evil and moronic," and also to the founding of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Page 1076

Frank and Stray's daughter Ginger and the baby Plebecula
"Ginger" is sometimes a nickname for Virginia but also sometimes a substitute for "Red": a redheaded person. "Plebecula" can mean "the common people" . . . or a species of ant. Both children (Jesse too, could be) have political given names.

Kitsap Peninsula
Dissected peninsula in Puget Sound, Washington state. Not the northernmost point in the 48 states, but maybe the remotest.

Not far from Port Renfrew, B. C.

Page 1077

It was Policarpe, an old acquaintance of Kit
Belgian anarchist, named for St. Polycarp; see annotation to page 527.

Lwów
A city in western Ukraine, see Wikipedia. The city's emblem shows a lion in front of a castle wall with 3 towers. It is strikingly reminiscent of the Tibetan seal on the cover of ATD. Recall that Venetia also claims the Lion (the winged Lion of St. Mark) as its emblem.

Galicia
If the complex history of this region—now partly in western Ukraine and partly in southern Poland—moves you, there's a pretty fair Wikipedia entry that also covers the next item. Lots of Americans trace their ancestry back to Galicia. See also the annotations to page 697.

West Ukraine Republic
Or West Ukrainian People's Republic, or West Ukrainian National Republic (1918-19). See the link in the Galicia entry.

E. Percy Movay
When the Inquisition compelled Galileo to recant his ideas about the celestial realm (he had blasphemed by reporting that Jupiter's moons orbit the planet and by reasoning that the Earth moves around the Sun too), he left the courtroom muttering, "And yet it does move." In Italian: Eppur si muove.

a fabled group of mathematicians in Lwów
The Lwów School of Mathematics, [1] led by Stefan Banach, a founder of functional analysis, who became a professor there in 1920.

Page 1078

Scottish Café
An extraordinarily talented group of mathematicians could be found in Lwow in the 1930s. Much of their best work was inspired by their meetings in the Scottish Café[2]. It's a shame that Kit got there early.

Zermelo's Axiom Of Choice
[3]

Here used to explain a variant of the Banach–Tarski paradox [4] which says in effect that it is possible to "carve up" a 3-dimensional solid unit ball into finitely many pieces and, using only rotation and translation, reassemble the pieces into two balls each with the same volume as the original. An infinitley re-assemblable universe?

the set of all sets that are not members of themselves
Quick, does it contain itself? Bertrand Russell's pursuit of this paradox forced a major realignment of axiomatic set theory.

Q.E.D.
Proofs in geometry and algebra used to end with this statement: Quod Erat Demonstrandum = which was to be proved.

Page 1079

Lemberg, Léopol, Lvov, Lviv and Lwów
Names applied to the city by its various rulers. Today it's Lviv, but its citizens are sometimes called Leopolitans.

Page 1080

Glowny Dworzec
Polish: Main Station.

There was music...attended to
Thelonius Monk's music was once described this way. Quotation, reference being sought.

Also reminds me of John Cage's idea of an 'anarchic harmony', where all individual sounds have the same value and importance (and require to be listened to by themselves, "each note insisted on being attended to"), and 'dissonant' as they may appear, form a 'harmony' of individual sounds, "non-obstructive and interpenetrating".

Page 1081

since the Spanish Lady passed through
The great influenza pandemic of 1918-20. The disease got the name "Spanish flu" because Spain, neutral in the World War and therefore not censoring its press, was the country where the spread of the illness was most openly reported.

Page 1082

bandoneón
Musical instrument similar to an accordion, named for its inventor Heinrich Band, heavily used in Argentine tango music.

the taxis, battered veterans of the mythic Marne
World War, First Battle of the Marne, 1914. To shore up their Sixth Army the French commandeered 600 Paris taxicabs and used them to carry 6000 reserve troops to the front.

Page 1083

Penny Black
The Penny Black, the world's first official adhesive postage stamp, was issued by the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland on 1 May 1840[5].

Page 1084

no longer a matter of gravity

Page 1085

grace
Cf. what Lew Basnight "came to think of as grace". p. 42.

Gravity and Grace, a reference to Simone Weil.

Annotation Index