Difference between revisions of "ATD 81-96"

Revision as of 04:43, 20 December 2006

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

Page 81

July Fourth started hot and grew hotter,...

Guardan Review

Feast of St. Barbara
According to legend, Saint Barbara was the extremely beautiful daughter of a wealthy heathen named Dioscorus, who lived near Nicomedia in Asia Minor, in the 4th Century AD. Because of her singular beauty and fearful that she be demanded in marriage and taken away from him, he jealously shut her up in a tower to protect her from the outside world. When Barbara converted to Christianity, her enraged father killed her and was subsequently struck down by lightening. St. Barbara was venerated as early as the seventh century. The legend of the lightning bolt which struck down her father caused her to be regarded as the patron saint in time of danger from thunderstorms, fires and sudden death. When gunpowder made its appearance in the Western world, Saint Barbara was invoked for aid against accidents resulting from explosions — since some of the earlier artillery pieces often blew up instead of firing their projectile, Saint Barbara became the patroness of the artillerymen. [1]

Propaganda of the Deed
Anarchist terrorism. [Wikipedia]

Zarzuela
Spanish genre of musical theater. [Wikipedia]

Page 82

Skinner
A person who drives mules.

Chinaman
This is the latest of many allusions to China or Chinese in an exotic, oriental way. This may simply be imitating Gilded Age and early 20th century American fiction and films, which often featured mystical Chinese as characters and villains. It also recalls the use of Feng Shui in Mason & Dixon.

Cour d'Alene bullpens
Usually 'Coeur'. Striking miners in 1892 were illegally confined in bullpens. [Wikipedia]

Cripple Creek
Cripple Creek was the location of a miner's strike in 1894. It was a significant labor event and it was the first time that a state Militia was called out in support of the miners. Wikipedia entry

Page 84

1900
So the current Fourth of July must be 1901 or later (not 1899).

Minneskort
Modern Finnish word for computer memory cards. (TRP likely saw it on a Nokia phone.)

Page 85

Innocent Victims...Monsters That Did the Deed
Use of capitals seems to emphasize the fact that these persons are simply convenient stock characters in the forwarding of the owners'/government's agenda.

"some of these explosions, the more deadly of them, in fact, were really set off to begin with not by Anarchists but by the owners themselves"
Is this an allusion to the Controlled demolition hypothesis for the collapse of the WTC?

"Which left precious few targets except for the railroad."
Frank Norris's 1901 novel The Octopus is summed up in one short paragraph. Wikipedia entry.

Page 86

Shorty's Billiard Saloon
This is based on real accounts of billiard balls sparking and exploding in saloons. The balls in question used a then-new thermoplastic compound of cellulose nitrate and camphor developed and patented under the trademark "celluloid" by John Wesley Hyatt as a substitute for ivory. See Celluloid for Wikipedia links to Hyatt and Celluloid.

Page 87

Rev. Moss Gatlin's rhetorical question "How can anyone set off a bomb that will take innocent lives?" and its wisecrack response, "Long fuse" seems a calculated echo of Kubrick's 'Full Metal Jacket.' ("How can you shoot women and children?" "Easy -- don't lead 'em so much.")

Emile Henry, Vaillant
Emile Henry (1872 - May 21, 1894) was a French anarchist who on February 12, 1894 detonated a bomb at the Café Terminus in the Parisian Gare Saint-Lazare killing one person and wounding twenty. Henry was angered over the execution of another Anarchist, Auguste Vaillant, for the destruction of a government building that hurt no one, and took it upon himself to strike back to avenge his fellow revolutionary's death. He saw the Cafe as a representation of the bourgeois itself and his intent was to kill as many people as possible in the bombing. Wikipedia entry.

Mason-Dixon line
We learn that the Traverse family had been "an old ridegerunning clan from southern Pennsylvania, close to the Mason-Dixon." No Traverses appear, however, in Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, but one can speculate that had they been, the Traverse ancestors may have been victims of the Line's bad Feng Shui. From this, one could infer a connection between the Line and Colorado Anarchism.

Civil War
This is the first instance of the term, for a war so far in the novel being referred to as "The Rebellion".

Page 89

silver-boom babies
Assuming the silver boom of 1890-1892 is meant, Webb's kids were aged about 9 to 16. Timeline with spoilers

Bob Ford's Funeral
June 1892 [Wikipedia]

repeal of the Silver Act

Prior to 1892, both Silver and Gold were used as a metallic standard for currency in the United States. The Sherman Act authorized the treasury to purchase 4.5 million ounces of silver per month. This inflated the price of silver, causing eastern investors to start hoarding gold as a hedge. The unrest this caused in the Colorado mines resulted in the repeal of the Act. When this happened, the mining of silver began to rapidly decline, causing further destabilization in the silver mining industry.

Page 90

before he got shot
1899. [cite]

Lake
Lake Traverse is between Minnesota and South Dakota. Wikipedia

Page 91

"Sleep? is when you sleep...." "Only that I wouldn't want it..."
(Looks like typos to me.)

Page 92

"a mule dropping on the edge of life's mountain trail, ready to be either squashed flat or kicked into the void"
Brings directly in mind a scene from Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness In The West: "The following evening as they rode up onto the western rim they lost one of the mules. It went skittering off down the canyon wall with the contents of the panniers exploding soundlessly in the hot dry air and it fell through sunlight and through shade, turning in that lonely void until it fell from sight into a sink of cold blue space that absolved it forever of memory in the mind of any living thing that was." (Modern Library Edition 2001, p. 147). The novel is set about 45 years before the beginning of ATD (1849-50) at the Mexico - Texas borderlands. In fact, due to Pynchon's frequent references to red light and west (pages 41, 59, 63, 86, 784 so far and counting), I suspect a kind of deeper relation between the two novels, but more evidence is required.

Page 93

plutes
Plutocrats: members of the wealthy class controlling a government

Labor produces all wealth. Wealth belongs to the producer thereof.
Reviewers of ATD have quoted this line, [2] but Pynchon did not make it up. It comes from authentic miner's union literature of the time. [3]

Republicans
William McKinley was elected in 1896 on the Republican ticket, defeating Democrat William Jennings Bryan, ushering in a chain of Republican Presidents until Woodrow Wilson was elected in 1912. Obviously, could also be interpreted as a jab at the current Republican Party.

Page 94

duster
Long coat. {Wikipedia]

Page 95

dynamite rounders
Rounders was a precursor to baseball. [Wikipedia]

waiting for the rest of the joke
Cf Dally and Lindsay, p27.

Page 96

"We ready?"
The destruction of the railroad bridge is reminiscent of scenes in Edward Abbey's anarchistic 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang. Wikipedia entry.

Sufficient unto the day

From The Gospel According to Saint Matthew: 6:34. "Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof." (The New Testament of the King James Bible)

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