Difference between revisions of "ATD 429-459"

Revision as of 21:13, 22 January 2007

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

Page 431

metaphorical way and lateral resurrection
Cf. page 418, where metaphor and lateral are also used in quick succession.

"Turkish Corner"
???

Bactrian
Camel. Even-toed ungulate, two-humped (twin-peaked) as compared with the one-humped dromedary.

Cameling
Seems to mean riding on a camel, contextually.

light might be a secret determinant of history
One of the averarching themes of the book, it seems. Natural light vs. artificial and what it means for we humans.

Page 432

fatal word
"Wife".

C.A.C.A.
Caca; Spanish for "shit". The Chums have already begun to suspect the "shit", i.e. the malevolent organization that lies behind their boys' book heroics; the reader is now made aware of a large organization (see B.I.N., below) standing behind the massive airships and their crews. We all know what about the dynamics of large organizations, and the percentage of the time they spend in serving their purported purposes. Reminiscent of Van Vogt's Law: "90% of everything is shit (caca)".

Gamomania
"Gamos" is Greek for "marriage," and mania means "mania" or "madness."

H.M.S.F.
His Majesty's Subdesertine Frigate (p425).

Balaam's ass
refers to Num. 22:21-34 - Balaam rides out with the princes of Moab, but the Lord sends an angel to prevent him. Balaam does not see the angel but his ass does and will not go further. Balaam smites the ass three times, to no avail, until "the Lord opened the mouth of the ass, and she said to Balaam: What have I done unto thee, that thou hast smitten me these three times?" Balaam's ass and the serpent (in the Garden of Eden) are the only speaking animals in the bible.

reported as long ago as Marco Polo
From Marco Polo's The Travels of Marco Polo (1298-99):

". . . When a man is riding by night through this desert and something happens to make hime loiter and lose touch with his companions . . . and afterwards he wants to rejoin them, then he hears spirit talking in such a way that they seem to be his companions. Sometimes, indeed, they even hail him by name. Often these voices make him stray from the path, so that he never finds it again. And in this way many travelers have been lost and have perished. And ometimes in the night they are conscious of a noise like the clatter of a great cavalcade of riders away from the road; and, believing that these are some of their own company, they go where they hear the noise and, when day breaks, find they are victims of an illusion and in an awkward plight. . . Yes, and even by daylight men hear these spirit voices, and often you fancy you are listening to the strains of many instruments, especially drums, and the clash of arms. . . . ."

(page 67, The Travels of Marco Polo, The Folio Society 1968 edition.)

For Marco Polo's bio and more see Cf. page 247 and Marco Polo and His Travels.

Page 433

mutatis mutandis
Medieval Latin. A direct translation from Latin of mutatis mutandis would read, 'with those things having been changed which need to be changed'. More colloquially, it can be interpreted as 'the necessary changes having been made,' where "the necessary changes" are usually implied by a prior statement assumed to be understood by the reader. It carries the connotation that the reader should pay attention to the corresponding differences between the current statement and a previous one, although they are analogous. This term is used frequently in economics and in law, to parameterize a statement with a new term, or note the application of an implied, mutually understood set of changes. [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutatis_mutandis].

This suggests we should view communication from the camel with the same skepticism with which we view the voices, or possibly view this communication as we would that from Balaam's ass.

polygamy
Cf. Lake's conversion to (de facto) polyandry in Colorado Springs, p. 268. In both cases aquifers are the scene of the activity.

pan-spectral fields
Well, pan means universal. As in panorama, Pan-Am.

Another suggestion of possible worlds.

"Euphrates" poplars
???

aryq
Most likely variant of Arrack (OED): name applied in Eastern countries to any liquour of native manufacture, usually distilled coconut palm sap.

B.I.N.
Biometric Institute of Neuropathy, see p. 432.

As in "Loony bin".

seventeen-syllable
Haiku - japanese poems consisting of 17 syllables, classically arranged in three lines of 5 - 7 - 5 syllables each

Page 434

Eta/Nu Transformators
Probably an imaginary scientific device. Eta is most likely a reference to the metric tensor of (four dimensional) Minkowski space.

pari passu
on an equal footing

Deep Blavatsky
Named for Madame Helena Blavatsky (Helena Petrovna Hahn), founder of the Theosophical Society [1]. Cf. page 219.

Page 435

Gurkhas
Nepalese forces that have fought alongside British troops.

German professors
Likely a double allusion, first to Professor Werfner of Göttingen, referenced on p. 226, and also to Heinrich Schliemann, the German treasure hunter (not actually a professor) who first established the true historical location of Troy, the site of the Trojan War. His accomplishments are sadly underscored by his extremely amateurish excavation technique which destroyed as much as it extracted from the site.

General Forrest
Nathan Bedford Forrest, rebel leader in U.S. Civil War. Although he pioneered high-mobility tactics, he may never have uttered the famous quotation; see Wikipedia entry.

archiepiscopal
Pertaining to an archbishop.

Fabergé
Russian jewelers. Wikipedia entry.

"appealing though they be or, shall I say, as they are"
Captain Toadflax's corrects his grammatical mistake, an error that is partially obscured by the inverted construction he employs. If one straightens out his words into a more conventional form, e.g., "though they [secular pleasures] be appealing," the error is clearer: they, the third person plural pronoun, requires are as a verb, i.e. pleasures are rather than pleasures be. The OED lists many examples of be taking the place of are in similar contexts, but notes that this usage is either dialectal or archaic.

Why Toadflax commits this error is less clear than what the error itself is. One possibility is that Pynchon is making an allusion to Captains Bildad and Peleg of Moby-Dick, who speak in an archaic vernacular typical of New England Puritans.

For more information, see the OED, "be, v.," sub-entry, A.I.h.¶.

subarenaceous
Below or beneath the sand (sub) + (arenaceous).

Page 436

limen
threshold

transmundane
literally: beyond the mundane, beyond the world

lamaseries
Domiciles of Buddhist lamas (as in "monasteries").

Torriform Inclusion
A made-up condition from Torus==Arch.: a large convex molding, semicircular in cross section, located at the base of a classical column? From the American Heritage Dictionary. St. Cosmo has just seen, he thinks, a "watchtower". 'Watchtower'-Cf. the name of the magazine (and building in Brooklyn) that the Jehovah's Witnesses use. 'distinguishing man-made from God-made'...

Urban terrain
(But only cities unwisely built on sand.)

Stilton Gaspereaux
??? stilton is type of blue cheese from England.

Sven Hedin
Swedish explorer, especially of the Asian countries, and excavator of ruins of ancient cities. wikipedia

Aurel Stein
Sir Marc Aurel Stein. Hungarian-born explorer later knighted as a British citizen. Credited with the discovery, and arguably the exploitation, of the Mogao Grottoes in China. A rock-carved repository of ancient Buddhist texts and murals, the grottoes are known collectively as 'The Cave of a Thousand Buddhas' and protected a copy of the Mahayana Diamond sutra, acknowledged as the oldest book in existence. Wikipedia entry.

crusades begin as holy pilgrimages
???

first known maps
None of Ptolemy's maps has survived the classical period. They were, however, reconstructed in manuscript and engraved on copper or carved in wood for editions of the Ptolemy atlas. In 1482, the first woodcut edition, containing the first map of the world to include contemporary discoveries, was published in Ulm, Germany. It contains a brightly handcolored map of the Holy Land....

Allusion to the Map/Territory relation—the relationship between symbol and object. Coined by Alfred Korzybski, “The map is not the territory” is a related expression meaning that an abstraction derived from something, or a reaction to it, is not the thing itself, e.g., the pain from a stone falling on your foot is not the stone; one's opinion of a politician, favorable or unfavorable, is not that person; a metaphorical representation of a concept is not the concept itself; and so on. [2]Here, the (abstract) map itself could be a guide to a spritual quest or to conquest.

Page 437

Nernst lamps
Nernst = German physicist and chemist who formulated the third law of thermodynamics (1864-1941)

 Synonym: Walther Hermann Nernst

range-finder
Cf. 'range', passim

level of encryption
(Cf Heisenberg?)Does not seem to allude to Heisenberg and his Uncertainty Principle so much as buried layers of meaning that can hide to invisibility.

Mount Kailash
A mountain located in the Chinese Himalayas with great religious significance in Hinduism and Buddhism. In Hinduism, it is seen as the residence of Shiva, God of destruction and regeneration. The mountain is visited every year by many religious pilgrims. In Buddhism, the mountain was believed to be the location of a battle between two ancient sorcerers: Milarepa (Tantric Buddhism) and Naro-Bonchung (Tibetan Bön religion). Pynchon is perhaps alluding to the population dividing nature of religions. wikipedia

polarize light... in time
Thematic.

Manichaeans
A gnostic sect that followed the third century Persian prophet Mani. Their main theological belief was in a stark divide between Good and Evil.

Very relevant here in ADT: one could call their theology, BINARY.

Page 438

expanded sense... Maxwell... Hertz
All forms of electromagnetic radiation form a spectrum, of which visible light is a small part; all such radiation shares fundamental physical properties. Cf. range as spectrum.

'Perfects'
Perfects are the priests of the Cathar, a pantheistic manicheistic sect from the middle ages.

Graeco-Buddhist
???

Italo-Islamic
???

Page 439

Nuovo Rialto
Seems like Pynchon creating a "New Rialto" city under these sands as many cities take the name of an older city and add New....

From Wikipedia: Rialto is an area of the San Polo sestiere of Venice, known for its markets and for the Rialto Bridge.

The area was settled by the ninth century, when a small area in the middle of the Realtine Islands either side of the Rio Businiacus was known as the Rivoaltus. Soon, the Businiacus became known as the Grand Canal, and the district became the Rialto, referring to only the area on the left bank.

The Rialto became an important district in 1097, when Venice's market moved there, and in the following century a boat bridge was set up across the Grand Canal providing access to it. This was soon replaced by the Rialto Bridge.

Pynchon seems to love Venice so Nuovo Rialto is very ironically intended given this scene.

crystallography of the silica medium
Computer-base [silicon] allusion!?

clearly a thousand years more recent than they ought to have been
That is, the Manichean shrines date from the fourteenth Century, not the fourth Century when Mani, the founder, started Manicheanism. Pynchon dating 'when it went bad' in history?

Passing of the Remarks
Sounds like a humorous reification of what gets said between sailors. Modeled after Changing of the Guard?

Steeplechase Park
???

Page 440

screaming...with blood
Screaming motif.

chong pir
Presumably Uyghur for "big lice."

Uyghur
Member of an ethnic group in western China. It is sometimes claimed that the Uyghurs are Indo-European in one sense or another.

voiced interdental fricative
The th sound, as in "the" or "with." Basically, the lice lisp. This could be meant to suggest that their speech contains static or noise.

skeleton rig
The skeleton rig is a shoulder holster for carrying a concealed handgun. They were developed in the 1890s. A very nice looking one, as well as a description thereof, can be purchased at First American Ordnance website, which also just so happens to be my source for the above info.

andante
Literally "walking." An Italian word typically seen in notation for classical music. It denotes a moderately slow pace.

Sandman Saloon
Tavern for the 'sandmen', without those great tavern names in the above-ground world. Negative associations to this saloon, it seems, unlike the usual saloons in TRP's world.

Page 441

Leonard and Lyle
Resonates with Leopold and Loeb?-- two young American murderers in a famous case from early in the Century Wikipedia. Probably a stretch: Google comes up with mentioning Sir Leonard Lyle 1, sugar-magnate and heir to Abram Lyle 2 and "Lyle‘s Golden Syrup" 3. Thats one interesting logo, what with the dead lion/bees and the tibetan stamp on ATD, btw. Golden Syrup = oil?

teke
From this glossary on greek rembetiko music: "teke (pl. tekedhes): A club where one could buy hashish and the use of a narghile in which to smoke it"

An American fraternity or a member thereof. Tau Kappa Epsilon. Founded in the 1890s; has had a reputation for being a bit wilder than many fraternities.

Spindletop
From wikipedia: Spindletop is a salt dome oil field located in south Beaumont, Texas (approx. 30.02 -94.07) in the United States. On January 10, 1901, the well "Lucas 1" came in at Spindletop, marking the birthdate of the modern petroleum industry. At 100,000 barrels of oil a day, the gusher tripled U.S. oil production overnight, ensuring the second industrial revolution would be fueled not by wood and coal but by oil and its byproducts. Some of the companies chartered to exploit the wealth of Spindletop are some of today's largest and well known corporations such as ExxonMobil, and Texaco.

Groznyi
Grozny or Groznyy (Russian: Гро́зный; Chechen: Соьлж-ГIала, Syolzh-Ghaala) is the capital of the Chechen Republic in Russia. The city lies on the Sunzha River....As most of the residents there were Terek Cossacks, the town grew slowly until the development of Oil reserves in the early 20th century. This spiralled development of industry and petrochemical production. In addition to the oil drilled in the city itself, the city became a geographical centre of Russia's network of oil fields, and also in 1893 became part of the Transcaucasia - Russia Proper railway. From wikipedia

calyx bits
SYLLABICATION: ca·lyx PRONUNCIATION: klks, klks NOUN: Inflected forms: pl. ca·lyx·es or ca·ly·ces ( kl-sz, kl-) 1. The sepals of a flower considered as a group. 2. A cuplike structure or organ, such as one of the cuplike divisions of the pelvis or of the kidney. 3. A collecting structure in the kidney. ETYMOLOGY: Latin calyx, calyc-, from Greek kalux From The American Heritage Dictionary.

adults
Chums not adults, then? No,they do not age, it seems.

assalamu alaykum
A muslim greeting. Translates to "Peace be with you."

anticline
SUFFIX: Slope: anticline. ETYMOLOGY: Back-formation from –clinal. From American Heritage Dictionary.

Page 442

equine altitude
High horse.

allure of Veneto-Uyghur women
Veneti Veneto Uyghurs Long distance trade (like wars and tourism in general) is very likely to enforce the intermingling of different Gene Pools, which, more often than not, results in particularily beautiful specimens of the kinds involved. Travels of mediterrenean merchants along the various branches of the Silk Road seem to have been pretty common from at least 14th century on - see Pegelotti‘s Merchant Handbook (ca. 1340) which partially reads like a Lonely Planet Guide of back then. During the Renaissance most of the merchants (from Florence/Venice/Geneva) set out from Tana/Tanais which some sources put as a trade-post if not colony of the "West".

2 percent . . . most of them
Implies at least 150 in crew.

Marco Querini
???

Terrenascondite
???

Pozzo San Vito
???

all that incarnation and slaughter will transpire in silence
Calls to mind the silent battle scene in Akira Kurosawa's samurai retelling of King Lear, titled Ran, which translates roughly to "chaos."

Page 443

peterman option
A 'peterman' is a slang term for a safe-blower.

Consomme Imperial
A gingered chicken broth with julienne of carrots and leeks.

Timbales de Supremes de Volailles
Chicken Supreme Pudding ?

Gigot Grille a la Sauce Piquante
A 'gigot' is a leg of lamb or haunch of veal. 'Sauce Piquante' is a spicy sauce.

aubergines a la Sauce Mousseline
Eggplants with mussel sauce.

Pouilly-Fuisse
A white Burgundy made from the Chardonnay grape.

Graves
A white wine from the Graves district of France.

Page 444

Oasi
Plural of "oasis."

cataplexy
Sudden loss of muscle power following a strong emotional stimulus.

Nobel brothers
Robert and Ludvig Nobel, brothers of Alfred Nobel of dynamite and prize fame, co-founders of Branobel, an important early oil company that controlled a large amount of Russian output. Wikipedia entry.

shaft-alley
???

the balloon is up
British metaphor: The action has started. A phrase also used in V.

F.O.
Foreign Office

Daily Mail
London tabloid, staunch early supporters of Adolf Hitler. Today specialises in stirring up hatred of immigrants and other minorities.

Inspector Sands
A code word used in London to alert authorities without causing panic amongst the general public. Generally the alert is raised by the fire alarm. Wikipedia entry.

"Sands of Inner Asia"
Captain, now Inspector Sands, seems to be being compared for his achievements to "Lawrence of Arabia" parodistically.

Taklamakan
The Taklamakan (also Taklimakan) is a desert of Central Asia, in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China. It is known as the largest sand-only desert in the world. Some references fancifully state that Taklamakan means "if you go in, you won't come out"; others state that it means "Desert of Death" or "Place of No Return". Wikipedia.

Page 445

Kashgar to Urumchi
Two cities currently on the far western border of China. Presumably in this context they were two points inside the general area within which the 'Great Powers' competed to try and find Shambhala.

fell into the hand of
Ana analogy with the present-day situation in Central Asia in particular. throughout the book, there are references to Anarchist/Terrorists, to the spread of dynamite and other kinds of phenomena. These are all technologies that allow, or cause, power to flow into the hands of the powerless to use for their own purposes.

World-Island
The Earth.

discreet summons
Eg "paging Dr Blue". It doesn't seem to me to be a phrase that needs a gloss: a discreet summons is simply what it says and made be made in any number of ways.

far wicket
A 'wicket' may simply be a gate; but in the context of a novel and the bomber at Headingly cricket ground and Fenners, the Cambridge cricket ground, a 'wicket' is the three stumps at one end of a cricket pitch. ("The Gentleman Bomber of Headingly" - see p.236.)

wog
Chiefly British. An ethnic slur used for any dark-skinned peoples. Alleged to stand for "Western Oriental Gentleman", but mainly applied to Indians, Pakistanis, Arabs, and other brown-skinned Asians. I have heard it comes from 'wily oriental gentleman'; but the Oxford English Dictionary states that the origin is uncertain and defines a 'wog' as someone especially of Arab extraction.

Vic removal
???

eating an explosive
Cf Lew's Cyclomite.

Page 446

St Martin le Grand
A street in the City of London.

Angel Street
Another street in the City which meets St Martin le Grand at right-angles.

G.P.O. West
G.P.O - General Post Office

pneumatic dispatches
An extensive 'pneumatic dispatch' system existed on London during the Victorian era, started in 1851 and carrying on at least into the 1930's. By 1886 London had 94 telegram tubes totaling 34 1/2 miles and around 4.5 million telegraph messages were carried in cylinders at around 20mph. At its height the network extended some 57 miles connecting 67 branch offices via a central sorting office. See [3] and [4] (with illustrations).

drill suits
???

chars
Charwomen. Maids, cleaners.

clicks and rests
Presumably the clicks of a telegraphic system and the rests or silences in between.

Northern Temple of Connexion
It's in the north of the City; and the phrase suggests the religious intensity of the need to connect or communicate as well as mildly satirising it.

marblework
Such buildings would have used quantities of marble; hence the image of a 'temple' above.

Bloggins
An archetypal ordinary man; an everyman figure.

allegro vivatchy
phonetic of 'allegro vivace' - a musical term for a quick tempo

Page 447

grease-paint
'Grease-paint' refers to old-fashioned stage make-up.

cylinder of gutta-percha
Pneumatic dispatches were carried in cylinders of Gutta-Percha -- an inelastic latex made from the sap of the Gutta-Percha tree -- covered in felt. See [5]. Gutta-percha crops up a number of times in ATD, possibly enough to suggest some sort of motif or connection?

Gutta percha per se is a Victorian equivalent to rubber.

its "D" box
The receiving mechanism on the end of pneumatic dispatch pipe.

"The somewhat complicated pattern of double sluice valve originally used at the central stations has been superseded by a simpler form, known as the D box, so named Despatching from the shape of its cross section. This box is of and cast iron, and is provided with a close-fitting, Receiving brass-framed, sliding lid with a glass panel. This Apparatus, lid fits air-tight, and closes the box after a carrier has been inserted into the mouth of the tube; the latter enters at one end of the box and is there bell-mouthed. A supply pipe, to which is connected a 3-way cock, is joined on to the box and allows communication at will with either the pressure or vacuum mains, so that the apparatus becomes available for either sending (by pressure) or receiving (by vacuum) a carrier. Automatic working, by which the air supply is automatically turned on on the introduction of the carrier into a tube and on closing of the D box, and is cut off when the carrier arrives, was introduced in 1909." From the 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica entry on Pneumatic Dispatch, cited at [6]

Holborn
Holborn is between the Strand (at the northern end of Waterloo Bridge) and Bloomsbury.

Saffron Hill
is in the City, an area named Farringdon, east of Holborn.

tantum dic verbo isn't it
Might be derived from that part of the Mass where it's said: "Domine, non sum dignus, ut intres sub tectum meum: sed tantum dic verbo et sanabitur anima mea" ("Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof: but speak the word only, and my soul shall be healed")

Sands seems to be telling Gaspereaux to "just say the word".

intact
(Did I miss this?)

Page 448

because I'm mad
???

half-sovereign case
A sovereign is old English money for one pound, i.e 20 shillings. A half-sovereign is ten shillings old money.

Mr. Campbell-Bannerman
Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (1836-1908) was a Liberal MP and then Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1905 to 1908. I'm not sure when he was knighted; but he's not the only character in the novel connected with Trinity College, Cambridge.

Page 449

Clarabella
Clarabelle=name of the clown on The Howdy Doody Show [TV] in the fifties.

Audacity, Iowa
???

Page 450

DREAMTIME MOVY
Misspelling is dreamlike? Or, more possibly, the spelling hadn't yet been standardized.

The OED an cites an occurance of this spelling as late as 1919.

log... waterfall
Cf. DW Griffith?

lens-brother
(Like masonic sign?)(Also reminiscent of the lens (the K/kid/d) carries in Delaney's Dhalgren)

Powers movement
???

Geneva
???

Wilt Flambo
Flambeau = torch (French).

acetylene
When the flammable gas was used for illumination, it was often generated on the spot by dripping water onto lumps of calcium carbide.

Page 451

nitro in the film
Cellulose nitrate, also known as collodion, was the predecessor to modern photographic films. The collodion was the substratum to the chemistry that made the image.

the tip
The audience. Pynchon uses the word many times in AtD.

strange relation
Cf GR on calculus.

dark perplexity
Cf Gen X?

dilapidated portals
See p.406: the West Gate's "two flanking towers of rusticated stone and Gothical aspect... an aspect of terrible antiquity..."

queen-of-the-prairie
???

Page 452

Sempitern
An archaic term meaning 'eternal', a poetic but appropriate name for a river? Echoing "Serpentine," the lake in London's Hyde Park.

siegecraft of Time
Cf Paris Commune siege, p.19.

between Cleveland and Denver
Merle's idiosyncratic choice of endpoints?

automorphic functions
Auto= self; same as in autogamy. American Heritage Dict. -morph = Form, structure, function. Self-forming, self-structuring-- or self-organizing as Pynchon says elsewhere in ADT.

Page 453

We thus enter the whirlwind
God is sometimes referred to this way. Often Capitalized, but here the speaker is using it literally, but Pynchon maybe metaphorically?

Lobatchevskian
of Nikolai Lobachevsky (1793-1856), a Russian Mathematician, co-founder with Hungarian mathematician János Bolyai, of non-Euclidean geometry. Born at Nizhny Novgorod and a professor at Kazan University from 1814. In 1829 he published his non-Euclidean geometry paper, the first account of that subject in print.

Automorphic Dispensation
Self-forming, self-organizing dispensation.

distressing regularity
Explains dilapidation?

Thorvald
Scandinavian name from the Old Norse name Þórvaldr. It combines the name "Thor" (thunder) and scandinavian word "valdr" (ruler), to create the meaning "thunder ruler" or "ruler of the thunder". Either would be apt, in this case.

The persisting storm also occurs in Mason & Dixon and in at least one of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels.

thresher dinners
Hearty communal midday meals for men taking part in harvest. Here a sacrifice to Thorvald.

Page 454

"gaff"
A deceptive feature like the rabbit-concealing false bottom in a magician's top hat.

Giant Airships of 1896 and '7
Photo and info here

Chick
First Chum to appear in non-Chums chapter? Chick is the Chum we know, besides Pugnax if we count him, to have come aboard The Inconvenience from the real world. Another meaning to Counterfly? More earthbound?

Page 455

Cleveland... trial... Bounce v. Vibe
See p67 & 426

Somble, Strool, and Fleshway
???

'paranoia querulans'... P.Q.
A made-up noun to mean the psychological disease of constant questioning of one's paranoia?...

blasting agent
???

detonans
That which is detonated - cod latin

"I'm just another nutty inventor"
Roswell has been discussing his plans to dynamite the Vibe Corp. which has used its power to harrass him. Throught his work, esp. Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon has dealt with themes involving the split between elect and preterite, or to use a more simplified phrase, winners and losers. Dynamite offers the small and powerless, the "long-shot opponents of the mills of Capital" referred to earlier in the page, an expression of power of their own. In this way it is like the AK-47 today which has made it far more difficult for powers (e.g. the United States in Iraq) to exert control over populations.

Page 456

aigrette
Literally an egret or aigrette (or Lesser White Heron); hence a tuft of feathers such as an egret has and hence a spray of gems worn on the head and finally luminous rays seen emerging from the moon in solar eclipses or, to quote the OED, "at the ends of electrified bodies".

Pencil
To mathematicians, a pencil is a family of geometric objects sharing a common property, such as a collection of lines that pass through a common point. (Of course, constipated mathematicians also find pencils useful for working out logs).

equivalent of a shrug
Nice anthropomorphism.

lost mines
(Factual?)

Page 457

tourbillon
???

make time impervious to gravity
Thematic to this book and GR?

patent pencils
patent here to describe pencils seems to mean 1) of high quality, Archaic 2) open to general inspection... American Heritage Dictionary - because the pencils we all know and use were never "patented"... "He [Ebenezer Wood] constructed the first hexagon- and octagon-shaped pencil cases that we have today. Ebenezer did not patent his invention and shared his techniques with whoever asked." from Wikipedia.

zephyr gingham
???

lawn
???

pongee
???

Page 458

professors... engineers
Theory vs practice.

Latinate token of prestige
PhD, summa cum laude, etc.

suspicious of night horizons
(sunsets?)Absence of light horizons?

current... purity
Free of noise?

Minkowski
Hermann Minkowski was a German mathematician who made useful contributions in the development of relativity, amongst other things. [7]

Three times ten... minus one seconds
Three times ten to the fifth refers to the speed of light. The square root of minus 1 Wikipedia is also known as the Imaginary Unit or i. i is sometimes also expressed as the square root of -1, as here. Complex numbers Wikipedia can be expressed as a + bi where a is the real part of the complex number and b is the imaginary part. Complex numbers were an important element of the work of both Minkowski and Einstein.

Against the Day takes place at the time when Newtonian physics were being supplanted, at least in theory, by physics based on Relativity. This equation touches on that. But also, the use of a real and an imaginary number returns to the theme of duality that arises throughout the book. The spacetime measured by imaginary or complex numbers would seem to be something different though co-existent with 'our' spacetime.

other expression
Contextually, Roswell seems to be refering to the other side of the above equation...'that other expression 'over there'...they are at a slate "blackboard."

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