Difference between revisions of "ATD 199-218"

Revision as of 06:22, 29 December 2006

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

Page 202

V-twin with white rubber tires
A V-twin is a two cylinder internal combustion engine where the cylinders are arranged in a V configuration, most often seen in motorcycles. The first motorcycles available for purchase were made in 1894 by Hildebrand & Wolfmüller.

notes... rang like schoolbells
Recalls the lyrics from the famous 1958 Chuck Berry song, "Johnny B. Goode": "But he could play the guitar just like a ringing a bell".

Cooper

In the spirit of Icelandic Spar doubling, is it possible that the description of 'young gent Cooper' is Pynchon writing himself into ATD? Pynchon is reportedly shy and one of the supposed reasons given for why he never wanted his picture taken was that his upper teeth protruded and he did not like his portrait. Cooper sits astride a black and gold V-twin (!), produces a "Cornell" model Acme guitar, 'which now and then found strange notes added into the guitar chords, as though Cooper had hit between the wrong frets, only somehow it sounded right,' a pretty good analogy of Pynchon's bizarre but powerful prose style. Cf. Pynchon and his music connections and the trope (from Homer on) of musicians as the archetypal artists. Pynchon reportedly played the ukelele, so perhaps he also plays guitar. Perhaps this Cooper is an amalgam of himself and his great deceased school friend, Richard Farina?

A Cooper is also a barrel-maker.

On the other hand, Cooper is blonde and blue-eyed, whereas Pynchon has dark brown hair and dark eyes, as near as can be made out from the photos that exist.

Then there is Gary Cooper, debonair American movie star.

A Peter Cooper wrote an early book on Pychon's signs and symbols.

Page 203

Cooper, cont'd

If Cooper is meant as some kind of parallel of Pynchon, note that Cooper waits "for faces there, or a particular face, to be drawn by the music," and one is-- Sage, who exits the house wearing gray and puts her arm up Cooper's sleeve. Could this be Pynchon's loving memory of meeting his wife?

Page 204

Linnet
European finch. Wikipedia

Page 205

against the daylight
A direct example of against the day as against the light. Significantly, Frank's attempt to discern Stray's true facial expression is thwarted by the daylight behind her. An object positioned against the daylight, or, in general, between an observer and a light source, is shadowed or silhouetted -- in Pynchon's words of the same sentence, "veiled by its own penumbra". This is suggestive of the idea that light does not always illuminate.

"faro boxes"
Card game with anti-cheating mechanism that can be fixed. Wikipedia

Page 206

soul-to-soul and down Mexico way
Possible allusions to blues-rock guitarists Stevie Ray Vaughan and Jimi Hendrix, respectively. The first phrase was the title of a Vaughan album and the second is a phrase used in the song "Hey Joe," most famously recorded by Hendrix.

Down Mexico Way was, before "Hey Joe", a 1941 Western movie starring Gene Autry. See IMBD. Frank Sinatra was perhaps the most famous person who sang the title song, a hit in 1953, (when TRP was 15), "South of the Border, down Mexico Way."

both sounders and inkers
Two types of telegraph machine. Inkers turn telegraph signals into marks along long ribbons of paper, while sounders only made sounds through a speaker, requiring a human to write down the message.

one day it rang while Reef happened to be right next to it
Someone who knew Pynchon in the 60s described their final meeting in the article, Thomas Pynchon and the South Bay: "I was walking down the street and he was walking toward me. Our paths crossed right in front of a pay phone, our eyes met and we recognized each other. I asked how he was and at that moment the telephone rang. He looked at me and looked at the phone, then turned around and ran down the street, and I never saw him again."

a turbulent bath of noise that could have been fragments of speech or music surged along the lines
A possible imagistic allusion to the work of Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, specifically their 1948 book A Mathematical Theory of Communication. Shannon and Weaver were engineers working for Bell Systems who posited that information traffic through telephone systems could best be described in mathematical terms normally reserved for the flow of turbulent fluids. Their work, along with that of Norbert Weiner, founds the basis of the American branch of information theory. Wikipedia citations for Shannon and Weaver, and for information theory.

We know from the introduction to Slow Learner that Pynchon read (some--two books mentioned) Norbert Weiner while still in college.

Page 207

"Bob Meldrum"
1920s outlaw. cite

Page 209

"every telegraph pole had a corpse hanging from it"....very reminiscent of the heads on poles in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, an important text for GR.... "worst town Reef ever rode into". And the Belgian Congo, the setting for most of Conrad's novella, is mentioned in "AtD".

Towers of Silence
The Towers of Silence (also dakhma or dokhma or doongerwadi) are circular raised structures used by Zoroastrians for exposure of the dead. Wikipedia

Page 210

Reef learns in chatting with the Rev that even certain "accommodations", technically subornation, could be made "for a price" risking "an appropriate fate", i.e. death for money [from the Rev?] even here.

Page 211

arnophilia
A word invented by Pynchon. According to this website the greek word arnos generally refers to a lamb or sheep, but occasionally to a goat, too. Suffixes with the common part -phil- (-phile, -philia, -philic) are used to specify some kind of attraction or affinity to something, in particular the love or obsession with something. Wikipedia

Lourdes
city in France of Blessed Virgin appearances in the late 1800s to a youth and supposed miraculous cures since. Wikipedia entry

a kind of winged God
in various depictions, Satan appears as an angel/godlike-creature with huge wings. One of the most famous examples would be Milton's "Paradise Lost", especially Books 1 and 2.

Page 212

The upside down star
The upside down star, also known as the inverted pentagram, (with "two horns exalted"), is an emblem of the Devil.

In Mason and Dixon, the upside star is a symbol of two things that are connected: 1) when M&D are trying to find true north, they look at stars in their telescope to measure when they reach the peak of their arc arcoss the sky. In the telescope the star is upside down. Thus, upside down stars symbolize points which cut through distortion. 2) The star is seen again and again on rifles of both Dutch and American design. They pop up around slavery, a massacre, and an Iron refinery used for making impliments of slavery and war. The rifle is much like a telescope, but differs in that it shoots lead rather then huge sweaping cuts across the landscape. But they are both acts that are branded by evil.

Page 213

dusk's reassembly of the broken day
Broken by heat, reassembled as it cools. Or, dusk bringing darkness, night--"it's always night"--after another broken day...another 'against the day' allusion?

Page 214

the McElmo
Watershed territory in Utah and Colorado.

stole a horse
Reef probably he left in such a hurry, rapelling down "the blood-red wall", that he did not try to find his own horse or felt the Marshall might have gotten to it. Possibly, but unlikely, that TRP 'forgot' about the horse Reef came in on.

voice of the thunder
Twelfth Song of the Thunder

The voice that beautifies the land! The voice above, The voice of the thunder Within the dark cloud Again and again it sounds, The voice that beautifies the land.

The voice that beautifies the land! The voice below, The voice of the grasshopper Among the plants Again and again it sounds, The voice that beautifies the land.

[From Washington Matthews, The Mountain Chant: A Navajo Ceremony, 1887]

Voice of the Thunder is also the title of a book by Laurens Van der Post championing the life of the Australian Aborigines.

And the fifth and final section of T S Eliot's poem 'The Waste Land' is entitled "What the Thunder Said".

Chums of Chance and the Ends of the Earth
Not to be confused with The Chums of Chance in the Bowels of the Earth, mentioned at the end of Part 1 (page 117).

[the book], already dog-eared"
A contributor has mentioned a possible connection to Pugnax, but Pugnax was a neat reader, unlike Reef. The book was "dog-eared" when Reef got it and I think the connection is to the word and the meaning of reading dogs like Pugnax and the one in Mason & Dixon.

Page 215

Bridal Veil Falls
(c) ColoradoGuy.com

Could he have been visiting Frank at mine school?

"running a game of chance without a license"
The use of the word 'chance' here is probably no accident. Perhaps this implies that only the Chums of Chance can run a game of chance? Only the author of the Chums books has "[poetic] license? Cf. 'Great Game'and chance.

North Cape and Franz Josef Land
North Cape, Norway, is one of the northernmost points of Europe. Franz Josef Land is an archipelago in the Arctic Circle that was discovered in 1873 by Austrian polar explorers and named in honour of the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph I. Today it belongs to Russia.

While reading, "he enjoyed a sort of dual existence"
Spar and splitting theme? Pynchon on fiction and readers of?

Bridal Veil Falls
Waterfall near Telluride, Colorado. At 431 feet, Bridal Veil Falls is Colorado's tallest. The historic structure between the two falls is the former Smuggler-Union hydroelectric plant, which provided Telluride's electricity from 1904 until 1954. source

Page 216

"Just greasy ashes by the trailside."
Cf. p. 10, "tall smokestacks unceasingly vomiting black grease-smoke."

disrespect
Corruption setting in?

Page 217

Confederate Colt
Webb's Uncle Fletcher's gun, introduced on page 88.

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