Difference between revisions of "ATD 678-694"

Revision as of 13:14, 19 February 2007

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

Page 678

Whitechapel . . . Ripping . . . murders of the late '80s
Whitechapel is an inner city district east of Charing Cross, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. The heart of the district is Whitechapel Road itself, named for a small chapel of ease dedicated to St. Mary. In Victorian era Whitechapel area was full of poor English country stock which was swelled by large number of immigrants. This endemic poverty drove many women to prostitution. Such prostitutes were the victims of the serial killer known as Jack the Ripper who terrorised this part of London in the autumn of 1888.

exhibiting that sinister British craving for the dark and shiny...
Perhaps an Orwellian reference here:

'It's this bloody thing that does it,' she said, ripping off the scarlet sash of the Junior Anti-Sex League and flinging it on to a bough. Then, as though touching her waist had reminded her of something, she felt in the pocket of her overalls and produced a small slab of chocolate. She broke it in half and gave one of the pieces to Winston. Even before he had taken it he knew by the smell that it was very unusual chocolate. It was dark and shiny, and was wrapped in silver paper.^[1]

The whole paragraph also recalls the Velvet Underground Song Venus in Furs Lyrics, a hymn of the SM/Fetish-scene: "dark and shiny... patent boots... mackintoshes..." reads like catchwords from the covers of Atomage Magazine, whose editor John Sutcliffe, btw, did the costumes for the TV-Series The Avengers.

...students of the chimpanzee...
A stretch? According to a paper done by Arthur W. Epstein (1987), (male) chimpanzees and other primates might develop a fetish: "The endowing of an object with ... [erotic associations] has been noted in a zoo-dwelling chimpanzee ... who displayed sexual arousal toward one specific object, a rubber boot.... The chimpanzee quickly approached, gazed at the boot and handled it. The penis became erect and was touched to the boot. Shortly thereafter, manual self-stimulation and ejaculation occurred. The ejaculate was then consumed. This response was said to be invariable and occurred whether the boot was worn by a keeper or simply placed in the cage. (pp. 143-144)" source

To me, the text implies the chimpanzee likes all the bright and shiny stuff, not that it has any neurotic fetishes...see list down to albedo. The experts in 'erotic neuropathy' see what 'students of the chmpanzee' know. [User: MKOHUT, February 4, 2007]

marcasite
Wikipedia

Marcasite, in keeping with the idea of bilocations and doubles, is also a twinned mineral, it's opposing pair being pyrite (fool's gold), much as diamonds are twinned with graphite. [1]

queasy albedo
Albedo is the ratio of reflected to incident electromagnetic radiation power. It is a unitless measure indicative of a surface's or body's reflectivity. The word is derived from albus, a Latin word for "white".

streetlighting... luminous equivalent of a ...shriek
Thematic.

Whitechapel and white color theme all over.

Page 679

co-tenant of Tarot Card XV...Renfrew
Werfner is other co-tenant surely.
Card XV is the Devil.

K. & K. Landwehr
German. K. und K. or K-K, Kaiserlich-Königlich, Imperial and Royal. Landwehr, a section of the "joint" Austro-Hungarian Army over which only the Austrian (as disctinct from Austro-Hungarian) government had authority.

slightly more mineral
cf Frank's "mineral condition", page 395.

Jack the Ripper
The serial killer in Whitechapel district of London in 1888. Cf page 678:Whitechapel . . . Ripping . . . murders.

Page 680

"including the blood everyone's come for"
The audience at a musical about Jack the Ripper 'comes for blood'? Revenge motivations even here? Notice response of other audience member...

Sowieso
German: anyway.

Page 681

Liebestod
German: love-death. Denotes in particular the climactic scene in Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde, but here means the fatal end of an affair.
And Rudolf's unfortunate love-death led to Austria's death-love thru Ferdinand!?

Fachsimpelei
German: shop talk.

Ach, die Vetsera
German: ah, the Vetsera. Baroness Mary Vetsera was the mistress of Crown Prince Rudolf. In 1889 both were found dead at the Mayerling hunting lodge.

cherchons la femme
French: let us seek the woman. The phrase usually means to look for the woman who has set events in motion; here it's used ironically to mean that focusing on the search for the woman will mask any questions about Rudolf and his father.

[Pynchon thru]Khautsch links the first famous serial killer in history, Jack the Ripper, with the assassination of Crown Prince Rudolf--he could have been at Mayerling!--and the serial genocidal killings of Austria? "Railway depot...gates disposed radially in all directions"...p.683 "lives by the trainload"... The implication, though, is that all of those thousands of potential murderers were, in fact, the one true murderer--that each of the victims was killed by an unspecified but potentially enormous number of killers, simultaneously...

Page 683

gemütlicher alter Junge
German: good old boy.

some symmetry was being broken
Spontaneous symmetry breaking in physics takes place when a system that is symmetric with respect to some symmetry group goes into a vacuum state that is not symmetric. At this point the system no longer appears to behave in a symmetric manner. A common example to help explain this phenomenon is a ball sitting on top of a hill. This ball is in a completely symmetric state. However, it is not a stable one: the ball can easily roll down the hill. At some point, the ball will spontaneously roll down the hill in one direction or another. The symmetry has been broken because the direction the ball rolled down in has now been singled out from other directions [2].

Here, the meaning appears to be that the equilibrium of the twinned professors is broken; Werfner is in London, where he "should not be" (Renfrew's territory); a historical stasis has been broken; this must mean something. Perhaps a foreshadowing of the collapse of the Great Power "symmetry" of 1814 to 1914.

Page 685

[D.C.]
Musical direction, Italian: da capo = (repeat) from the top.

impersonating British idiots
Again and again in AtD we see the vital importance of being able to act the part of an idiot.

Lew, detective realizing he is also a hired hand, has an epiphany into bilocation/doubling theme re Renfrew and Werfner.
"kept separate.. [by].. two distinct kinds of light."p. 686

Page 686

Dr. Otto Ghloix
p. 132 & 148.

Pure Land
Shambala but any other meanings?

Page 687

Plafond Lumineux
French: luminous ceiling.

Page 688

we risk being divided in two . . . Atonement, in any case comes much later
A superbly constructed wordplay. "Atonement" means seeking and gaining release from guilt or ostracism, but the word is constructed from "at one." So the risk of splitting in two is followed, at length, by becoming one again.

Page 690

irreversible, pitiless
Definition of a Doomsday Machine. See Dr. Strangelove and too many other authorities to count.

Charlottenburg
District of Berlin, west and south of the city center. Woods, a castle.

Page 691

carbonyl chloride
Phosgene.

Page 692

"No one seemed to be in charge"
The non-violent situation and meaning of anarchism. Things still worked and Lew on the next page felt free, released from a "contract", the social, political contract?

Page 693

scabland
An elevated area of barren rocky land with little or no soil cover, often crossed by dry stream channels. Often used in the plural.

References

1. ↑ 1984, George Orwell, 1948, Ch. X

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