Difference between revisions of "ATD 644-677"

Revision as of 00:39, 31 January 2007

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

Page 644

E.B. Soltera
Soltera is Spanish: spinster. Estrella Briggs, Unmarried.

Regeneration Equipment
In chemical technology "regeneration" means taking a spent product out of the system and cleaning it up for reuse.

whiteness
stressed motif. Cf. alabaster temples at the Columbian Exposition.Cf. whiteness in GR.

Page 645

E.P.T.
El Paso, Texas.

Page 646

Page 647

For really it was the sidekick who presented the problem. Restless type. Fair hair, hat back on his head so the big brim sort of haloed his face, shiny eyes and low-set, pointed ears like an elf's...

Billy the Kid?

Daisy, Daisy
"Daisy Bell" is a popular song whose lyrics ("Daisy, Daisy, Give me your answer do...I'm half crazy, all for the love of you..." as well as the line "...a bicycle built for two") are considerably better known than the song's actual title. "Daisy Bell" was composed by Harry Dacre in 1892. As David Ewen writes in American Popular Songs: "When Dacre, an English popular composer, first came to the United States, he brought with him a bicycle, for which he was charged duty. His friend (the songwriter William Jerome) remarked lightly: 'It's lucky you didn't bring a bicycle built for two, otherwise you'd have to pay double duty.' Dacre was so taken with the phrase 'bicycle built for two' that he decided to use it in a song. That song, Daisy Bell, first became successful in a London music hall, in a performance by Kate Lawrence. Tony Pastor was the first one to sing it in the United States. Its success in America began when Jennie Lindsay brought down the house with it at the Atlantic Gardens on the Bowery early in 1892." Wikipedia....see this for memorable occasions of its use. It was evidently sung at the OK Corral gunfight, if TRP says so but I have not substantiated this yet.

More popularly, sung by HAL, the failing shipboard computer, as it is disabled in Stanley Kubrick's film 2001, A Space Odyssey.

Page 648

Page 649

Rosie's Cantina
As found in Marty Robbins's 1959 hit song "El Paso" (a song frequently covered by the Grateful Dead). When the exiled narrator attempts to return to the cantina, he sees to his right "five mounted cowboys/Off to my left ride a dozen or more."

L.&O.L.
??

Page 650

Rock Springs
Wyoming town, center of the Wyoming oil boom of the late 1970s, early 1980s, known then as a wide open town.

Creede
Central Colorado town, like Telluride once a mining town, now a ski resort.

Page 651

Page 652

Karawankenbahn . . . Tauern . . . Wochein
A series of tunnels constructed as part of a huge Austrian public works project in the first years of the 20th century. They are named for ranges of mountains and hills they pass through. The objective was to develop rail transport to the port of Trieste. It's possible the Wochein tunnel is now in Italy under another name.

Brigue
Also spelled Brig.

Page 653

League of Prizren
Aimed for Albanian unity and autonomy; 1878; Wikipedia article.

many superstitions inside this mountain
Tunnelers and miners were among the most superstitious trades. Small wonder.

Page 654

Me fal
???

history. They suffered from it...survive to see the day.
Title thematic.To see the day History [Time] ended?

Page 655

Tatzelwurm
A/k/a Swiss dragon. A mythical creature or cryptid, depending on who you believe. Wikipedia entry; Cryptid zoo website.

[S]ometimes a Tatzelwurm is only a Tatzelwurm.
Echoing the comment attributed to Freud, "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar", the cigar-loving alienist who would have been on the faculty of the University of Vienna at this time.

Page 656

favogn
Also known as a föhn, a dry wind blowing up the lee side of the Alps.

balneomaniacs
People avid for mineral baths and spas like those at . . .

Baden-Baden . . . Wagga Wagga
In Germany and New South Wales (Australia) respectively. Names, of course, which suggest bilocation.

Moazagotl clouds
A persistent cloud formation associated with the föhn. Technical definition.

Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin
Great alliterative last name given her effect on men.

Page 657

Macchè, gioia mia
Italian: No way, my joy!

Càlmati
Italian: Take it easy.

Tutto va bene. Un amico di pochi anni fa
Italian: It's all right. A friend from years ago.

Ambroid
Synthetic amber used for costume jewelry.

Tesoro
Italian: treasure.

Page 658

Petite Roquette
A Paris prison later used as a reformatory for boys.

Tatzelwurm
Cryptozoologists also use the term "Swiss dragon" for this mythical Alpine beast. Its habitation is not said to be limited to mines and tunnels. Mostly uninformative Wikipedia entry.

Ndih'me!...Nxito!
???

a scream
again that Pynchonian expression of horror as elsewhere in ATD, such as in the 'inner sands' scenes and GR, of course.

spital
Various languages: hospital, infirmary.

Page 659

bien sûr
French: certainly. Here "Of course you did."

Domodossola
City located at the foot of the Italian Alps, a minor passenger-rail hub. Its strategic location accommodates Swiss rail passengers, acting as an international stopping-point between Locarno (a Swiss city of Italian language) and Brig (a Swiss city of German language) through the Simplon Pass [1].

Page 660

Page 661

Intra
Now Verbania, on the shore of Lago Maggiore.

Deep Germany
"the folk-dream behind the Black Forest", and so on to p. 662

Page 662

shadows with undulating tails and moving wings
shadow of Satan image?. Cf. p. 211

collapse of the Campanile in Venice
Bell-tower on St. Mark's Basilica. The campanile reached its present form in 1514. As it stands today, however, the tower is a reconstruction, completed in 1912 after the collapse of 1902. Wikipedia.

roof of the Charing Cross Station
A major railway station in London. The elegant original roof structure collapsed on 5 December 1905. By great fortune, only six lives were lost (two workmen on the roof, a bookstall vendor and three passers-by in the street, where most of the girders fell)...Wikipedia

So it is now 1906 in this chapter.

the revenge of Deep Germany
We have seen an earlier reference to deeper Germany, to the pre-Christian, pre-rational Germany, here supposed to be avenging itself upon the mechanised, rational order that has supplanted it.

This pre-Christian Germany was the mythical Golden Age Naziism sought to draw upon and revive.

Page 663

stranniki
Dissenters from the Russian Orthodox Church; a sect of Old Believers who rejected the Orthodox priesthood and sacraments.

podpol'niki, underground men
The Russian word does mean that, but the present use is especially interesting because they are pod pole, under the floor.
Perhaps also an allusion to that religious Russian, Dostoevsky and his "Notes from Underground".

"not the day we knew"
Thematic re day.

"extralogical...mathematical work"
math work is beyond logic, mystical-like.

smooth-enough World-Line
linear History, not the ATD 'line', with a verbal pairing to 'World-Island', that Pynchonian way of naming the Earth.

Page 664

Sanatorium Bopfli-Spazoletti
Allusion to the tuberculosis sanatorium of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, which was indeed the anteroom of death for its protagonist, Hans Castorp, who goes on to be "cured" to serve and die in World War I, a personificationof the death or Europe.

anterooms of death
The metaphor repeated from page 526, now possibly with a different meaning.

Page 665

Glenwood Springs
Colorado town, then as now site of a famous inn and hot springs, hydrotherapy center and spa, located on the main line of the Denver & Rio Grand Western Railroad. Until the early 1980s, a popular excursion was an overnight trip from Denver along teh upper Colorado River through Glenwood Canyon to the venerable hotel/baths on the D&RG's venerable rolling stock, the last privately operated passenger train in the U.S. The route is now operated by Amtrak, but the canyon has been ruined by the completion of I-70 through it. Pynchon's sinister railroad of the 1800s has been superseded, has become in its turn a nostalgic retreat from a newer modernity. For Kit, in his eastward trip from home, Glenwood Springs would have been the last large stop before Denver.

tunnel Italian
The pidgin Reef learned in the tunnels.

repeated figure being played on an alpenhorn
Ri-i-co-la!

Papillon
French: Butterfly.

Page 666

Reader, she bit him.
Reef has failed, both literally and figuratively, to screw the pooch. (and, of course, a parody of the opening sentence of the final chapter of "Jane Eyre")

Page 667

skeezicks
Affectionate term for a man. The foundling Skeezix was the protagonist of the comic strip "Gasoline Alley."

vint
A real game. Which Reef here pretends not to understand, a classic card-sharp gambit.

avantyuristka
Unfortunate placement of the hyphen makes it look as if it's avant- something, but it's a single Russian word, авантюристка, meaning "adventuress."

Page 668

reticule
Lady's handbag, especially one made by netting or tatting.

Ite, missa est
Last words of the Latin mass: Go, you are sent.

Page 669

Pinks
Pinkerton agents.

Page 670

glowing giant amœbas that leave sticky residues
A recent book, Spook, by Mary Roach, tells how 19th-century mediums prepared these cheesecloth apparitions and secreted them in their vaginas.

Page 671

Bozhe moi!
Russian: My God.

bunco man
The original bunco was a dishonest gambling game played with dice. Eventually the word evolved the sense 'the playing of a bunco game', and hence 'swindling or fraud of any sort'. From Spanish, Banco, a card game like monte. First recorded usage in 1870's, when it became popular quickly.

speakin as an old bunco man . . . it was him talkin
Reef displaying the kind of skepticism that would eventually explode the whole spiritualist enterprise.

Page 672

"I'm screamin again"
Screamin motif in Webb's channelled memory.

Page 673

Page 674

"great never-sleeping hydropathic"
Internal and external use of water as a therapeutic treatment for all forms of disease. hydro·pathic (hdr-pathik) , hydro·pathi·cal...American Heritage Dictionary.
In 1877, the estate became the property of the Craiglockhart Hydropathic Company, who set about building a hydropathic institute. Such was Craiglockhart's function until the advent of the First World War. Between 1916 and 1919 the building was used as a military psychiatric hospital for the treatment of shell-shocked officers. Wikipedia.
see esp. the next paragraph.

swamper
One who performs general, menial duties.

vis inertiæ
Latin: force of inertia. Not considered a "force" since Newton.

Page 675

As light began to steep in...

Like on page 566, this dream-passage seems to contain a top-down examination of Kit's progress; of his motives and awareness of complicity in the Traverse vengeance-quest against the Vibes. Similar to Kit's earlier dream(s?), it's a thematic reduction and feels like a significant 'clue':

As light began to steep in around the edges of the window blinds, Kit fell asleep again and dreamed of a bullet en route to the heart of an enemy, traveling for many years and many miles, hitting something now and then and ricocheting off at a different angle but continuing its journey as if conscious of where it must go, and he understood that this zigzagging around through four-dimensional space-time might be expressed as a vector in five dimensions. Whatever the number of n dimensions it inhabited, an observer would need one extra, n + 1, to see it and connect the end points to make a single resultant.

resultant
notice this word and not 'result' in the above paragraph. 'Resultant' has math vector meanings! ...Issuing or following as a consequence or result. 1. Something that results; an outcome. 2. Mathematics A single vector that is the equivalent of a set of vectors....Anerican Heritage Dictionary.

In addition to the broad narrative summary, there appears to be a metatextual implication here. Regarding the reader in Pynchon's overall 'Against The Day' scheme: the novel n must be observed from an n +1 perspective (that is: dimensionally distinct) to connect end-points and weave a single result, to engage and correlate strands and twines into a coherent narrative whole. Without an overarching consciousness there's apparent anarchy: with said consciousness there's meaning and vector.

Part of which meaning I might argue is that Kit's revengeful bullet is part of the overarching 'problem' of mutual complicity, which we readers have to see.

remy 10:52, 28 December 2006 (PST)

Page 676

Too many of us have to sit foolishly by...
Vibe = Vibration, a wave disturbance of the aether; for most of us incoherent force driving human misery, but for the Traverse family a person, a personified malevolence on which vengenace can be wreaked.

Page 677

Buda-Pesth
Budapest. The cities of Buda and Pest (archaic spelling Pesth) were unified in 1872; the hyphenated spelling persisted for many years.

Psychical Research
The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) is a non-profit organization in the United Kingdom whose purpose is to research and investigate supernatural, magical, paranormal, and occult phenomena in a scientific and unbiased manner. It was founded in 1882 by three dons of Trinity College, Cambridge, Edmund Gurney, Frederic William Henry Myers, and Henry Sidgwick, because of their interest in spiritualism. Wikipedia.
Wikipedia has no Budapest connection, but it says the Society was very active in its first thirty years, the time of ATD. A history of the Society might have the Budapest sections.

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