ATD 199-218

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.

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.

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."

a turbulent bath of noise that could have been fragments of speech or music surged along the lines
An 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 mathematically 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".

Towers of Silence
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": Philia equals "love of" in Greek and arno = The Association of Royal Navy Officers (ARNO)

"Lourdes"...city in France of Blessed Virgin appearances in the late 1800s to a youth and supposed miraculous cures since. See 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
Talking about the Marshal of Jeshimon, The Rev. of the town says: "'notice anything in particular?...Observe the star Wes is wearing.'...It was a five-pointed star, nickel-plated, like they tended to war, except that it was on upside down. 'Whith the two points up-that's the horns of the Devil, and signifies that Elderly Gent and his works.'"

In Mason and Dixon: The upside star is a symbol two things that are connected: 1. when M&D are trying to find true north, they look at starts in their telescope at 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.

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

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
(What happened to the one he came with, p209?) 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? Or else 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.

Page 215

Socorro
Could he have been visiting Frank at mine school?

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
See p88.

Annotation Index