ATD 460-488

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

Page 460

so close... rocking
(Fact?)

Page 461

bust
Eg 'gone bust'?

day... set to the side
Title motif.

phantom rooms
cf the Vibe mansion, p.160

came by
(Page ref.)

Page 462

'cute
The word 'cute' is a shortened form of 'acute'.

Fickle Creek
???

ice-points
???

red whiskey
???

Noctambulo
Sleepwalker (Spanish).

insomnia
Parody of think tanks, etc?

Page 463

"echoed off the steep mountainside"
One hit.

for no more
Solecism?

Silent Gray Fellows
???

Indian V-twins
Motorcycles first produced in 1907 by the Indian Motorcycle Manufacturing Company Wikipedia entry.

Joe Hill's "Pie in the Sky"
A/k/a "The Preacher and the Slave." Song written by IWW leader Joe Hill Wikipedia entry in 1911 that was an attack on organized religion as a means for keeping the workers down: "You get pie in the sky when you die." A parody of "In the Sweet Bye and Bye." Lyrics here. Later recorded by Woody Guthrie.

ancient flat-out labor nihilists
Notice fierce value judgment.

love lines, life lines, girdles of Venus
Lines in the palm figuring in palmistry. Wikipedia entry.

overmapped
Their palms are scarred by labor, to a point their futures cannot be told.

barbwire
AtD usually says 'bobwire'.

Four Corners Gang
Name given to Sloat and Deuce after what they did to Deuce's wife, Lake, at the Four Corners. Evidently, the gang has many more members now.

Taos Lightning
According to this website [Taos Lightning] is a slang for a straight Earth bourbon of dubious origin and low quality. Injured in a barfight with Wyatt Earp, Doctor McCoy tended to Captain Kirk's wounds by dabbing them with Taos Lightning, much to Kirk's discomfort—referring to it as "fire". McCoy suggested that the stuff is "medicinal" in small amounts, to which Kirk replied that it should be labeled "For External Use Only." . . .

Zoltan
Fearless of usual dangers but is afraid of crosses and avoids mirrors; i.e. a vampire.

Werner
Allusion, homage, to Werner von Braun, rocket scientist?

Page 464

Excelsior
???

divide a fellow into two
Iceland spar motif.

Vang Feeley
???

silencer bypass
???

multiple outcomes
Worldline motif.

clock-seconds
(Interesting disambiguation.)

routine as elaborate
I'm thinking maybe Ann Margaret in a 50s biker flick?

Page 465

Ed Chase's town
See page 176.

Tortoni's
See page 176.

Bill Jones's
???

honorary Negro
???

ankle-biter
???

breakbeam stiff
???

couple wives
(Divorce, or bigamy?)

Coahuila
Northern Mexican state where Frank unexpectedly found--and shot--Sloat Fresno in a Cantina.

Well.
Not an answer, apparently.

Page 466

Hammers o' Hell
???

Jephthah
Alt. Jephtha. (Heb. יפתח). Israelite judge who semi-purposefully sacrificed his daughter to God following his victories of war against the Ammons. Judges 11-12.

Cherry Creek
Tributary of the South Platte River, with which it joins in downtown Denver. It was a stage route from the East into Denver; Four Mile House museum, 4 miles out from the center of Denver, is a preserved stage stop perhaps the inspiration for Jephthah's "road ranch". Speer Boulevard and a long bicycle path run along present-day Cherry Creek, and the Cherry Creek shopping area, recently gone very upscale, was long the site of the famous Tattered Cover Bookstore.(Personal note: in the 1980s the Tattered Cover stumbled upon a cache of hardcover copies of GR, all, of course, First Editions, and sold them--in the spirit of fairness, and despite their rarity--for their retail price).

narrow-gauge
The Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad ("D&RG") network consisted of standard gauge trackage (4 ft. 81/2 ins. between the rails) for main East-West (to Salt Lake City) and North-South (Front Range cities) lines, plus a standard gauge line along the Arkansas River from Pueblo to Leadville. Lines to the mountain towns were "narrow gauge"--smaller distance between the rails, thus requiring a narrower roadbed and permitting tighter turns in the confined spaces of mountain passes; also smaller, lighter rolling stock. Fragments of the narrow gauge lines survive as tourist railroads: the beautiful Durango & Silverton survives intact, the Cripple Creek & Victor takes tourists between these mining (now gambling) towns, and the spectacular Georgetown Loop climbs from Georgetown to Silver Plume west of Denver. Now-trackless roadbeds are terrific cross-country ski and snowshoe trails.

traitor to his class
Working class man or woman who worked for the interests of the bosses; aka finks (informers), stooges, goons (company strong-arm men), scabs (strikebreakers).

mucker work
???

South Slavic knitted caps
???

Austrian boys
???

vengeful ghosts
???

Page 467

fifteen years old... Julius
Groucho Marx. Indeed born 1890, but didn't tour West until aged 20+. Wikipedia

Groucho did tour the West, at age 15 in the summer of 1905, as part of the "Leroy Trio." And he was indeed abandoned by his partners in Cripple Creek, who stole his money. To get money to go home he took a job driving a grocery wagon through the mountains between Cripple Creek and Victor, though he knew nothing about horses. [Hector Arce, _Groucho_, NY: Perigree Books, 1979, pp. 56-57]

Mr. Archer
Lew Archer, Ross MacDonald's fictional detective. One of MacDonald's later novels had a front-page NYTimes Book Review review, by Eudora Welty, in the early 70s. [Before GR was published]

Victor
Colorado mining town near Cripple Creek.

East Ninety-third

The Marx family lived at 179 E. 93rd St. from 1895 to 1910 (across the street from Harry Houdini! ).

Page 468

Cone Amor
'Con amor' = 'with love' (Spanish). Ice cream cones were invented in 1904, so this is not quite anachronistic.

me? lady
Capitalisation typo, or stylistic?

Fruita
Town on Colorado's Western Slope.

Lois... Poutine
Evidently sisters. Princess Poutine: An older, oblivious, French-Canadian scatter-brained female in authority (such as a manager, teacher, CEO) who has a knack for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time and is overtly overweight and disproportionate [1]. From Poutine: a French-Canadian dish of French Fries with cheese curds and gravy.

Page 469

teeth were gone
It's only been a couple of years. She's about 50.

Page 470

bengalines
???

Barbary Coast
San Francisco neighborhood once known for gambling, prostitution and crime [2].

lettuce opium
Lactucarium, the milky fluid secreted by several species of lettuce, usually from the base of the stems. Lactucarium is known as lettuce opium because of its sedative and analgesic properties, and because it can be reduced to a thick smokeable solid. Long known in the U.S., regained popularity in the 1960's when people were looking for any cheap way to get high.

Page 471

Hippodrome
???

Page 472

reoccupation
Replacing Indians?

criminal palps
criminal sensor. Palp is an elongated, often segmented appendage usually found near the mouth in invertebrate organisms such as mollusks, crustaceans and insects, the functions of which include sensation, locomotion and feeding. Also called palpus.

Page 473

absquatulator
One who absconds; a neologism from the 1830s. Absquatulate on World Wide Words

Crystal... Oneida
Oneida crystal is a type of glassware. Google search

sash-weights . . . casementing
Extended and complicated figure likening, in part, a sky full of an approaching storm to a window in an old house. Specifically the sound of thunder is compared to sash-weights, the counter-balances built into all wooden windows (which enable an opened window, for example, to remain open instead of slamming shut), the sky itself the casement, or "neatly carpentered" frame, concealing those sash-weights.

Egypt
Far southern tip of Illinois, centered on Cairo, where the Ohio Rvier joins the Mississippi River, evidently Deuce's home territory. Allusions perhaps to Egyptian exile, Flight Into Egypt, and the goal of Huck and Jim's raft journey, where they can turn North on the Ohio into free territory.

Page 474

inside the angle
Echoes p258.

Page 475

double-ought
Deuce had been in Cripple Creek by 1895 (p195). He might have returned, or not been present.

Page 476

put his head into
pic

Wall o' Death
To ride the Wall of Death, rev up your motorcycle and guide it onto the inside of the cylindrical wall. Centripetal force keeps you up. The act works best with multiple bikes. Either the wall is open gridwork or the "tip" (audience) sits above looking down into the cylinder.

ellipses
Roman arenas, like most American football stadiums today, were generally built so that the perimeter created an ellipse.

Page 477

"For It Is Thou, Lord"
???

Eugene Boilster.
???

Happy Jack La Foam
???

police ticker
Evidently a police information service similar to a stock ticker.

Reporting officer C. Marin
Allusion to Cheech Marin, of Cheech and Chong and other entertainments.

Flor de Coahuila
???

twenty-five
Would make him 15 in 1895 (p195).

Page 478

senorita chinga chinga
Senorita fuck fuck

mas cerveza
More beer

co-conscious
Cf page 527:co-conscious.

(What's Pynchon up to with this word?)

more shit
Because shot through gut.

surprisingly careful latchclick
Nice!

Page 479

Tace Boilster
???

Page 480

Elsie Dinsmore
Series of childrens' books written by Martha Finley between 1867 and 1905 [3].

Roy Mickie
???

Salida
Town in South Central Colorado, in a high valley west of Pueblo on the Arkansas River, at the northern tip of the Sangre de Christo Mountains.

blue columbines
Mountain wildflower, a pale blue in color, that opens in July; state flower of Colorado.

atole con el dedo
???

Page 481

caps
Pun.

wall of death
(Mayva's not dead!?)

a week or ten days
(Contradicts recent text?)

Page 482

getting deep
Wifely surrender is a con?

Page 483

heeled
Armed.

Champagne
Pynchon consistently capitalises this. And he is grammatically correct so to do.

Page 484

before the days
Title motif?

eyeball hydraulics
Tears, not rolling eyes.

Swede
See p266.

separate tracks
Worldline motif.

Page 485

delivered into his own life
(Born doomed, or early bad karma?)

Furies
The Erinyes, or euphemistically the Eumenides: three Greek goddesses of vengeance: Tisiphone, Electa, Megaera.

"free"
???

no little ones
Fertility karma.

Sioux... melancholy
Un-cliched?

her belly
(Naked?)

Page 486

Phoebe Sloper
???

seldom
(With no kids, why not more free time?)

all he talked about
To Deuce, Webb mentions Lake only once (p. 196). No trace of Lake being "all he talked about" in the text. On page 197, he cries out the names of his sons.

Page 487

'Child of the Storm'
Cf p190. Deuce is not present during that passage.

stove shovel
For emptying wood ashes.

Greener shotgun
???

she lit up
(Anxiety, or freedom?)

Page 488

cahoots
Marriage as cahoots?

Annotation Index

Part One: The Light Over the Ranges	1-25, 26-56, 57-80, 81-96, 97-118
Part Two: Iceland Spar	119-148, 149-170, 171-198, 199-218, 219-242, 243-272, 273-295, 296-317, 318-335, 336-357, 358-373, 374-396, 397-428
Part Three: Bilocations	429-459, 460-488, 489-524, 525-556, 557-587, 588-614, 615-643, 644-677, 678-694
Part Four: Against the Day	695-723, 724-747, 748-767, 768-791, 792-820, 821-848, 849-863, 864-891, 892-918, 919-945, 946-975, 976-999, 1000-1017, 1018-1039, 1040-1062
Part Five: Rue du Départ	1063-1085