Difference between revisions of "ATD 919-945"

Revision as of 17:53, 9 March 2007

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

Page 919

the recent battle
Battle of Casas Grandes, March 5, 1911, defeat for Madero's army in the Mexican Revolution; the action of this chapter begins a few days later.

novio
Spanish: boyfriend.

something like a city after dark
Like the White City, which he never saw.

Page 920

¿qué tal, amigo?
Spanish: What's up, my friend?

brujo
Spanish: wizard.

¿verdad?
Spanish: don't you?

José de la Luz Blanco
Colonel, later general, in Madero's revolutionary forces.

mucho gusto
Spanish: pleased to meet you.

Page 921

Adiós, mi guapo
Spanish: goodbye, lover.

Page 922

laudanum, paregoric
Laudanum is an alcoholic tincture of opium; paregoric, a camphorated tincture of opium.

Bloody Shirt
Waving the bloody shirt, as a political tactic, dates back at least 1300 years. The demagogue compels listeners to a desired action by citing a wrong they cannot ignore or forgive.

Bolsón de Mapimí
See p.395

Page 923

...the mysterious ruins thought to have been built by refugees fleeing from their mythical homeland of Aztlan up north.
An interesting anacronism here. From this website, we learn that

At first, because of its Pueblo-like architecture, Paquime [aka Casas Grandes] had been regarded as a sort of southern extension of the ancient Pueblo world. But Charles Di Peso's excavations in the 1950's raised a "storm of controversy," revealing pyramid platforms mounds, ball-courts, and macaw breeding pens, leading him to conclude that what he had found was a major Mesoamerican "Gateway City," a 14th century urban trading center from whence Mesoamerican prestige items (macaw feathers, marine shells, copper bells) were exported to the American Southwest, bringing "higher" Mesoamerican culture with them.

So it seems that at the time Wren Provenance would have been part of a "semi-official" Harvard dig at Casas Grandes, the original inhabitants wouldn't have been considered to be from Aztlan, unless they are (gasp!) Trespassers/visitors from the future. And on page 930, this is supported.

Also, Pynchon seems to subscribe here to the theory that the actual geographical location of Aztlan was somewhere in what is now the southwestern United States. He refers to Aztlan being "up north" of Casas Grandes. This theory, held by some, seems to contradict a well-established consensus among scholars that these areas were inhabited by North American Indians who, as opposed to Aztecs, left enough artifacts in these areas to document their existence there, and that Aztlan would have been closer to Central Mexico.

Page 924

tetas de muñeca
Spanish: doll-tits.

pinga de títere
Spanish: puppet-pecker.

Frank found himself in a strange yet familiar City [...] nobody but the most senior Astrologers even being allowed to view the sky.
An amazing sentence, perhaps the longest in the novel (more than a page in length), reminiscent of the opening dream sequence or that evensong service in Gravity's Rainbow — a hallucinogenic cinematic pan. Awesome!

Page 925

swamp-beaver hides
The nutria (called so in North America, coypu elsewhere) has the nickname swamp beaver.

Hallucinati
Play on Illuminati, the Illuminated Ones, but the Hallucinati are lit by indigenous cacti and such.

paseo time
Spanish: time for strolling.

pamphlets
These bear some similarity to the infamous "Tijuana Bibles" of the 20th century.

heliographs
The annotation to page 851 defines the machine used for communication; here "heliograph" is an image produced by the action of sunlight. See this remarkable page titled "The First Photograph." Nicephore Niepce invented the process which used the very limited sensitivity of bitumen of Judea to light to create an image.

city not yet come into being
Like an Aztlan alternate, an Aztlan never conquered by Cortez, developing without European influence beyond 1500 AD--what would such a mesoamerican culture look like?

Page 926

trespassers..winged demigods
Notice trespassers, non-capitalized, linked with beasts with wings--and gringos!-- we have seen earlier.

Page 927

Page 928

outside chance of saving his soul
Frank must become aware, by developing a historical sense. Pynchon goes beyond his concept of Temporal Bandwidth (in V.), the ability to experience the history of a place and imagine future consequences, to live simultaneously in past, present and future, to (if we agree Frank's vision took him to an alternate Aztlan) the ability to do so and to envision and in some sense inhabit alternate histories. Frank is a typical American, from a place whose history began yesterday; such an ability would save any American's soul.

They were not about to be caught twice
i.e. not like the Mesa Verde people along the McElmo.

Mormon settlements
Mormons did settle in the desert southwest, and proselytized among the Pueblos, Navajo and other groups. In 1911, Hopi adherents and traditionalists fought a brief civil war, permanently splitting the group between those remaining at the Mesas and those now settled at Tuba City, AZ.

Page 929

Page 930

"The professors she works for return in September to the other side..."
Aha, no wonder these professors "under semi-office Harvard auspices" know about the Casas Grandes/Aztlan connection which arose in the 1950s, but they're digging in the summer of 1911! They're from "the other side" — visitors/Trespassers from the future!

Page 931

profitable weeks
Because they are using Yashmeen's roulette system; see pages 862-3 and annotations.

Biarritz
Coastal city in France, on the shore of the Bay of Biscay.

Pau
Inland city in France, east of Biarritz.

Yz-les-Bains
Aix-les-Bains, pronounced EKS-lay-ban, is a city in southeastern France. (Bains = baths.) The name Yz, probably pronounced like eece but just possibly like the letter Y or Wise, may be an allusion to that. But here are a couple of odd things. (1) Although it is too high in the mountains to be "near the foothills," there is a ski resort called Ax-les-Thermes (Thermes = hot springs). And (2) scattered through the French foothills are a number of places whose names are letters of the alphabet: Ercé (R.C.), Port de l'Oo (O.), Les Eaux (O.), St. Béat (B.A.) and the excessively high peak Cembras d'Azè (A.Z., almost). There may be an intricate game of hide-the-spa going on here.

Possibly because: if Aix=X, we have a real X(-les bans) and a YZ(-le-bans); these are the coordinates, x,y,z. It is "carefully hidden", and as described on this and the following pages resembles the ideal Anarchist Collective of our (and Pynchon's) hippie dreams, ca. 1970. If Riemann functions are involved (see P. 937 and note), Y and Z may be coordinates involving imaginary numbers, fitting for the Edenic commune first referred to on P.372-373: "a place promised them, not by God, which'd be asking too much of the average Anarchist, but by certain hidden geometries of History, which must include, somewhere, at least at a single point, a safe conjugate to all the spill of accursed meridians, passing daily, desolate, one upon the next."

gave
French: mountain stream, torrent.

more desperamus than laudamus
Latin: more "we despair" than "we praise."

Page 932

I'm not in disguise...
The hippie dream: turn on, tune in, drop out. But bring your skills. People did, as described here.

Sophrosyne Hawkes
Sophrosyne is Greek, used in philosophy: moderation, moral sanity.

the old dutch
Rhyming slang: Duchess of Fife = wife.

treacle-and-brown-paper arrangement such as burglars use
One of P.G. Wodehouse's stories gives a good summary. You want to break a windowpane without lacerating yourself and waking everybody in the house. Get some treacle (molasses, syrup) and brown wrapping paper. Smear the window with the treacle and stick the paper to it. Rap the paper smartly. The glass fractures but doesn't fall out. (But is this correct or the fantasy of some crime writer?)

Page 933

plasmon biscuit
An odd endearment. Plasmon biscuits, containing milk protein, salts and phosphates, were made as dog rations.

Holloway
1852 U.K. prison in Islington, North London. Female only inmates since 1902.

brooch of honor designed by Sylvia Pankhurst
An honour medal for imprisonment was awarded to Emmeline Pankhurst, founder of the suffragettes, by the Women's Social and Political Union, Pankhurst was arrested in 1908 after she called on supporters to disrupt Parliament. The medal is inscribed with the date of her arrest and Holloway prison, where she was held. (Interestinigly,the medal was recently put up for sale [1].

I.W.W.
The Industrial Workers of the World, known popularly as The Wobblies. Their slogan was "One Big Union". The organization still exists [2]; it is currently (2007) organizing Starbucks baristas, among many other projects. Significantly, The IWW was founded in Chicago in June 1905 at a convention of two hundred socialists, anarchists, and radical trade unionists from all over the United States (mainly the Western Federation of Miners) who were opposed to the policies of the American Federation of Labor. The "Wobbly Shop" refers to the grass-roots democracy methods for running industry [3].

Page 934

A legacy, one finds, of these ancient all-male structures
A complaint about womens' roles in the Civil Rights and Peace movements of the 1960s, one factor that led to the emergence at that time of the modern feminist movement.
One woman participant in the 1968 Columbia student strike explained: "The men made revolution and the women made coffee."

Brambled golf balls

A "guttie" golf ball has a solid gutta-percha core [ See page 403 annotation ]; gutta-percha cores were invented in 1848. Modern golf balls have cores of titanium compounds, hybrid materials, softer shells and a more pressurized core. "Brambled" golf balls have hemispherical bumps molded into the surface to improve aerodynamics when the ball spins, the exact opposite of dimples which is what the surface of modern golf balls has. A brambled golf ball (sometimes called a Cayman ball) is specifically designed to fly true, but short. It is used on particularly short golf courses where space is at a premium. The brambles help it fly a trajectory that a normal golf ball would so that hooks and slices, fades and draws are possible.

Page 935

transform
A mathematical operation that "maps" a relation from one domain to another.

Here, "Belgian Congo" maps to "Balkan Penninsula". By 1912, everyone at Yz-le-Bans would be familiar with Conrad's Heart of Darkness, if not with other descriptions of the atrocities of exploitation of indigenous people in Congo. The conversation here and to follow describes the dawning realization of the imperialist exploitation of Eastern Europe by European powers. (Zora Neale Hurston famously commented that Hitler did in Europe what Europeans had been doing in Africa for a century). It begins with railroads and "other straight line" constructions.

common in dreams
Such as Frank's and Reef's. And/or, dreams require interpretation.

"The rail lines come into it as well, it's all like reading ancient Tibetan or something..."
The role of railroads in rationalizing the magic out of the world and exploiting it have been made clear repeatedly, and their extension to all corners of Asia is exemplified by Kit's and Frank's journeys. We know the strange seal on the AtD cover reads "Tibetan Chamber of Commerce". As Pynchon was writing AtD, China was completing its railroad to Tibet, now open.

self-inflicted Anarchist bomb casualties
In current chapter's context, possibly another 1960's reference, this time to the Greenwich Village (NY) townhouse explosion caused by a Weather Underground bomb manufacturing operation.

Page 936

a bold horizontal line
Again, a straight line imposed on natural terrain spells trouble.

certain disagreeable events, attributed to 'Germany', are scheduled to occur
This appears to be a map of time, not just of space, and perhaps of alternate historical possibilities.

the weight of a tank
Um, battle tank development did not begin until 1915.

Coddington lens
A hand lens used for close examination of objects.

Page 937

instead of real against imaginary values
Suggesting that on this map of time, what is supposedly imaginary is in some way real. Perhaps real in the sense we can learn from it? Real until we reduce the possibilities to a single reality by acting?

persistent long-standing nightmare
McHugh's scenario for the beginning of the World War.

Having failed to learn the lessons of that now mythical time...
That is, of the recently past Bosnian Crisis. Ratty now proposes yet another possible Balkan scenario leading to General European War.

Page 938

Cæsars
Both the German Kaiser and the Russian Tsar took their titles from the name Cæsar.

pestilent forms
The forms of 20th century totalitarianism were unknown in 1912.

Page 939

Phrenology
Nineteenth century pseudoscience that, oddly, was correct in one big idea and incorrect in all the small ones. Neuroscience in the 19th century believed all parts of the brain were totipotent, able to process any kind of information or carry out any mental function. Phrenologists correctly held that different parts of the brain carried out different and specialized functions. (Unfortunately, they also mapped these functions completely fancifully, and linked them to a series of palpable landmarks on the skull, which could be read as a pattern of mental capabilities [4]). Cyprian's quip suggests the modern Gaia hypothesis, which treats the Earth as a total conscious organism, would have to deal with the idea that some parts of the planet are more specialized. Niall Ferguson, in The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (Penguin Press, 2006) more plausibly points out that the early 20th century Balkans fulfills his three demonstrated conditions for becoming a conflict flashpoint: (1) Multi-ethnic population (2) location at the border of a failing empire (3) economic volatility.

relax into his fate
Cyprian again reacting as a Buddhist, following karma.

Page 940

Lydian
What Sleepcoat refers to is the Medieval/Modern Lydian mode (the white keys of the piano played from F to F). As with the Phrygian mode discussed in the wiki entry on page 896, there are two Lydian modes, the ancient Greek and the Medieval/Modern, although both modes in Against the Day refer to the medieval/modern Lydian. The "forbidden note" is the note that makes a tritone (three whole steps above the tonic). In jazz, this is often referred to as a "sharp eleven" (the 11th is the 4th degree of a scale when it is played in a chord that includes a dominant (flatted) seventh). The Beatles' "Blue Jay Way" is in the Lydian mode. Wikipedia on the Tritone.

"Exactly--it's this B natural," banging on it two or three times. "Should be flatted. Once it was actually a forbidden note, you know..."..."The interval which our unflatted B makes with F was known to the ancients as 'the devil in the music'..."
On Sept. 9, 2003, it was announced that astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory found evidence of sound waves (transmitted by the surrounding gas) emitted by a supermassive black hole. In musical terms, the pitch of the sound generated by the black hole translates into the note B flat, 57 octaves lower than middle-C. The vibrations explain why the gas shell surrounding black holes does not cool [5].

So the forbidden note in the Lydian mode, not found, Sleepcoat thinks avoided, in Balkan music, draws attention to a fundamental astrophysical property (a Music of the Spheres). Or to the fact that it "should be flatted", i.e. there is a fundamental half-tone difference in the universe as it is and as it mathematically should be.

Page 941

Jurançon
Town near Pau.

Paris Commune
Revolutionary government in Paris for two months in 1871.

Bartók and Kodály in Hungary
Béla Bartók (1881-1945) wrote music influenced in part by the Hungarian (Magyar) folk songs he collected after 1905. Zoltán Kodály (1882-1967) incorporated some such music into works such as the "Dances of Marosszék."

Canteloube in the Auvergne
Many songs Joseph Canteloube (1879-1957) collected found their way into his "Chants d'Auvergne."

Vaughan Williams in England
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) was one of a small corps of collectors in Britain. A highlight of his output is the "English Folk Song Suite" for military band. His "Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis" is discussed on page 896.

Eugénie Lineff in Russia
Publishing under this French form of her name, Evgeniya Lineva or Linyova (1853/4-1919) brought out collections of Russian and Ukrainian folk songs.

Hjalmar Thuren in the Farøe Islands
Danish musicologist Thuren (1873-1912) collected in the Farøes, East Greenland and elsewhere.

Page 942

a commonwealth of the oppressed
Such a commonwealth might require the kind of transcendence of desire Cyprian is embarked upon.

unmapped territory
But they have the Map--they just can't yet read it.

utopian dreams...defective forms of time travel
Fiction is an escape into Possibility, alternate histories; clearly a reflexive reference to AtD itself. One way to formulate this is to consider fiction, the Imaginary, another coordinate axis for the universe, like the three dimensions of space and the fourth of time. The imaginary/fictional affects reality, the choices made in the realm of the other four axes, by way of consciousness (thought and desire). Utopian dreaming is a "defective" form in that it is not along a "real" axis of travel, or perhaps because it can only affect choices in the other four axes via defective human consciousness.

untouched by cause and effect...points were thrown one by one like a magician forcing a card on spectators...
Action collapses Possibility into Actuality in one formulation of the quantum universe; a reprise of Yashmeen's departure from Vienna.

Page 943

Zagreb
Capital of Croatia.

Beograd
Usually "Belgrade" in English. Capital of Serbia, later of Yugoslavia.

There's ever such a nice panatela right here
Allusion to the famous apocryphal remark attributed to Sigmund Freud: "Sometimes a cigar is only a cigar."

massés
A massé shot in billiards involves driving the cue down onto the white ball.

Page 944

machos
Spanish: he-men.

Sofia
Capital of Bulgaria.

Tsentralna Gara
Bulgarian: Central (railway) Station.

Boulevard Knyaginya Mariya Luiza
Bulgarian: Princess Marie Louise Boulevard. Named for Marie Louise of Bourbon-Parma (1870-99), consort of Prince Ferdinand, who became Tsar of Bulgaria after her death.

Page 945

Arthur Symons
1865-1945, poet and critic who visited Sofia in 1903.

Kind of like Omaha
This gratuitous comment calls for a self-indulgent annotation. I lived in Omaha for 2 years. Reef's assessment is completely accurate. But it might be worth noting that just as the arrival of the railroad seems to have rationalized Sofia, Omaha, also a city developed on a grid system, was the jumping off point for the Union Pacific half of the Transcontinental Railroad project.

kebabcheta
Bulgarian: rissole (something resembling a meat-filled croquette or breaded cutlet). Two notes: (1) The -ta at the end is not part of the word but a definite article; (2) present-day spelling is kebapche.

banichka
Bulgarian: cheese patty.

palachinki
Bulgarian: pancakes.

Transylvanian . . . kanástánc
In western Bulgaria he thinks he hears a Hungarian "swineherd's dance" from a part of present-day northern Romania, which belonged to the Kingdom of Hungary until 1918, with a large Magyar population (31.6 pct according to the 1910 census). That song really would have done some traveling. (Should it be spelled kanásztánc? - Oh yes. It had a Transylvanian Romanian version, though, called crucea.)

Shop dialect
Nothing to do with ateliers. Bulgarian shop refers to the Sofia district and specifically peasants living there.

Annotation Index