Difference between revisions of "ATD 460-488"

Revision as of 06:00, 13 March 2007

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'? Yes.

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
the points(temperature) at which water freezes for a given pressure which is falling as one goes up a mountain

Well, no, the freezing point doesn't vary perceptibly under these conditions. He looks down from the toll station to the valley. The light down there seems green and cold but sound is carrying easily up to him. Snow in the air would deaden the sound, so it isn't snowing. Fragments of ice slowly falling through the air could affect the color without muffling the whoop-de-do. You could get this effect if an ascending breeze slowed the fall of ice crystals through the air. I think that's what "ice-points" means: tiny sparkles.

red whiskey
Customary phrase in Westerns for bad corn whiskey from a licensed distillery. "White whiskey" is made from the same ingredients but briefly aged in a jug (and without the formality of paying excise tax).

Noctambulo
Sleepwalker (Spanish).

insomnia
Parody of think tanks, etc? (Or college dormitories.)

Page 463

"echoed off the steep mountainside"
One hit.

for no more
Solecism?

Silent Gray Fellows
The very first production model made by Harley-Davidson, about 1903.

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.

A Google search suggests this is a popular urban gang name. In the world of paperback adult Western fiction, there's Longarm and the Four Corners Gang, by Tabor Evans. The Longarm series includes 370 titles (as of Feb. 28, 2007) dating back to 1978, so Evans can be spotted on the street by the scars from his carpal tunnel surgeries. There's not really any reason to think Deuce, Lake and Sloat have any connection with these bikers, though.

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." . . .

That's a Star Trek fan wiki ("Earth bourbon," give me a break). Taos Lightning was one name for corn whiskey made by freelance distillers. Not bourbon because it didn't come from Kentucky and never saw the inside of an oak barrel. Romantic Old West tales say it was colored with burnt sugar and flavored with chewing tobacco, but if Western moonshiners were like those in the Appalachians, many of them took pride in selling a quality product.

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
Muffler cutout.

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 the fine annotation to 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
???

Not sure, but usually "mucking" refers to either cleaning manure from a stall and is also used for "dirty jobs" around latrines or septic systems.

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.

Prince Albert
A Burley-based tobacco for the pipe or handrolled cigarette. Still popular.

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
???

Was an arena or course for chariot racing. Later used as a course for walking. In this instance most likely connected to the motorcycle and "wall of death" motif.

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

not so much gone as consciously committing absence
A heartbreakingly beautiful little phrase. How parents must sometimes feel after their children are away.

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. First mentioned on P.18 as starting point of Penny Black and the Tzigane (Gypsy)’s trip to the White City.

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

As must happen to all badmen . . . deputy's star
A cliché from Westerns, but not without some truth. Bob Meldrum, for example, worked both sides of the law.

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.

when viewed from overhead reminding widely-traveled aeronauts
Are the Chums observing this episode? (This switch or twitch in point of view is something Nabokov practiced.)

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

some suburban fatality in the dwellings presently appearing at human random around it
I believe this is an odd printer's error resulting in garbled syntax and marring a carefully patterned passage. My conjecture is based on internal evidence. The whole passage, a paragraph-long sentence running from the bottom of 476 to the top of 477, is an intricate, lyrical riff on the idea of its ominous closing phrase: "structures in their vanishing. . . ." It's a beautifully layered play on the drift of time and space as the panaorama moving outward from the Wall of Death evokes a movement in time as well, from the "legendary" to the "suburban." But right in the heart of it one runs nose first into the little knot quoted above. That "at human random" must be wrong. It makes no sense semantically (or grammatically, I think); it so obviously breaks the patterned flow of phrasing; even the sound is blocked—the vowels, "m" and "n" sounds are ugly and labor intensive. Of course, my first thought was that it was some coinage or that I had missed something, yet the more I pored over it, the more clearly out of place it seemed. But simply shifting the word "human" backward so it modifies "dwellings" yields:

"some suburban fatality in the human dwellings presently appearing at random around it"

which makes everything click into place. It makes sense on the content level, smoothly advancing the temporal reference points of the structures evoked by the passage and presaging the momentary arrival of the "wheelfolk and picnickers," and formally it is clearly more satisfying, especially the restored assonance and the cadence.

The phrase "at human random" seems right. The passage moves as gracefully as you say, in time and space. When "suburban fatality" enters the picture, the "dwellings" are implicitly "human" ones, so "human dwellings" would be inelegant. But at first (in time and space) they are not aligned; "at human random" describes an anarchic condition that comes before "boulevards" and "viaducts," which might be described as imposed, civic or industrial order. The phrasing in the text makes the contrast stronger in part because it surprises the reader. (It's also perilous to suggest typographical garbles—as opposed to single-letter errors—so early in the book.)

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

Sloat Eddie Fresno, dead
We've made a jump in time back to the date of the Bolsón de Mapimí shooting.

señorita chinga chinga
Senorita fuck fuck

más 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
Short for Eustatia? Anastasia?

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

She was only a dynamiter's daughter
Old joke template:

She was only a photographer's daughter, but my, was she well developed!
She was only a hash-slinger's daughter, but could she ever dish it out!

See James N. Tidwell, A Treasury of American Folk Humor, pp. 543-44.

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 (“Kindly Ones”): 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