Difference between revisions of "ATD 525-556"

Revision as of 23:58, 29 January 2007

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

Page 525

Ostend
Cf page 521, a seaport in northwest Belgium. For more and pictures Ostend.

Fishermen's Quai
Fishermen's Quay, also called De Trap. The shrimp boats come home here from the sea in the morning. Along the quay many stands sell lots of seafoods.

Boulevard van Isenghem
???

street-plausible
Presentable.

Quai de l'empereur
???

estaminet
According to the OED - A café in which smoking is allowed. Now, any small establishment selling alcoholic liquor.

twelve-centime
one centime is the French eqivalent of one cent. A twelve-centime beer would cost 12/100 of a franc

Kellner
German: waiter, barman. Use of the German word would be insulting to the Belgian barman.

demi
Half glass.

Lambic
Pron. lahm-BEEK. Unique Belgian beer style, sour and often thin in body.

skimmer
Straw hat ("Panama").

Page 526

biquaternion
Double quaternion.

Barry Nebulay
Pun on a term from heraldry, barry nebuly. Barry (rhymes with "starry," not "carry") refers to a shield divided into an even number of parts by horizontal lines. Nebuly signals that the lines are deformed into stylized "cloud" shapes. Here you can see an example. If a British author had a character with a heraldic name, it would suggest a pseudonym.

University of Dublin
The Alma Mater of Hamilton, the father of Quaternion. He studied, graduated and taught at Trinity College, the University of Dublin, Irland's oldest university.

If University College, Dublin, then Joyce had graduated in 1902.

Tasmania
Tasmania is an island of the southern coast of Australia. Known for its relative isolation, it was a prison for English convicts in the 1800s

Hamiltonian devotees
The Quaternion faction, after William Hamilton, who devised the scheme.

Grand Hôtel de la Nouvelle Digue
There is a Hotel Digue in the Seychelles; this is a New Hotel Digue by Pynchon?

anterooms of death
This metaphor is sometimes applied to concentration camps. Here the lyric "feel like I'm fixin' to die" seems more apposite.

Belgian Art Nouveau
???

Page 527

dossing
British slang for "sleeping", "staying overnight"

Russian nihilists

Eugénie, Fatou
Females.

Denis, and Policarpe
Males.

Young Congo
Probably in reference to the Young Turks, a Turkish revolutionary movement

Garde Civique
A part of the Belgian army. According to the 1911 Britannica, "the mass of the garde civique does not pretend to possess military value. It is a defence against sedition and socialism."

French Second Bureau boys
Deuxieme Bureau; French Intelligence.

phalange
French: phalanx. A military (here mock-military) group ready for combat.

"...until something had happened, something too terrible to remember..."
Again this theme of an unknowable past transgression, here invoked almost as if the unknown signifies the other 'lateral' (a word which has cropped up at least a dozen times already) 'vector'.

the Digue
French for "dyke"

Congo... Belgians
The Belgian colonisation of the Congo was, as Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" makes clear, notable for its greed and brutality.

Leopold, King of the Belgians
1835-1909, reigned 1865-1909. In the Congo he acted as sole proprietor and absolute ruler.

co-conscious
???

Force Publique
Belgian armed forces operating in the Belgian Congo (Wikipedia)

rubber worker
See above: One of the early missions of the FP was to increase rubber export quotas through forced labor and related atrocities.

Page 528

khâgne
???

Reclus
???

Stirnerite
Follower of Max Stirner, 19th century German philosopher and author of The Ego and Its Own, a work influential in anarchist thought. Wikipedia entry.

Max Sirner (1806--56) attacked on systematic philosophy. His denial of absolutes, and his rejection of abstract concepts of any kind placed him among the first philosophical nihilists. For Stirner, achieving individual freedom was the only law; and the state, which necessarily imperiled freedom, must be destroyed. Even beyond the oppression of the state were the constraints imposed by others because their very existence was an obstacle compromising individual freedom. Thus Stirner argued that existence was an endless "war of each agains all" (1844).

Anarcho-individualiste
i.e. he has doctrinal differernces with Stirnerism, strictly speaking; see P. 324 and "Eigenheit".

Leopold
See p. 527.

going down lately
Being assassaniated.

Sipido
Jean-Baptiste Victor Sipido (1884-1959), a Belgian socialist. On April 5, 1900, he attempted to assassinate the Prince of Wales at the Northern Railway Station (Gare du Nord) in Brussels because of his believing that thousands were killed by the British during the Boer War in South Africa. The fifteen-year old leaped onto the foot board of the royal compartment right before the train left the station and fired two shots through the window but missed everyone inside. He wes arrested, tried but acquitted.

Prince... of Wales
(Maud Gonne's husband claimed to have been involved in another such plot.)

Royal Bathing Hut... twenty francs
???

twenty francs
???

Page 529

picric family
The explosive picric acid (2,4,6-trinitrophenol) and its derivatives. For picric acid, Brugère's powder and Designolle's powder, see this Britannica article.

Brugère's powder
See "picric family" above.

Designolle's
See "picric family" above.

Monsieur Santos-Dumont
Alberto Santos-Dumont (1873-1932), a pioneer of aviation from Brasil. Check out Wikipedia to get a look at the way he was wearing his "trademark Panama hat".

Green Hour and l'heure vertigineuse
Absinthe-drinking time. The liqueur is green. In French, l'heure verte, so vertigineuse (vertiginous, causing dizziness) is a pun on the word for "green."

Rocco and Pino
Rabid Quaternionists and sudden friends of Kit Traverse.

No, they are not Quaternionists, but "Italian naval renegades".

Whitehead works in Fiume
Anticipating GR's V2 works.

Fiume is now Rijeka, Croatia. Trieste is on the northern shore of the Istra Peninsula, Rijeka on the southern shore.

Alberta
???

Siluro Dirigible a Lenta Corsa
or S.L.C. "slow course torpedo", "slow-running torpedo". Wikipedia Italy‘s Navy was among the first to experiment with manned torpedos. Though according to this site this did not happen until 1935, Italian frogmen as early as October 31, 1918 made it into the harbour of Pula with the help of a modified german torpedo and sank the former Austrian but by then since a few hours Croatian/Slovenian/Bosnian battleship SMS Viribus Unitis. website

Italian dirigibile means "steerable." The word suggests the torpedo is a counterpart of the dirigible Inconvenience.

Page 530

exfiltrate
Make a surreptitious escape (as "infiltrate" means to make a surreptitious entrance).

Macchè
???

Ehi, stugazz', categoria
???

mezzogiornismo
Denigrating the Italian South

Page 531

Bruges
An exceptionally beautiful Belgian town of canals which is thus one of several towns known as the 'Venice of the north'.

Raoul's Atelier de la Vitesse
French: Ralph's Speed Shop.

Ghent
Belgian city on the rail line about halfway between Ostend and Brussels.

Daimler six-cylinder
???

a hundred horsepower
???

guaglion
???

Umeki Tsurigane
Umeki is typically made with some combination of the various kanji for "plum" (ume) and "tree" (ki), though one has the ki being the character for "ghost/devil" and one obscure reading that's entirely redundant, where ume is "plant" (usually read ue). There is one where ume is the kanji for "buried or embedded". Tsurigane, means a "temple bell", which can stand alone or be followed by the grass kanji to mean "bellflower" (lots of botanical stuff happening here, if that means anything; hardly the only example in AtD). Given the search for Shambhala going on, "Buried Temple Bell" seems a likely translation, at least at this point; the botanical meanings could perhaps emerge later.

Professor Knott
???

Page 532

drover's sombrero
Cowboy hat.

furoshiki
???
Japanese all-purpose cloth. Can be worn, used as wrapping, or used as a bag.

taupe
A brownish gray.

boilermakers and their helpers
A shot of straight scotch followed by a beer chaser, plus other drinks.

Comptes rendus
Les Comptes rendus de l'Académie des sciences Francais.

Page 533

aniline teal
The wallpaper dye; aniline dyes were the products of I.G. Farben, significant in GR.

Heavisiders
Oliver Heaviside (May 18, 1850 – February 3, 1925) was a self-taught English electrical engineer, mathematician and physicist who adapted complex numbers to the study of electrical circuits, developed techniques for applying Laplace transforms to the solution of differential equations, reformulated Maxwell's field equations in terms of electric and magnetic forces and energy flux, and independently co-formulated vector analysis. Although at odds with the scientific establishment for most of his life, Heaviside changed the face of mathematics and science for years to come.[1].

Grassmanniacs
Nineteenth century German mathematician and linguist, essentially the inventor/discoverer of vector space. Grassmann showed that once geometry is put into the algebraic form he advocated, then the number three has no privileged role as the number of spatial dimensions; the number of possible dimensions is in fact unbounded.[2].

in the mood for a clambake
Anachronistic Broadway show tune? If so, the clambake in Carousel turns into a brawl; the assmebled factions of mathematicians could be in the mood for either a party or a brawl, apparently.

Monopole de la Maison
???

Idiom Neutral
An invented language, like Esperanto. Idiom Neutral dictionaries first appeard in 1902. It looks like a simplified Latinate language and it grew out of Volapuk, another "auxiliary language." It was abandoned by the Akademi Internasional de Lingu Universal in 1908.

For a list of all the invented languages that linguists are keeping track of, including Klingon, try Eastern Michigan's Linguist List. And don't forget to click on the link to "Browse sites devoted to constructed languages."

phatic
Basically, small talk or chatter. Words used to convey fellow-feeling rather than to impart information.

Kampf ums Dasein
German: struggle for existence.

Q-brother
"My fellow Quaternion"?

Page 534

Poiret gown
???

green and long
Pickle, or... what?

Page 535

no-name wine
1970s idiom for common European practice?

Hamilton... first love
???

Page 536

Oscar Wilde
Note that Wilde's Dorian Gray also undergoes a kind of bilocation.

Kursaal
Spa.

Curls
Cf page 326. In vector calculus, a curl is a vector operator that shows a vector field's rate of rotation.

Laplacians
Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace (March 23, 1749 – March 5, 1827); French mathematician and astronomer who summarized and extended the work of his predecessors in his five volume Mécanique Céleste (Celestial Mechanics) (1799-1825), translating the geometrical study of mechanics used by Isaac Newton to one based on calculus, known as physical mechanics.

He is also the discoverer of Laplace's equation. Although the Laplace transform is named in honor of Laplace, who used the transform in his work on probability theory, the transform was discovered originally by Leonhard Euler. The Laplace transform appears in all branches of mathematical physics — a field he took a leading role in forming. The Laplacian differential operator, much relied-upon in applied mathematics, is likewise named after him. [3].

Laplacian is a differential operator named after Laplace. Cf page 326. Pynchon here talked about not the person but the mathematical operations such as rotation, partial differentials, curls and Laplacians!

scream
Scream motif.

beginning to appal
By 1905 there had been years of outrage at conditions in the Belgian Congo, King Leopold's private fief. Conrad's Heart of Darkness had been published as a serial in Backwood's Magazine in 1899 and as a book in 1902. There were missionaries' accounts of the brutality, and newspaper reports. Leopold and his apologists published rebuttals. The Norton Critical Edition of Heart of Darkness contains an extensive collection of both.

baize
Baize is a course woolen felt.

Page 537

broken symmetries
???

sphinxe Khnopffienne
refers to the Belgian symbolist painter Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921), famous for his painting "The Caress", in which a female sphinx erotically lures a young man. The painting can be seen in the wikipedia entry

Pléiade Lafrisée
???

Conseilleuse
Female consultant?

Page 538

retroversion matrix
???

Ma foi
Literally "My faith", i.e. "By my faith!", a mild exclamation of incredulity.

ten thousand francs
???

piker
Someone cheap or cautious, possibly named after people from PIke County, Missouri, who came to California in the 1800s, looking for work. They were poor, hence cheap.

'Mad Dog'
???

Hegel... puns
???

Page 539

vector quotient
???

'Triangle Asana'
A basic yoga pose.

Here are images of several basic poses.

'Quadrantal Versor Asana'
A triangle pose taken that extra dimension.

"Uwe moer!"
???

noncommutative
A term typical to mathematics. A commutative equation is one that can operate in exact reverse and still yield the same results. 'Noncommutative' then suggests unidirectionality. The ability to go from point A to point B, but not from B to A.

reticule
A woman's drawstring handbag; usually made of net or beading or brocade; also: A system of lines forming a pattern of squares at the focal plane of a telescope, used in micrometers. [www.astunit.com/tutorials/glossary.htm]

Vacheron & Constantin watch
???

hunting-case
???

Page 540

"haar rekening, ja?"
The bill, yes? (Dutch)?

Her bill, yes? I.e., give the check to the lady.

Given the presence of Chris 'Kit' Traverse here, this very much suggests a reference to Christopher 'Kit' Marlowe, Elizabethan poet, playwright and contemporary of Shakespeare. Marlowe was stabbed to death in 1593, in murky circumstances, ostensibly over a bill or 'reckoning', though he was widely believed to have been involved in some form of espionage.

Piet Woevre
Pete Weaver?

made him reach
Possible allusion to a famous line, "When I hear the word culture I reach for my gun." From Hanns Johst's biographical play Schlageter. The original line is slightly different: "Wenn ich Kultur höre ... entsichere ich meinen Browning," "Whenever I hear of culture... I release the safety-catch of my Browning!" (Act 1, Scene 1). It is spoken by another character in conversation with the young Schlageter. In the scene Schlageter and his wartime comrade Friedrich Thiemann are studying for a college examination, but then start disputing whether it's worthwhile doing so when the nation is not free.

The line is often misattributed to better-known Nazis and others [4].

not unambiguous
Ie, ambiguous.

rastaquoueres
8???

de Decker
In Dutch/Flemish, the name means "roofer." (De in these names almost never means "of, from" as in French; it's nearly always the definite article.)

Page 541

bobbejaan
???

MKIV/ODC... Mark Four
???

your remit
???

gatkruiper
Dutch/Flemish: brownnose, ass-kisser.

one on her wrist
???

over the day
Title motif?

Page 542

trans-horizontic
???

Edmund Whittaker
The Sir Edmund Whittaker Memorial Prize is awarded every four years by the Edinburgh Mathematical Society to an outstanding young mathematician having a specified connection with Scotland [5].

foaming louche
???

cheval-glass
Standing mirror in a freestanding vertical frame.

as if someone
Sound-cancelling vs opacity-cancelling?

Page 543

monitory
Admonitory.

He Who Must Come
???

General Boulanger
Georges Boulanger, French War Minister urging an attack on Germany

what death and what transfiguration
Allusion to Richard Strauss' tone poem "Death and Transfiguration" (Tod und Verklärung), premiered in 1890.

"Zeker"
Dutch, "certainly"

dead cert
Dead certainty, sure thing.

Von Schlieffen
Alfred von Schlieffen was the author of a German war plan to win a two-front war against both France and Russia by quickly defeating France before Russian troops could be mobilized. The Schlieffen Plan included an attack on France through Belgium, disregarding its neutrality.

Wilhelm has offered Leopold part of France, the ancient Duchy of Burgundy
History of the duchy. Map, with portrait of Duke Charles the Rash.

lowlands
Title of Pynchon's first published story. Here, ass?

Page 544

Place d'Armes
Main square of Ostend; literally "drill field".

peau de soie
"Skin of silk" A heavy, smooth satin with very fine ribbing; somewhat dull in sheen compared with traditional silk finishes.

Krafft-Ebing
Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing, Austro-German psychiatrist and author of Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), a pioneering study of deviant sexual behavior and fetishism. Coined both sadism and masochism as terms for these respective behaviors. Wikipedia entry.

toque
A chef's hat

guipure
???

midinette
???

sous
???
coins. Originally Roman gold coins, latterly any kind of coin.

mayonnaise
Brautigan's "Trout Fishing in America" famously ends with the word mayonnaise. GoogleBooks

ovoöleaginous
Another Pynchonic word combination, here denoting the two main ingredients of mayonnaise: 1) eggs, and 2) oil. It's not "fecoventilatory collision" as seen in "Vineland," but it's nice.

Grenache
???
Grape commonly used in Rhone Valley wines e.g. Chateauneuf du Pape.

Chantilly
???
Region north of Paris.

attainder
Legislative act declaring that a person is guilty of a crime and setting punishment without the benefit of a formal trial. The Constitution forbids the federal government (Article I, Section 9, clause 3) and the state governments (Article I, Section 10, clause 1) from passing bills of attainder. [www.historycentral.com/Civics/B.html]

'Aux armes, citoyens'
Not "Le Marseillaise," you nitwit!

Louis XV
King of France 1715-1774 [6].

Cléo de Mérode
Glamorous French ballerina, later Follies Bergere dancer and famous beauty. Her reputed intimacy with King Leopold was only a rumor [7].

marquise de Pompadour
Mistress of Louis XV,once friend of Voltaire and a power behind official scenes.[8].

Page 545

dubious 'victory' in 1756
???

the ill-fated Admiral Byng
John Byng, convicted by court-martial of failure "to do his utmost" in the battle, shot in 1757. Remembered because of (1) his being the last officer of flag rank to be put to death for conduct in battle and (2) Voltaire's gag in Candide: "In this country it is good to kill an admiral from time to time in order to encourage the others."

cantharides
"Spanish fly," contact irritant sometimes ill-advisedly used as aphrodisiac.

Sadean
Pertaining to the Marquis de Sade. The acts the chef performs on the egg and oil have the same names as acts of Sadean sex.

vetiver
A grass (Vetiveria zizanioides) of tropical India, cultivated for its aromatic roots that yield an oil used in perfumery. [www.answers.com/topic/vetiver]. So, a perfume with, llterallly, roots in India.

pip
A beaut; in current parlance, a hottie.

Q.P. system
Quaternion Probability, p?.

Usine Régionale
French: as translated in the text.

Page 546

disjunctive effects of thunderstorms
Folk wisdom says a thunderstorm will cause mayonnaise to separate (oil from yolks).

lounge suit
???

congress shoes
???

dripping-heads
???

cuves d'agitation
???

Clinique d'Urgence pour Sauvetage des Sauces
French: Emergency Clinic for Salvage of Sauces.

Page 547

Cazzo, cretino
Literally, "Dick, cretin." Cazzo is a common Italian interjectionary obscenity, especially in the south. "Cazzo, cretino," is akin to someone saying, "Well shit, dummy," or "F-ing moron!"

È il cowboy!
Italian: It's the cowboy!

Le bambole anarchiste, porca miseria
Italian: Anarchist babes, oh boy.

Oudenberg
???

Quai de l'Entrepôt
???

ragazzi
Italian: boys, guys.

Page 548

timbres fictifs
French: fictive postage stamps. Cf "Lot 49".

"IIIb"
As explained in the text

Germany might stand a better chance...
That is, if the French were to push into Alsace (per Boulanger) as the Germans executed the Schlieffen Plan [9] for the encirclement of Paris, it would put the French at an even greater disadvantage...as actually happened in 1914. Had the Belgians and British not delayed the Germans in Flanders, and had the French railroads not performed speedily to bring the French troops back to the Marne, World War I could have had a very different outcome...an alternate history.

revanchist
Policies based on revenge, or a person following such policies. In General Boulanger's case, revenge against Germany for the Franco-Prussian War (that is, retaking Alsace, lost in 1871).

the somewhat discomposed General
Having died in 1891, the General by the time of the action is certainly somewhat decomposed; brief biographies do not suggest he was non compos mentis, that is, mentally discomposed.

Page 549

cackled Darby
(When did he lose his innocence?)

a modification of any salsician metaphor toward the diminutive
Salsician: pertaining to sausage. Lindsay says Suckling's penis is better compared to a wiener than a knockwurst.

"Why you little–and I do mean 'little'–"
Another Simpsons reference?

dunes between Nieuport and Dunkirk
???

power-receivers
Not information, energy.

Page 550

Italian grotto
???

a highly developed taste, moreover, for human blood
Since Pugnax developed this taste in the Carpathians, home of Castle Dracula, this seems a clear reference to Bram Stoker's novel.

Carpathians
Major mountain range running northwest-southeast through Poland, Slovakia, western Ukraine and Romania.

Uhlans
Uhlan regiments belonged to the light cavalry. They wore splendid uniforms (model for some U.S. marching band uniforms). Wikipedia article.

Temesvár
Now Timişoara, extreme western Romania.

Page 551

...separated by only a slice of Time...
Miles is beginning to experience Time almost as a spatial dimension, his personal vector as traversing (!) 4-dimensional space, or perhaps multidimensional space, the mathematics for which is being debated in Ostend.

securing the mess decks
The Chums follow U.S. Navy idiom in orders (frequently prefixed with "Now") and shipboard activities ("secure" meaning "whatever you did before, undo it now," in this case put away the dishes and fold up the tables).

Ryder Thorn
Tolkienesque name?

He was at Candlebrow.
Presumably a 'trespasser.'

the four-note chord in the context of timelessness
A melody is formed by notes following one another in time; a chord on the ukulele violates that practice by having all the notes sound at once. A really clever little passage.

Page 552

knuckle-duster
Brass knuckles.

Diksmuide
20 kilometers south of Ostend (about halfway to Ypres).

Page 553

The terrain was flat...lowlands
Not, this time, a reference to Pynchon's Lowlands, but to the two-dimensionality of Flanders, as in Edwin A. Abbott's Flatland [10]; most humans, like the inhabitants of Flanders and Abbott's Flatlanders, experience life in two dimensions.

Somewhere up in the sky was Miles' home...
Whereas Miles and the Chums of Chance, in contrast, live in three dimensions. The mathematicians gathered in Ostend are trying to calculate how to experience and use vectors to live in four dimensions; in a way, to experience Time as a kind of spatial dimension. Miles, on P. 551, is demonstrating the beginnings of an intuitive discovery of how to experience Time as an almost spatial dimension. Which would be a sort of "time travel", or at least an expanded view of life and history.

retted
???

Page 554

Ypres and Menin
Municipalities in West Flanders that were sites of some of the bloodiest battles of WWI. At the beginning of the war, the British and Belgian stand helped save Paris from encirclement by the Germans, and saved the Channel ports, but as Thorn points out, the area became the western anchor of the Western Front trench system. The several Battles of Ypres saw the first uses of poison gas (Mustard Gas, dichlorodiethylsulfide, was first called Yperite), the use of enormous mines, and the legendary mud of Passchendaele [11].

Ten years from now
(1914?) through 1918? and beyond?. Another paramorphic mirror--what do we now face. Whatever it is, it is nuclear.

Bosch
Hieronymous Bosch (1450-1516), Dutch painter of nightmares. Wikipedia entry.

Brueghel
Pieter Brueghel the Elder(1525-1569), Flemish painter.Wikipedia entry.

League
League of Nations? The League of Nations was formed after WWI to prevent future wars. Didn't succeed.

where the needles went and which way to rotate them
I.e., how to push Thorn's buttons; the image is from acupuncture.

Page 555

simpletons at the fair
Making Pynchon's metaphor explicit.

Chopin E-minor Nocturne
???

owl-light
???

'plasmic hysteresis'
???

Annotation Index