Difference between revisions of "ATD 588-614"

Revision as of 22:37, 6 February 2007

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

Page 588

tannery
In ancient history, tanning was considered a noxious or "odiferous trade" and relegated to the outskirts of town, amongst the poor. Indeed, tanning by ancient methods is so foul smelling that tanneries are still isolated from those towns today where the old methods are used.

Gottlob
Literally "praise to God", as an exclamation also "Thank God!". Though it is rare, it is a real German name.

Humfried
A German translation of Humphrey. This was not an existing German name any time after the medieval, though.

Gauss's brain
After Carl Friedrich Gauss died in 1855, his brain was preserved for research purposes. To this day, it is in the possession of the University of Göttingen.

impervious to the wind
(Attribute of tanned leather?)

"Heiliger Bimbam!"
A German expression of surprise, translated elsewhere as "Holy Moly!"

It is she, she!
In H. Rider Haggard's She, the she in question rises, like Venus, from the sea. In Against the day, she rises from the swamp. Carl Jung, who used the novel She (1887) as an example of anima, posited the anima is an archetypical form, expressing the fact that a man has a minority of female genes. Haggard's Queen Ayesha is an unmistakable anima type — the ultimate guide and mediator to the inner world. The idea has also connections with the observations of James Frazer in his classical study The Golden Bough. Haggard's idea of a journey into the "darkest Africa," which turns into a spiritual search, has been used by a number of writers, including Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness (1902).
"I am of thy imagination", She says in the novel, "She".

Kovalevskaia
Sofia Kovalevskaia, 1850-1891. Russian mathematician, in 1884 appointed professor in Stockholm. The third female professor in Europe ever. Cf page 500:Sofia Kovalevskaia and (Wikipedia)

Roentgen-ray spectacles
The X-ray glasses that used to be advertised in comic books.

natürlich
German: naturally.

rim
Kit pretends to think he's referring to monocle as 'chichi' (stylish).

Page 589

Those curves . . . Noli me tangere
A well-turned wordplay: The operation of differentiating a curve involves drawing tangents to it at selected points. The curves in question are continuous, but the injunction Noli me tangere means you can't draw the tangents.

Noli me tangere
Latin for 'don't touch me'

Hausknochen
German: a giant housekey, as defined, literally House Bone,with perhaps a double entendre on bone?

Page 590

Hadamard... Poussin... Prime Number Theorem
Hadamard and Poussin independently proved the prime number theorem in 1896, relying on Riemann's Zeta function.

patent Kühlbox
patent here, as adjective, means ACCESSIBLE, EXPOSED: Archaic

readily visible or intelligible : OBVIOUS

synonym see EVIDENT. If the Kuhlbox were a patented invention, TRP would have written "patented Kuhlbox"

Advertising of the time used "patent something" as a moniker for anything patented, to signify its novelty and exclusiveness, so the meaning of "patented" appears rather likely, even though it's not strictly correct. See this search for some anecdotal evidence.

icebox..this last an English-German meld or Archaic, it seems.

pic of a ca. 1920 Eiskiste-model. According to german Wikipedia, the mobile "Eiskiste" (icebox) had to be filled with (natural) ice, while its successor, the Kühlbox, worked/works with "Kühlaggregate" (cooling units). The contributor is not sure if suchlike were around at that time. German Wikipedia on Eiskiste and Kühlbox.

beleaguered subset
a group (from the whole) under attack

That is, is it was some smile
Typo, for That is, it was some smile.

Prime Number Theorem
Gives an estimate of the number of primes less than a whole number n. For example, if n is 20 then there are nine primes less than it (1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19). The Prime Number Theorem is closely related to the Riemann Hypothesis.

Page 591

prats
Literally the buttocks. As a slang term, a 'prat' is an idiot.

Die Nullstellen der ζ-Funktion
German: the zeroes of the ζ function. (Null = zero; Stelle = location.) Wikipedia on the "Zeros of the Riemann zeta-function".

not all that hard to prove
Kit will upset the applecart if he can prove the Riemann Hypothesis; Yashmeen's research topic will shrink to triviality. (Last time I checked, no one had yet proved the hypothesis.) --Volver 19:37, 9 January 2007 (PST)

"Richard Harding Davis"
Popular writer of fiction and drama, journalist/war-correspondent and a major male-role-model of his time (1864 - 1916). He was considered the model for illustrator Charles Dana Gibson's dashing Gibson man, the male equivalent of his famous Gibson Girl. He is also referenced early in Sinclair Lewis's book, Dodsworth as the example of an exciting, adventure-seeking legitimate hero. Wikipedia. Among other things, he reported on Belgian atrocities in the Congo.

seldom, if ever
Cf p559 re Umeki!?

tetralatry
made up from greek "tettares" (prefix -tetra) = four and "latreia" = worship

C. Howard Hinton
Charles Howard Hinton (1853 – 1907) was a British mathematician and writer of science fiction works titled Scientific Romances. He was interested in higher dimensions, particularly the fourth dimension, and is known for coining the word tesseract and for his work on methods of visualising the geometry of higher dimensions. He also had a strong interest in theosophy. Wikipedia Entry

Johann K.F. Zöllner
Johann Karl Friedrich Zöllner (1834–1882) was a German astrophysicist. Studied Photometrie and optical illusions. He insisted a fourth dimension should be considered in Physics and tried to scientifically explain spiritist phenomena.

vogue... 'vague'
Nice wordplay as Yashmeen seems to think the vogue of mysticism is not very precise, is 'vague' intellectually. Further play on "vague" = wave, as in an intellectual fad, e.g. in film, the French "Nouvelle Vague" (New Wave).

Page 592

upside-down triangles
Also Pléiade p538. In mathematics that would be the operator del Wikipedia. Since pre-history and across most cultures the upside-down triangle is a symbol for the female (genitals).

screamingly obvious fallacy in this . . . "proof" of yours
Yashmeen reacts in a slight panic to Kit's threat (page 591).

metallic banging
Hausknochen on doors, with 'banging' entendre.

"metric interval"
In Euclidean (three-dimensional) space a distance is just what you think it is. In other geometrical systems the term "metric interval" is preferred as a generalized distance.

social life is unpredictable
mirrors the situation in the "Hotel Noctambulo", p. 462. Are all these guys "chums of chance"?

Prinzenstrasse and Weenderstrasse
A street corner at the very center of Göttingen (Google Maps), "known to mathematicians here as the origin of the city of Göttingen's coordinate system".

Page 593

twenty marks
A mark is short for deutschemark, a German monetary unit.

der Pistolenheld
German: the pistol hero.

das Nichtharmonischestrahlenbündel
Or das nichtharmonische Strahlenbündel. German: the anharmonic pencil. A "pencil" is the set of lines passing through a point.

Euler
Leonhard Euler (pronounced Oiler; IPA [ˈɔʏlɐ]) (April 15, 1707 – September 7, 1783) was a Russian-German mathematician and physicist of Swiss descent. From Wikipedia and below:

Euler made important discoveries in fields as diverse as calculus, number theory, and topology. He also introduced much of the modern mathematical terminology and notation, particularly for mathematical analysis, such as the notion of a mathematical function. [1] He is also renowned for his work in mechanics, optics, and astronomy.

Euler is considered to be the preeminent mathematician of the 18th century and one of the greatest of all time.

Mathematical Theory of the Top
Published in the U.S. in 1897. Compare Felix Klein and Arnold Sommerfeld, Über die Theorie des Kreisels, 4 volumes, 1897-1910.

Leopold Kronecker and Cantor
The "monumental quarrel between Kronecker and Cantor" is also referred to as a "religious war," appropriately enough. It's based in a disagreement over the legitimacy of numbers. Kronecker held that "'the positive integers were created by God, and all else is the work of man.'" This is contradicted by "'Cantor with his Kontinuum, professing an equally strong belief in just those regions, infinitely divisible, which lie between the whole numbers so demanding of all Kronecker's devotion.'"

The disagreement between the two mathematicians is reminiscent of (or does it anticipate?) the rift between Pointsman and Mexico in Gravity's Rainbow. Kronecker's integers "created by God" have become a Pavlovian digital binary for Pointsman, but the two oppositions track faithfully right down to the italicized "between."

"The young statistician [Mexico] is devoted to number and to method, not table-rapping or wishful thinking. But in the domain of zero to one, not-something to something, Pointsman can only possess the zero and the one. He cannot, like Mexico, survive anyplace in between. Like his master I. P. Pavlov before him, he imagines the cortex of the brain as a mosaic of tiny on/off elements.... But to Mexico belongs the domain between zero and one." [Page 55]

It should be noted, however, that the continuous number line was a modern innovation. In Greek number theory, a number is a collection of indivisible units. Irrationals, such as the square root of 2 are not numbers but "magnitudes." One is not even a number for it is not a number of units. There are no negative numbers as well. (see Klein's Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra.) So Kronecker's position may be less of a crazy innovation as much as a maintenance of ancient theory.

(That last paragraph makes an excellent point. --Volver 19:45, 9 January 2007 (PST))

Kontinuum
This passage closely parallels the one about the "microcosm of Venice" on page 575.

Page 594

Nervenklinik
German: nerve clinic. Three-dollar word for a mental hospital.

boundless epsilonic world
Epsilon, Greek letter like E. In mathematics (particularly calculus), an arbitrary (or nearly so) small positive quantity is commonly denoted ε; see limit. By analogy with this, the late mathematician Paul Erdős also used the term "epsilons" to refer to children (Hoffman 1998, p. 4). Wikipedia; of Huxley's five classes of citizens in Brave New World epsilons were purposely stunted physically and intellectually.

Der Finsterzwerg
The choice of the tavern "The Dwarf of Darkness" may have been meant as a dig at five-foot-tall Kronecker.

chloral hydrate
A/k/a "knockout drops" a/k/a a "Mickey Finn". Hence the Mickifest. Wikipedia entry.

Kneipe
German: dive.

Gauss passing to Weber a remark
Carl Friedrich Gauss (Gauß)(30 April 1777 – 23 February 1855) was a German mathematician and scientist of profound genius who contributed significantly to many fields, including number theory, analysis, differential geometry, geodesy, magnetism, astronomy and optics. Sometimes known as "the prince of mathematicians" and "greatest mathematician since antiquity", Gauss had a remarkable influence in many fields of mathematics and science and is ranked as one of history's most influential mathematicians. In 1831 Gauss developed a fruitful collaboration with the physics professor Wilhelm Weber; it led to new knowledge in the field of magnetism (including finding a representation for the unit of magnetism in terms of mass, length and time) and the discovery of Kirchhoff's circuit laws in electricity. Gauss and Weber constructed the first electromagnetic telegraph in 1833, which connected the observatory with the institute for physics in Göttingen. Gauss ordered a magnetic observatory to be built in the garden of the observatory and with Weber founded the magnetischer Verein ("magnetic club"), which supported measurements of earth's magnetic field in many regions of the world. He developed a method of measuring the horizontal intensity of the magnetic field which has been in use well into the second half of the 20th century and worked out the mathematical theory for separating the inner (core and crust) and outer (magnetospheric) sources of Earth's magnetic field

crisis in mathematics . . . Weierstrass functions, Cantor's continuum, Russell's inexhaustible capacity for mischief
A genuine crisis as well-established ideas were challenged. Weierstrass functions have the unheard-of property that they are "continuous but nowhere differentiable." Cantor's ideas about the continuum violated a longstanding prohibition against infinite quantities. Bertrand Russell around this time was setting the cat among the pigeons by identifying paradoxes and inconsistencies in set theory and number theory.

"the infinite" was all but a conjuror's convenience
There is a very good book relating how the infinite, between the 18th and early 20th centuries, finally found a place in mathematics: In Search of Infinity by N.Ya. Vilenkin (translated by Abe Shenitzer).

Page 595

That winter, in St. Petersburg
22 Jan 1905 Wikipedia

Kronstadt
The Kronstadt rebellion of March 1921

I think the text refers to mutinies in 1905 instead. --Volver 14:48, 22 January 2007 (PST)

Correct--there were fleet mutinies throughout the Russian Navy in 1905.

Black Hundreds
Anti-Semitic vigilantes.

Japanese won
The Japanese destroyed the bulk of the Russian Baltic Fleet in the Battle of Tsushima Strait on May 27-28, 1905. Wikipedia In GR, the soon-to-be-defeated fleet puts in at German Southwest Africa during the 1904 Herero Revolt; Tchicherine's father, a sailor in that fleet, may also be the father of Enzian, leader of the Schwarzcommando.

Muslim rebellion
The downfall of the Ottoman Empire by Turkey?

Muslims in Central Asia (Kirghiz, Kazakh, Uzbek, Tadzhik, and others) had never been happy as pawns in the "Great Game" and now (1905) attempted to throw off Russian domination. Turkey, center of the Ottoman Empire, had its rebellion a few years later. --Volver 14:48, 22 January 2007 (PST)

the year that followed
Seemingly 1918. Russian Revolution of 1917, which included: February Revolution, resulting in the abdication of Nicholas II of Russia October Revolution, resulting in the coming to power of the Bolshevik party Third Russian Revolution, the failed anarchist revolution against the Bolsheviks and the White movement 1918 - 1922

The reference is to 1905-6 when Russians who'd been on the wrong side in various movements and insurrections fled abroad to elude imprisonment or death. --Volver 14:48, 22 January 2007 (PST)

Peter and Paul Fortress
At St. Petersburg, established by Peter the Great. Political prisoners were confined there from the first half of the 1700s. Conditions were notoriously harsh.

kazatsky
A Cossack dance, stereotypical Russian behavior.

raid....Waziristan
Waziristan (Pashto: وزیرستان) is a mountainous region of northwest Pakistan, bordering Afghanistan and covering some 11 585 km² (4,473 mi²). It comprises the area west and southwest of Peshawar between the Tochi River to the north and the Gomal River to the south, forming part of Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas. The North-West Frontier Province lies immediately to the east. The region was an independent tribal territory from 1893, remaining outside of British-ruled empire and Afghanistan. Tribal raiding into British-ruled territory was a constant problem for the British, eliciting frequent punitive expeditions between 1860 and 1945. Wikipedia

Currently, it is thought to be the last stronghold of Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden.

Worth noting, perhaps, that Yashmeen came from Russia and had been transported to Waziristan for sale as a slave. --Volver 14:48, 22 January 2007 (PST)

Page 596

as-ever transcendentally interesting hair
(Perhaps a reference to Albert Einstein?)

Possibly, but given the numerous mentions of the Zeta function it is most likely a reference to transcendental numbers. These are irrational numbers that do not exist as the zero (or solution) to any algebraic function. A number of groundbreaking results regarding transcendentalism were made around the time the novel is set, and most if not all of the mathematicians and mathematical methods mentioned in the book revolve around transcendental numbers and functions.

Given that these numbers are often expressed as an infinite series, in which successive terms add ever-more-miniscule amounts to the value of the number, yet each digit is fascinatingly unique (since the decimal never repeats), it seems to me that Pynchon is suggesting that Yashmeen's hair has the quality of being endlessly fascinating, that even the observation of a single hair (or even a portion of a single hair) is involving and invigorating. This would mirror Kit's fascination and infatuation with Yashmeen, and the term would likely spring readily to the mind of a mathematician of the era.Dharper 08:15, 16 January 2007 (PST)

'gen'
British military slang for information. To gen-up is to learn quickly. OED gives earliest recorded use of the word as 1940.

a soul impaled . . . as if to bisect me
Harks back to the fate of La Jarretière in V.

Afghani dirhan
An Afghani coin, more usually transliterated as "dirham". This site has pictures and more information.

Ghaznivid Empire
Usually transliterated as Ghaznavid Empire (Wikipedia)

coffee scion
Coffee motif. More likely: coffee heir.

Günther von Quassel
"quasseln" is a German verb, meaning roughly "to jabber"

less than universally respected Ludwig Boltzmann
Boltzmann proposed an explanation of thermodynamics based on the statistical behaviour of atoms. Many influential colleagues at the time did not believe in the reality of atoms and thus worked to discredit Boltzmann.

Page 597

Gymnasium child
A Gymnasium is a German secondary school

Ach, die Zetamanie
German: Oh, the zeta-mania.

one measure of the chaos
Cf GR on entropy?

crime...narrative puzzle
Hinting at Webb's role in the novel?

Göttingen tradition...statue
Like other university towns, Göttingen has developed its own folklore. On the day of their doctorate, postgraduate students are drawn in handcarts from the Great Hall to the Gänseliesel-Fountain in front of the Old Town Hall. There they have to climb the fountain and kiss the statue of the Gänseliesel (Goose girl). This practice is actually forbidden by law, but the law is not at all enforced. She is considered to be the most-kissed girl in the world. Wikipedia.

Addendum of interest for GR and ATD. Nearly untouched by allied bombing in World War II (the informal understanding during World War 2 was that Germany wouldn't bomb Cambridge and Oxford and the allies wouldn't bomb Heidelberg and Göttingen).

Rathaus square
The square in front of City Hall.

Page 598

Axioms of Zermelo
The basic axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory.

Poincaré
Henri Poincaré (Wikipedia)

Cauchy
Augustin Louis Cauchy (Wikipedia)

Whittaker and Watson
A standard mathematics textbook of the time (Wikipedia)

two point one
(Cf Sondheim lyric, "A Little Night Music" lyrics.)

Page 599

"What here is he doing?" . . . "Obviously, we must now a duel fight."
In keeping with his name (see p. 596 annotations), Günther speaks in a stage-German accent.

dueling-society cap
Probably student corporation insignia.

inconvenience
Obviously the name of the Chums' airship; whenever the word appears there seems to be a refernce to the Chums; here: "...Here, not completely...slightly...somewhere else" as the airshio always seems to be.

Liebchen
German, "sweetheart"

Egal was, meine Schatze
German, "No matter what, my darling" - though "meine Schatze" is an improper femininization, which ought to be "mein Schatz".

Schläger
A specialized weapon for student duels. See Wikipedia's Academic fencing article.

Krummsäbel
German, "scimitar".

Korbrapier
A rapier with a basket ("Korb" in German) like protection hilt.

épée
A sharp-pointed duelling sword.

Page 600

Colt six-shooters
I guess Kit's luggage beat him to Gottingen.

Verbindung
German: connection, union. Here the student corps one belongs to.

upon the face of the other, to inscribe one's mark
In several of his movies, the actor Erich von Stroheim appeared with a nasty scar on the left side of his face. Dueling was a pastime of honor at some universities, and the sword scar was the mark of having sustained one's honor there. Special weapons, masks and inflaming treatments were employed to produce this lifelong disfigurement.

a Mexican tilde
The wavy mark over the letter ñ in Spanish.

restoring moment, elastic constants
???

wasn't going to converge . . . skipped a step . . . divided by zero
Kit insults Günther by pointing out blunders in the proof he gave to Yashmeen.

Geheimrat Hilbert
German: confidential counsellor. A title of honor given to prominent civilian figures in Germany.

Page 601

Ehrenkodex
German, "code of honor"

Tyrolean hats
Images

Schnurrbartbinde
A device to keep one's mustache safe from entanglement when sleeping, like this.

Zeiss "Palmos Panoram"
An early panoramic camera, mentioned in the 1911 Britannica's Photography article.

"Auf die Mensur!"
German, "to the duel"

Andaman Islands
Here's a mention of tattooing practices in the Andaman Islands

Stephanie du Motel... group-theory godfather Évariste Galois
Évariste Galois died in a duel at the age of 20. Though much confusion surrounds the affair, it is suspected that he provoked the duel after being rejected by one Stéphanie-Felice du Motel. (Wikipedia)

Page 602

young Ouspensky
Peter D. Ouspensky (1878-1947), Russian mystic and philosopher, author of The Fourth Dimension, appropriate to Pynchon's themes in ATD. Wikipedia entry.

Chong
A strange and seemingly unlikely visitor to Göttingen. The name "Chong" is not the character's actual name, as one will find out within the next 50 pages. The name might be taken from the Chinese philosopher Wang Chong, or Wang Ch'ung.
Could be Cheech Marin's partner, Tommy Chong? (C.Marin alluded to earlier P.477).

"The what?"
(Precipitous drop in authorial expectations?)

Sidney... Kensington Sid
Sidney Webb, leading political theorist [socialist] and (later, I think) Labour Pary representative of the time? No "Chinese Bolshevik", but with his wife Beatrice, an English supporter and defender of Russia See Wikipedia. Kensington is where elected officials worked.

transtriadic
Beyond the three.

Page 603

"Spiritual... At Göttingen?"
Gottingen is materialistic. Preserved brains as like in a tannery.

Applied Mechanics Institute
An institute of the University of Göttingen

Prandtl's recent discovery of the boundary layer
Ludwig Prandtl (Wikipedia) in 1904 developed the theory of the boundary layer (Wikipedia) in aerodynamics, greatly simplifying aerodynamic calculations.

powered flight . . . at the edge of history
In 1905 already a reality, but the pioneering empirical work was taking place in Ohio, not Germany.

brambled guttie
A proto golf-ball, see here.

Bürgerstrasse
German, "Citizen's Street", a street in Göttingen.

Brauweg
German, "Brewery Way", a street in Göttingen.

Zhukovsky's Transformation
The Joukowsky Transform maps the unit circle in the complex plane to a shape very much like an airfoil.

Geheimrat Klein
Geheimrat = Privy councillor. In geometry, the Klein model, also called the projective model... is a model of n-dimensional hyperbolic geometry in which the points of the geometry are in an n-dimensional disk, or ball, and the lines of the geometry are line segments contained in the disk; that is, with endpoints on the boundary of the disk

glass of tea
(Why not 'cup'?) because in Europe, as opposed to in England, tea may be drunk from glassware.

draw pictures . . . flights of arrows . . . vectors without pictures
Vectors can be visualized as arrows in a plane or three-dimensional space; more generally they can be represented as arrays of coefficients, and now they are not limited to three dimensions.

"...according to Spiral Theory, up to infinity."
"And beyond, " added Gunther, nodding earnestly.
Reference to Buzz Lightyear's stock character phrase in 1995's TOY STORY (Pixar/Disney): "To Infinity... and Beyond!" --Btchakir 07:43, 19 December 2006 (PST)

Page 604

nontrivial zeroes
The Riemann zeta function has two classes of zeros, the trivial zeroes being at negative even integers (-2, -4...), the non-trivial complex numbers, believed (but not proven) to have Re(z)=1/2. See Wikipedia.

much-noted talk
At the 1900 International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris, Hilbert proposed a research programme of 23 problems. The Riemann hypothesis is number 8 on the list.

eigenvalues
Wikipedia Dudley Eigenvalue, D.D.S., was a character in V.

Hermitian operator
A Hermitian operator generalises some of the ideas of symmetry when complex numbers are involved. Wikipedia

spine of reality... "Rückgrat von Wirklichkeit"
Probably a reference to the main diagonal of a Hermitian matrix, which can contain only real numbers. The German phrase is one accurate way to translate the English.

Hilbert-Polya Conjecture
The conjecture that the zeroes of the Riemann function would be the eigenvalues of a Hermitian operator, just what Yashmeen is suggesting.

Page 605

Vance Aychrome
The voracious detective is a stock figure in the mystery genre (Nero Wolfe, Mycroft Holmes, Inspector Dover, D.C.I. Dalziel and others).
Is his name pronounced Eye Chrome, as in private eye? Weak possible connection?-- a truck light called Big Eye Chrome. The name sounds like 'fancy chrome.'

Full English Breakfast
Bacon, eggs, tomato, toast... otherwise known as a fry-up.

Pythagorean dietary
The first prominent modern vegetarian was the Greek philosopher Pythagoras who lived towards the end of the 6th century BC. The Pythagorean diet came to mean an avoidance of the flesh of slaughtered animals. Pythagorean ethics first became a philosophical morality between 490-430 BC with a desire to create a universal and absolute law including injunctions not to kill "living creatures," to abstain from "harsh-sounding bloodshed," in particular animal sacrifice, and "never to eat meat." (From a review of The Heretics Feast: a History of Vegetarianism by Colin Spencer, University Press of New England, 1995)

kippers and bloaters
Different words (both Scottish) for smoked herrings

baps
soft bread rolls - another Scottish word

Spong machine
Appropriate technology. An English-made hand-cranked coffee grinder that doesn't light up, lacks a readout to tell when the beans are ready, and signally fails to function before the user wakes up. Only drawback is that some spouses compare its sound to half a load of cobbles being dumped on the roof.

thinned
From full 78. Wikipedia

vegetarian haggis
It exists: Google search

Page 606

Lamont Replevin
"Replevin" is a legal term for a form of civil action to recover possession of property being wrongfully held by another.

Elflock Villa
Elflock: A lock of hair tangled as if by elves. Often used in the plural.

Stuffed Edge, Herts
An imaginary village in the South-East English county of Hertfordshire. Stuffed hedge?

kedgeree
A hot breakfast dish of fish, rice, and eggs.

Cesare Lombroso
Anthropologist who devised a method of identifying criminal "types" from their facial structures.

Trans-Oxanian
From the other side of the Oxus River (now Amu-Darya) in Central Asia.

Graeco-Buddhist
The hybrid cultural background evidenced in Shambhala. Greco-Buddhism, sometimes spelled Graeco-Buddhism, is the cultural syncretism between Hellenistic culture and Buddhism, which developed over a period of close to 800 years in Central Asia in the area corresponding to modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan, between the 4th century BCE and the 5th century CE. Wikipedia

bad hats
A bad hat is a slang term for a rascal

Page 607

Gas Office
As explained in the text, the Scotland Yard bureau that kept gas communications under surveillance.

communication by means of coal-gas
Cf Nabokov's "Ada". Also inverse of Tesla's energy-transmitter. A parallel to the Tristero, too. The description of communication by gas seems like a self-parody of The Crying of Lot 49.

bombs... Suffragettes
(Did they bomb post offices?!?)post boxes:Suffragettes carried out direct action such as chaining themselves to railings, setting fire to the contents of mailboxes, smashing windows and on occasions setting off bombs. Wikipedia

Persian
Majority language in Iran, now called Farsi.

Pashto
A language spoken in Afghanistan and nearby.

Tadjik
A language spoken in Tadjikistan. "Mountain Tadjik" presumably dominates in the 60% or so of the country that is in high mountains.

Seven Dials
In Covent Garden, London - a place where 7 roads meet. An unsavory assignment for a policeman.

Page 608

"Avoid beans"
Pythagoreans follow a proscription against eating beans.

spotted dick
A suet pudding with raisins or currants

Yarmouth bloater
A cured herring from the port town of Yarmouth.

queering the pitch
The pitch in a medicine show is the audience; queering them means putting them onto the doc's game. In cricket, the pitch is the playing field; queering the pitch means disturbing the surface so that the ball bounces unpredictably.

'shape'
a doughnut,which comes in various shapes? Including the math-relevant shape: a torus. But probably just a bit of bun, scone, etc. listed as Vance's breakfast...no doughnut listed.

blue lamps
Traditionally hung outside police stations in England.

lamé surfaces
Lamé (fabric), a fabric inwoven metallic threads
Lamé, name of the electrically conductive jacket worn by foil and sabre fencers
Lamé (armor), an unarticulated component of a larger piece of armor

yarmulke... high crown... dented Trilby style
Image of a Trilby hat.

Page 609

Kelly's Suburban Dictionary
The peerless London A to Z did not come along until the 1930s.

wenlets
Politician and journalist William Cobbett (1763-1835) called London "the great wen." It was not a compliment, because wen means a sebaceous cyst. Wenlets are small versions of the "great" wen.

Page 610

daylight oil
from the streetlamps, lit up for hours?

a moon no one could see
Note that the Inconvenience is repeatedly referred to as a "second moon".

refused to dim
(Nicely vivid.)

Vontz's Universal Pick
Vontz (Yiddish): bedbug.

alchemized coke
Gas works that manufacture syngas also produce coke as an end product, called gas house coke.

Fluid coking is a process by which heavy residual crude is converted into lighter products such as naptha, kerosene, heating oil, and hydrocarbon gases. The "fluid" term refers to the fact that coke particles are in a continuous system versus older batch coking technology. Wikipedia

Lincrusta-Walton
an embossed fabric used for covering walls, invented in 1877 by Frederick Walton as an alternative to more expensive wallpapers (wikipedia).

hipshot
having one hip lower than the other: a Greek statue in hipshot pose.M-W.

captive maiden
In The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Maas is referred to as a "captive maiden" in the scene where she's standing in front of the Remedios Varo painting. It would certainly be worth while to examine the parallels more closely.

scalene polygons
Polygons with sides of unequal length.

jet
jet black, a color.

Apotheosis Sparkless Torch

Page 611

magnalium
An alloy of magnesium and aluminum.

Lamont Replevin (for it was he)
Formula from penny-dreadful literature.

The Slow and the Stupefied
Daytime soap 'The Young and the Restless'.

gas-head
Cf pothead, acidhead, etc.

Pike's Peak
Lew's old stompinground.

Gus Swallowfield
A curious pseudonym assumed by Lew Basnight while in the presence of Lamont Replevin. As Mr. Swallowfield, Lew professes to be an insurance salesman. The name is very overtly British and is possibly referential to the Swallowfield estate in Berkshire, which itself has a curious history.

most theft policies
(Fact?)

pantechnicon
A closed van or carryall. (Is TRP trying to put a burr under S. Weisenburger's saddle by bringing this vehicle back? SW's gloss in the GR Companion, at page 19 of the Viking edition, is famously wrong.)

Pantechnicon can mean either a furniture warehouse (originally a bazaar) or a removal van. The reference in GR to "the piano in the pantechnicon" is therefore ambiguous. TRP might say that he meant a van, not a bazaar, but that would not mean that SW was wrong. Just that SW and TRP had different readings of the novel. And the author's reading does not necessarily have primacy.

This assertion is generally debateable and in the case of TRP his conscious intentions in his fully thought out novels carries a lot of primacy most of the time, most might argue. This wiki attests to that.

legitimate bill of sale
That is, a stolen object with a stolen bill of sale cannot be proved to be stolen; the thief has the receipt.

Page 612

Pavonazzetto
???

Phrygian marble
Phrygia is an ancient region of west central Asia Minor, to the south of Bithynia. Marble from there was highly valued.

Atys... Agdistis
???

The Mutilation of Atys
No images: Google image search

Arturo Naunt, Chelsea's own, shocking the bourgeoisie since 1889
Phrasing reminiscent of advertising.

shocking the bourgeoisie
A popular pastime for young and not-so-young soi-disant radicals ("Epater le bourgeois").

koumiss vessel
A container for fermented horse's milk. Perhaps like this one: [1]

depending on the angle you hold it at, sometimes it doesn't look like anything at all
A concise description of anamorphic and paramorphic images; this one needs the Paramorphoscope to interpret it.

wrathful deities from Tantric Buddhism
Tantric Buddhism is also known as Varjayana Buddhism. In Varjayana Buddhism, a dharmapāla (Tibetan drag-gshed) is a type of wrathful deity. The name means "Dharma-defender" in Sanskrit, and the dharmapalas are also known as the Defenders of the Law (Dharma) or the Protectors of the Law in English. In Buddhist iconography, they are invariably depicted as fearsome beings, often with many heads, hands or feet; blue, black or red skin; and a fierce expression with protruding fangs. Though dharmapalas have a terrifying appearance, they are all bodhisattvas or buddhas- embodiments of compassion that act in a wrathful way for the sake of sentient beings.Wikipedia

Page 613

tiny German hand camera
Probably a Zeiss Ikon. Wikipedia Entry

raw light
light from a gaslight is not 'artificial' as from electric lights, streetlamps, etc. Cf. Telleruide section.

Gasophilia
Love of gas.

Schwärmer
The name is a German word meaning visionary, zealot, raver.

Waves in a timeless stream of Gas
Replevin equates piped gas to the æther.

Sensitive Flame
A burner flame adjusted so that it responds to the tiniest disturbance in the air. Used by both physicists and spiritualists.

Chidambaram
A city in south India and Chidambaram is one of the Panchabhoota Sthalams - temples built for the 5 elements said to embody Shiva - at Chidambaram (space), Kalahasti (wind), Thiruvanaikaval (water), Tiruvannamalai (fire) and Kanchipuram (earth).

Akaša
Akasa is the fifth element,the ether, unseen and invisible but an important element permeating the whole universe. It is also considered to be indentical with Brahma, the creator.....
Akasa is 'simple,continuous infinite substance and is the substratum of sound.' Both from Indian Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 1999.

Atman
Sanskrit. In Hinduisim, the innermost essence of each individual. Also, the soul. Cf. Weed Atman in Vineland.

'Chaos'
allusion is seems to Genesis. "Chaos" is in fact the Greek word [for without form and void], says this site. "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light; and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness." -- Genesis 1: 1-4 (KJV)

van Helmont
He claimed to have coined the word "gas" in just the way described here.

stridently unpopulated
Cf p610.

Annotation Index