Thomas Pynchon Wiki - User contributions [en]

Against the Day Title

2007-03-02T23:35:09Z

Bluetail: /* Painting */

'''Note: please keep this analysis general and spoiler-free.'''

==Painting==

David Hockney: "Contre-jour in the French Style - Against the Day dans le style français".
Paris 1974. Oil on canvas

<references/ http://www.hockneypictures.com/works_paintings_70_09.htm>

==Contra Jour==

''Contra Jour'' is a photographic term meaning, literally, 'Against the Day' or 'Against the Light'. This seems particularly relevant given that light is a major theme in the book.

Wikipedia has this as [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contre-jour contre-jour] and that article suggests other reasons for the title. In particular, this technique exaggerates the contrast between light and dark in the picture and emphasises outlines.

==Other books of the same title==

''Against the Day'' is also the title of a book by Michael Cronin, dealing with an alternate history of World War II.

==Biblical connotations==

In his review of ''Against the Day'' in the ''Wall Street Journal'', Alexander Theroux (author of [http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FDarconvilles-Cat-Alexander-Theroux%2Fdp%2F0805043659&tag=hyperartspynchon&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325 ''Darconville's Cat''] and the upcoming [http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FLaura-Warholic-Intellectual-Alexander-Theroux%2Fdp%2F1560977981%2Fsr%3D11-1%2Fqid%3D1164652830&tag=hyperartspynchon&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325 ''Laura Warholic; or The Sexual Intellectual'']) traces the title of Pynchon's novel back to the Bible, 2 Peter 3:7.:

:(5) For this they willfully forget, that there were heavens from of old, and an earth compacted out of water and amidst water, by the word of God;

:(6) by which means the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished:

:(7) but the heavens that now are, and the earth, by the same word have been stored up for fire, being reserved '''against the day''' of judgment and destruction of ungodly men.

:(8) But forget not this one thing, beloved, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.

(Source: [http://www.spcm.org/english/ASB/B61C003.htm American Standard Bible])

Theroux's review can be found in [http://online.wsj.com/home/us The Wall Street Journal], November 24, 2006, Page W8. (The website is only accessible for subscribers.)

'''Romans 2:5'''

"Against the Day" is a fairly common phrase and probably not limited to one meaning, but this passage from the King James Bible is particularly resonant, especially considering the great amount of religious and pseudo-religious imagery in the book:

The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans 2:5 "But after thy hardness and impenitent heart treasurest up unto thyself wrath ''against the day'' of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God" (King James Bible)

The bookends of the word "wrath" around "against the day" make this particularly suggestive of judgement day or the day of wrath. The passages around this one and around Matthew: 6:34 where Webb's "Sufficient unto the day" (p.96) appears dwell on judgement: "Judge not, that ye be not judged. 7:2 For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again."

'''Proverbs 21:31'''

"The horse is prepared against the day of battle: but safety is of the LORD" (KJV) is another possibility, considering the novel's ominous context of impending war.

==Mormon Sources==

The phrase "against the day," which provides the novel's title, appears on page 805 of the U.S. edition, and while it may carry biblical overtones, it perhaps is more directly derived from The Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

Specifically, Pynchon embeds "against the day" in a larger phrase, "prepare them against the day," which appears in Section 85 of the Doctrine and Covenants, Verse 3: "It is contrary to the will and commandment of God that those who receive not their inheritance by consecration, agreeable to his law, which he has given, that he may tithe his people, to prepare them against the day of vengeance and burning, should have their names enrolled with the people of God."

Section 85 is part of a response by Joseph Smith to one W. W. Phelps "to answer questions about those saints who had moved to Zion, but who had not received their inheritances according to the establish order in the Church."

[http://scriptures.lds.org/en/dc/85 '''Doctrine and Covenants, Section 85''']

Other potential Doctrine and Covenants sources include Section 29, Verse 8 ("the decree hath gone forth from the Father that they shall be gathered in unto one place upon the face of this land, to prepare their hearts and be prepared in all things against the day when tribulation and desolation are sent forth upon the wicked") and Section 109, Verse 46 ("Therefore, O Lord, deliver thy people from the calamity of the wicked; enable thy servants to seal up the law, and bind up the testimony, that they may be prepared against the day of burning").

[http://scriptures.lds.org/en/dc/29 '''Doctrine and Covenants, Section 29'''] and [http://scriptures.lds.org/en/dc/109 '''Doctrine and Covenants, Section 109''']

==The themes of the book==

The title, ''Against the Day,'' contains references to many of the primary themes of the novel: light, opposites, mirror imagery... Travel backward through time is quite literally traveling "against the day"; the idea of such surfaces frequently in the book. The search for eternal life might also be considered a literal struggle "against the day", or the inevitable effects of living through any measured length of time.

Another great writer full of Biblical allusions, William Faulkner, used the phrase in a 1955 speech: “We speak now against the day when our Southern people who will resist to the last these inevitable changes in social relations, will, when they have been forced to accept what they at one time might have accepted with dignity and goodwill, will say, "Why didn't someone tell us this before? Tell us this in time?"

That it is all too late for America, that we the people might feel that we should have been told before, told in time, might describe a Pynchon theme throughout all his work. See [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Education_of_Henry_Adams The Education of Henry Adams] and its relationship to [http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ ''Gravity's Rainbow''].

==Appearances of "against the day" in other Pynchon works==

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mason_and_Dixon '''Mason & Dixon''']

p. 125
:Mason nods, gazing past the little Harbor, out to Sea. None of his business where Maskelyne goes, or comes, — God let it remain so. The Stars wheel into the blackness of the broken steep Hills guarding the Mouth of the Valley. Fog begins to stir against the Day swelling near. Among the whiten'd Rock Walls of the Houses seethes a great Whisper of living Voice.

p. 683
: [...] till the Moment they must pass over the Crest of the Savage Mountain, does there remain to them, contrary to Reason, against the Day, a measurable chance, to turn, to go back out of no more than Stubbornness, and somehow make all come right [...]

Against the Day Title

2007-03-02T23:29:45Z

Bluetail: /* Painting */

'''Note: please keep this analysis general and spoiler-free.'''

==Painting==

David Hockney: "Contre-jour in the French Style - Against the Day dans le style français".
Paris 1974. Oil on canvas

[[Image:Contre_jour_74_f.jpg‎]]

<references/ http://www.hockneypictures.com/works_paintings_70_09.htm>

==Contra Jour==

''Contra Jour'' is a photographic term meaning, literally, 'Against the Day' or 'Against the Light'. This seems particularly relevant given that light is a major theme in the book.

Wikipedia has this as [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contre-jour contre-jour] and that article suggests other reasons for the title. In particular, this technique exaggerates the contrast between light and dark in the picture and emphasises outlines.

==Other books of the same title==

''Against the Day'' is also the title of a book by Michael Cronin, dealing with an alternate history of World War II.

==Biblical connotations==

In his review of ''Against the Day'' in the ''Wall Street Journal'', Alexander Theroux (author of [http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FDarconvilles-Cat-Alexander-Theroux%2Fdp%2F0805043659&tag=hyperartspynchon&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325 ''Darconville's Cat''] and the upcoming [http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FLaura-Warholic-Intellectual-Alexander-Theroux%2Fdp%2F1560977981%2Fsr%3D11-1%2Fqid%3D1164652830&tag=hyperartspynchon&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325 ''Laura Warholic; or The Sexual Intellectual'']) traces the title of Pynchon's novel back to the Bible, 2 Peter 3:7.:

:(5) For this they willfully forget, that there were heavens from of old, and an earth compacted out of water and amidst water, by the word of God;

:(6) by which means the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished:

:(7) but the heavens that now are, and the earth, by the same word have been stored up for fire, being reserved '''against the day''' of judgment and destruction of ungodly men.

:(8) But forget not this one thing, beloved, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.

(Source: [http://www.spcm.org/english/ASB/B61C003.htm American Standard Bible])

Theroux's review can be found in [http://online.wsj.com/home/us The Wall Street Journal], November 24, 2006, Page W8. (The website is only accessible for subscribers.)

'''Romans 2:5'''

"Against the Day" is a fairly common phrase and probably not limited to one meaning, but this passage from the King James Bible is particularly resonant, especially considering the great amount of religious and pseudo-religious imagery in the book:

The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans 2:5 "But after thy hardness and impenitent heart treasurest up unto thyself wrath ''against the day'' of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God" (King James Bible)

The bookends of the word "wrath" around "against the day" make this particularly suggestive of judgement day or the day of wrath. The passages around this one and around Matthew: 6:34 where Webb's "Sufficient unto the day" (p.96) appears dwell on judgement: "Judge not, that ye be not judged. 7:2 For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again."

'''Proverbs 21:31'''

"The horse is prepared against the day of battle: but safety is of the LORD" (KJV) is another possibility, considering the novel's ominous context of impending war.

==Mormon Sources==

The phrase "against the day," which provides the novel's title, appears on page 805 of the U.S. edition, and while it may carry biblical overtones, it perhaps is more directly derived from The Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

Specifically, Pynchon embeds "against the day" in a larger phrase, "prepare them against the day," which appears in Section 85 of the Doctrine and Covenants, Verse 3: "It is contrary to the will and commandment of God that those who receive not their inheritance by consecration, agreeable to his law, which he has given, that he may tithe his people, to prepare them against the day of vengeance and burning, should have their names enrolled with the people of God."

Section 85 is part of a response by Joseph Smith to one W. W. Phelps "to answer questions about those saints who had moved to Zion, but who had not received their inheritances according to the establish order in the Church."

[http://scriptures.lds.org/en/dc/85 '''Doctrine and Covenants, Section 85''']

Other potential Doctrine and Covenants sources include Section 29, Verse 8 ("the decree hath gone forth from the Father that they shall be gathered in unto one place upon the face of this land, to prepare their hearts and be prepared in all things against the day when tribulation and desolation are sent forth upon the wicked") and Section 109, Verse 46 ("Therefore, O Lord, deliver thy people from the calamity of the wicked; enable thy servants to seal up the law, and bind up the testimony, that they may be prepared against the day of burning").

[http://scriptures.lds.org/en/dc/29 '''Doctrine and Covenants, Section 29'''] and [http://scriptures.lds.org/en/dc/109 '''Doctrine and Covenants, Section 109''']

==The themes of the book==

The title, ''Against the Day,'' contains references to many of the primary themes of the novel: light, opposites, mirror imagery... Travel backward through time is quite literally traveling "against the day"; the idea of such surfaces frequently in the book. The search for eternal life might also be considered a literal struggle "against the day", or the inevitable effects of living through any measured length of time.

Another great writer full of Biblical allusions, William Faulkner, used the phrase in a 1955 speech: “We speak now against the day when our Southern people who will resist to the last these inevitable changes in social relations, will, when they have been forced to accept what they at one time might have accepted with dignity and goodwill, will say, "Why didn't someone tell us this before? Tell us this in time?"

That it is all too late for America, that we the people might feel that we should have been told before, told in time, might describe a Pynchon theme throughout all his work. See [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Education_of_Henry_Adams The Education of Henry Adams] and its relationship to [http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ ''Gravity's Rainbow''].

==Appearances of "against the day" in other Pynchon works==

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mason_and_Dixon '''Mason & Dixon''']

p. 125
:Mason nods, gazing past the little Harbor, out to Sea. None of his business where Maskelyne goes, or comes, — God let it remain so. The Stars wheel into the blackness of the broken steep Hills guarding the Mouth of the Valley. Fog begins to stir against the Day swelling near. Among the whiten'd Rock Walls of the Houses seethes a great Whisper of living Voice.

p. 683
: [...] till the Moment they must pass over the Crest of the Savage Mountain, does there remain to them, contrary to Reason, against the Day, a measurable chance, to turn, to go back out of no more than Stubbornness, and somehow make all come right [...]

Thomas Pynchon Wiki:Copyrights

2007-03-02T23:25:49Z

Bluetail: New page: Contre-Jour in the French Style-Against the day Dans Le Style-Francais, 1974 oil on canvas, 72x72 in. <references/http://www.hockneypictures.com/works_paintings_70_09.htm>

Contre-Jour in the French Style-Against the day Dans Le Style-Francais, 1974
oil on canvas, 72x72 in.
<references/http://www.hockneypictures.com/works_paintings_70_09.htm>

File:Contre jour 74 f.jpg

2007-03-02T23:22:09Z

Bluetail:

Against the Day Title

2007-03-02T23:09:44Z

Bluetail: /* Painting */

'''Note: please keep this analysis general and spoiler-free.'''

==Painting==

David Hockney: "Contre-jour in the French Style - Against the Day dans le style français".
Paris 1974. Oil on canvas
<references/ http://www.hockneypictures.com/works_paintings_70_09.htm>

==Contra Jour==

''Contra Jour'' is a photographic term meaning, literally, 'Against the Day' or 'Against the Light'. This seems particularly relevant given that light is a major theme in the book.

Wikipedia has this as [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contre-jour contre-jour] and that article suggests other reasons for the title. In particular, this technique exaggerates the contrast between light and dark in the picture and emphasises outlines.

==Other books of the same title==

''Against the Day'' is also the title of a book by Michael Cronin, dealing with an alternate history of World War II.

==Biblical connotations==

In his review of ''Against the Day'' in the ''Wall Street Journal'', Alexander Theroux (author of [http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FDarconvilles-Cat-Alexander-Theroux%2Fdp%2F0805043659&tag=hyperartspynchon&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325 ''Darconville's Cat''] and the upcoming [http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FLaura-Warholic-Intellectual-Alexander-Theroux%2Fdp%2F1560977981%2Fsr%3D11-1%2Fqid%3D1164652830&tag=hyperartspynchon&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325 ''Laura Warholic; or The Sexual Intellectual'']) traces the title of Pynchon's novel back to the Bible, 2 Peter 3:7.:

:(5) For this they willfully forget, that there were heavens from of old, and an earth compacted out of water and amidst water, by the word of God;

:(6) by which means the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished:

:(7) but the heavens that now are, and the earth, by the same word have been stored up for fire, being reserved '''against the day''' of judgment and destruction of ungodly men.

:(8) But forget not this one thing, beloved, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.

(Source: [http://www.spcm.org/english/ASB/B61C003.htm American Standard Bible])

Theroux's review can be found in [http://online.wsj.com/home/us The Wall Street Journal], November 24, 2006, Page W8. (The website is only accessible for subscribers.)

'''Romans 2:5'''

"Against the Day" is a fairly common phrase and probably not limited to one meaning, but this passage from the King James Bible is particularly resonant, especially considering the great amount of religious and pseudo-religious imagery in the book:

The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans 2:5 "But after thy hardness and impenitent heart treasurest up unto thyself wrath ''against the day'' of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God" (King James Bible)

The bookends of the word "wrath" around "against the day" make this particularly suggestive of judgement day or the day of wrath. The passages around this one and around Matthew: 6:34 where Webb's "Sufficient unto the day" (p.96) appears dwell on judgement: "Judge not, that ye be not judged. 7:2 For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again."

'''Proverbs 21:31'''

"The horse is prepared against the day of battle: but safety is of the LORD" (KJV) is another possibility, considering the novel's ominous context of impending war.

==Mormon Sources==

The phrase "against the day," which provides the novel's title, appears on page 805 of the U.S. edition, and while it may carry biblical overtones, it perhaps is more directly derived from The Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

Specifically, Pynchon embeds "against the day" in a larger phrase, "prepare them against the day," which appears in Section 85 of the Doctrine and Covenants, Verse 3: "It is contrary to the will and commandment of God that those who receive not their inheritance by consecration, agreeable to his law, which he has given, that he may tithe his people, to prepare them against the day of vengeance and burning, should have their names enrolled with the people of God."

Section 85 is part of a response by Joseph Smith to one W. W. Phelps "to answer questions about those saints who had moved to Zion, but who had not received their inheritances according to the establish order in the Church."

[http://scriptures.lds.org/en/dc/85 '''Doctrine and Covenants, Section 85''']

Other potential Doctrine and Covenants sources include Section 29, Verse 8 ("the decree hath gone forth from the Father that they shall be gathered in unto one place upon the face of this land, to prepare their hearts and be prepared in all things against the day when tribulation and desolation are sent forth upon the wicked") and Section 109, Verse 46 ("Therefore, O Lord, deliver thy people from the calamity of the wicked; enable thy servants to seal up the law, and bind up the testimony, that they may be prepared against the day of burning").

[http://scriptures.lds.org/en/dc/29 '''Doctrine and Covenants, Section 29'''] and [http://scriptures.lds.org/en/dc/109 '''Doctrine and Covenants, Section 109''']

==The themes of the book==

The title, ''Against the Day,'' contains references to many of the primary themes of the novel: light, opposites, mirror imagery... Travel backward through time is quite literally traveling "against the day"; the idea of such surfaces frequently in the book. The search for eternal life might also be considered a literal struggle "against the day", or the inevitable effects of living through any measured length of time.

Another great writer full of Biblical allusions, William Faulkner, used the phrase in a 1955 speech: “We speak now against the day when our Southern people who will resist to the last these inevitable changes in social relations, will, when they have been forced to accept what they at one time might have accepted with dignity and goodwill, will say, "Why didn't someone tell us this before? Tell us this in time?"

That it is all too late for America, that we the people might feel that we should have been told before, told in time, might describe a Pynchon theme throughout all his work. See [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Education_of_Henry_Adams The Education of Henry Adams] and its relationship to [http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ ''Gravity's Rainbow''].

==Appearances of "against the day" in other Pynchon works==

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mason_and_Dixon '''Mason & Dixon''']

p. 125
:Mason nods, gazing past the little Harbor, out to Sea. None of his business where Maskelyne goes, or comes, — God let it remain so. The Stars wheel into the blackness of the broken steep Hills guarding the Mouth of the Valley. Fog begins to stir against the Day swelling near. Among the whiten'd Rock Walls of the Houses seethes a great Whisper of living Voice.

p. 683
: [...] till the Moment they must pass over the Crest of the Savage Mountain, does there remain to them, contrary to Reason, against the Day, a measurable chance, to turn, to go back out of no more than Stubbornness, and somehow make all come right [...]

Against the Day Title

2007-03-02T22:53:31Z

Bluetail: /* Picture */

'''Note: please keep this analysis general and spoiler-free.'''

==Picture==

David Hockney: "Contre-jour in the French Style - Against the Day dans le style français".
Paris 1974. Oil on canvas
<references/ http://www.hockneypictures.com/works_paintings_70_09.htm>

==Contra Jour==

''Contra Jour'' is a photographic term meaning, literally, 'Against the Day' or 'Against the Light'. This seems particularly relevant given that light is a major theme in the book.

Wikipedia has this as [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contre-jour contre-jour] and that article suggests other reasons for the title. In particular, this technique exaggerates the contrast between light and dark in the picture and emphasises outlines.

==Other books of the same title==

''Against the Day'' is also the title of a book by Michael Cronin, dealing with an alternate history of World War II.

==Biblical connotations==

In his review of ''Against the Day'' in the ''Wall Street Journal'', Alexander Theroux (author of [http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FDarconvilles-Cat-Alexander-Theroux%2Fdp%2F0805043659&tag=hyperartspynchon&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325 ''Darconville's Cat''] and the upcoming [http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FLaura-Warholic-Intellectual-Alexander-Theroux%2Fdp%2F1560977981%2Fsr%3D11-1%2Fqid%3D1164652830&tag=hyperartspynchon&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325 ''Laura Warholic; or The Sexual Intellectual'']) traces the title of Pynchon's novel back to the Bible, 2 Peter 3:7.:

:(5) For this they willfully forget, that there were heavens from of old, and an earth compacted out of water and amidst water, by the word of God;

:(6) by which means the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished:

:(7) but the heavens that now are, and the earth, by the same word have been stored up for fire, being reserved '''against the day''' of judgment and destruction of ungodly men.

:(8) But forget not this one thing, beloved, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.

(Source: [http://www.spcm.org/english/ASB/B61C003.htm American Standard Bible])

Theroux's review can be found in [http://online.wsj.com/home/us The Wall Street Journal], November 24, 2006, Page W8. (The website is only accessible for subscribers.)

'''Romans 2:5'''

"Against the Day" is a fairly common phrase and probably not limited to one meaning, but this passage from the King James Bible is particularly resonant, especially considering the great amount of religious and pseudo-religious imagery in the book:

The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans 2:5 "But after thy hardness and impenitent heart treasurest up unto thyself wrath ''against the day'' of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God" (King James Bible)

The bookends of the word "wrath" around "against the day" make this particularly suggestive of judgement day or the day of wrath. The passages around this one and around Matthew: 6:34 where Webb's "Sufficient unto the day" (p.96) appears dwell on judgement: "Judge not, that ye be not judged. 7:2 For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again."

'''Proverbs 21:31'''

"The horse is prepared against the day of battle: but safety is of the LORD" (KJV) is another possibility, considering the novel's ominous context of impending war.

==Mormon Sources==

The phrase "against the day," which provides the novel's title, appears on page 805 of the U.S. edition, and while it may carry biblical overtones, it perhaps is more directly derived from The Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

Specifically, Pynchon embeds "against the day" in a larger phrase, "prepare them against the day," which appears in Section 85 of the Doctrine and Covenants, Verse 3: "It is contrary to the will and commandment of God that those who receive not their inheritance by consecration, agreeable to his law, which he has given, that he may tithe his people, to prepare them against the day of vengeance and burning, should have their names enrolled with the people of God."

Section 85 is part of a response by Joseph Smith to one W. W. Phelps "to answer questions about those saints who had moved to Zion, but who had not received their inheritances according to the establish order in the Church."

[http://scriptures.lds.org/en/dc/85 '''Doctrine and Covenants, Section 85''']

Other potential Doctrine and Covenants sources include Section 29, Verse 8 ("the decree hath gone forth from the Father that they shall be gathered in unto one place upon the face of this land, to prepare their hearts and be prepared in all things against the day when tribulation and desolation are sent forth upon the wicked") and Section 109, Verse 46 ("Therefore, O Lord, deliver thy people from the calamity of the wicked; enable thy servants to seal up the law, and bind up the testimony, that they may be prepared against the day of burning").

[http://scriptures.lds.org/en/dc/29 '''Doctrine and Covenants, Section 29'''] and [http://scriptures.lds.org/en/dc/109 '''Doctrine and Covenants, Section 109''']

==The themes of the book==

The title, ''Against the Day,'' contains references to many of the primary themes of the novel: light, opposites, mirror imagery... Travel backward through time is quite literally traveling "against the day"; the idea of such surfaces frequently in the book. The search for eternal life might also be considered a literal struggle "against the day", or the inevitable effects of living through any measured length of time.

Another great writer full of Biblical allusions, William Faulkner, used the phrase in a 1955 speech: “We speak now against the day when our Southern people who will resist to the last these inevitable changes in social relations, will, when they have been forced to accept what they at one time might have accepted with dignity and goodwill, will say, "Why didn't someone tell us this before? Tell us this in time?"

That it is all too late for America, that we the people might feel that we should have been told before, told in time, might describe a Pynchon theme throughout all his work. See [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Education_of_Henry_Adams The Education of Henry Adams] and its relationship to [http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ ''Gravity's Rainbow''].

==Appearances of "against the day" in other Pynchon works==

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mason_and_Dixon '''Mason & Dixon''']

p. 125
:Mason nods, gazing past the little Harbor, out to Sea. None of his business where Maskelyne goes, or comes, — God let it remain so. The Stars wheel into the blackness of the broken steep Hills guarding the Mouth of the Valley. Fog begins to stir against the Day swelling near. Among the whiten'd Rock Walls of the Houses seethes a great Whisper of living Voice.

p. 683
: [...] till the Moment they must pass over the Crest of the Savage Mountain, does there remain to them, contrary to Reason, against the Day, a measurable chance, to turn, to go back out of no more than Stubbornness, and somehow make all come right [...]

Against the Day Title

2007-03-02T22:41:11Z

Bluetail:

'''Note: please keep this analysis general and spoiler-free.'''

==Picture==

David Hockney: "Contre-jour in the French Style - Against the Day dans le style français"
Paris 1974

==Contra Jour==

''Contra Jour'' is a photographic term meaning, literally, 'Against the Day' or 'Against the Light'. This seems particularly relevant given that light is a major theme in the book.

Wikipedia has this as [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contre-jour contre-jour] and that article suggests other reasons for the title. In particular, this technique exaggerates the contrast between light and dark in the picture and emphasises outlines.

==Other books of the same title==

''Against the Day'' is also the title of a book by Michael Cronin, dealing with an alternate history of World War II.

==Biblical connotations==

In his review of ''Against the Day'' in the ''Wall Street Journal'', Alexander Theroux (author of [http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FDarconvilles-Cat-Alexander-Theroux%2Fdp%2F0805043659&tag=hyperartspynchon&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325 ''Darconville's Cat''] and the upcoming [http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FLaura-Warholic-Intellectual-Alexander-Theroux%2Fdp%2F1560977981%2Fsr%3D11-1%2Fqid%3D1164652830&tag=hyperartspynchon&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325 ''Laura Warholic; or The Sexual Intellectual'']) traces the title of Pynchon's novel back to the Bible, 2 Peter 3:7.:

:(5) For this they willfully forget, that there were heavens from of old, and an earth compacted out of water and amidst water, by the word of God;

:(6) by which means the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished:

:(7) but the heavens that now are, and the earth, by the same word have been stored up for fire, being reserved '''against the day''' of judgment and destruction of ungodly men.

:(8) But forget not this one thing, beloved, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.

(Source: [http://www.spcm.org/english/ASB/B61C003.htm American Standard Bible])

Theroux's review can be found in [http://online.wsj.com/home/us The Wall Street Journal], November 24, 2006, Page W8. (The website is only accessible for subscribers.)

'''Romans 2:5'''

"Against the Day" is a fairly common phrase and probably not limited to one meaning, but this passage from the King James Bible is particularly resonant, especially considering the great amount of religious and pseudo-religious imagery in the book:

The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans 2:5 "But after thy hardness and impenitent heart treasurest up unto thyself wrath ''against the day'' of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God" (King James Bible)

The bookends of the word "wrath" around "against the day" make this particularly suggestive of judgement day or the day of wrath. The passages around this one and around Matthew: 6:34 where Webb's "Sufficient unto the day" (p.96) appears dwell on judgement: "Judge not, that ye be not judged. 7:2 For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again."

'''Proverbs 21:31'''

"The horse is prepared against the day of battle: but safety is of the LORD" (KJV) is another possibility, considering the novel's ominous context of impending war.

==Mormon Sources==

The phrase "against the day," which provides the novel's title, appears on page 805 of the U.S. edition, and while it may carry biblical overtones, it perhaps is more directly derived from The Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

Specifically, Pynchon embeds "against the day" in a larger phrase, "prepare them against the day," which appears in Section 85 of the Doctrine and Covenants, Verse 3: "It is contrary to the will and commandment of God that those who receive not their inheritance by consecration, agreeable to his law, which he has given, that he may tithe his people, to prepare them against the day of vengeance and burning, should have their names enrolled with the people of God."

Section 85 is part of a response by Joseph Smith to one W. W. Phelps "to answer questions about those saints who had moved to Zion, but who had not received their inheritances according to the establish order in the Church."

[http://scriptures.lds.org/en/dc/85 '''Doctrine and Covenants, Section 85''']

Other potential Doctrine and Covenants sources include Section 29, Verse 8 ("the decree hath gone forth from the Father that they shall be gathered in unto one place upon the face of this land, to prepare their hearts and be prepared in all things against the day when tribulation and desolation are sent forth upon the wicked") and Section 109, Verse 46 ("Therefore, O Lord, deliver thy people from the calamity of the wicked; enable thy servants to seal up the law, and bind up the testimony, that they may be prepared against the day of burning").

[http://scriptures.lds.org/en/dc/29 '''Doctrine and Covenants, Section 29'''] and [http://scriptures.lds.org/en/dc/109 '''Doctrine and Covenants, Section 109''']

==The themes of the book==

The title, ''Against the Day,'' contains references to many of the primary themes of the novel: light, opposites, mirror imagery... Travel backward through time is quite literally traveling "against the day"; the idea of such surfaces frequently in the book. The search for eternal life might also be considered a literal struggle "against the day", or the inevitable effects of living through any measured length of time.

Another great writer full of Biblical allusions, William Faulkner, used the phrase in a 1955 speech: “We speak now against the day when our Southern people who will resist to the last these inevitable changes in social relations, will, when they have been forced to accept what they at one time might have accepted with dignity and goodwill, will say, "Why didn't someone tell us this before? Tell us this in time?"

That it is all too late for America, that we the people might feel that we should have been told before, told in time, might describe a Pynchon theme throughout all his work. See [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Education_of_Henry_Adams The Education of Henry Adams] and its relationship to [http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ ''Gravity's Rainbow''].

==Appearances of "against the day" in other Pynchon works==

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mason_and_Dixon '''Mason & Dixon''']

p. 125
:Mason nods, gazing past the little Harbor, out to Sea. None of his business where Maskelyne goes, or comes, — God let it remain so. The Stars wheel into the blackness of the broken steep Hills guarding the Mouth of the Valley. Fog begins to stir against the Day swelling near. Among the whiten'd Rock Walls of the Houses seethes a great Whisper of living Voice.

p. 683
: [...] till the Moment they must pass over the Crest of the Savage Mountain, does there remain to them, contrary to Reason, against the Day, a measurable chance, to turn, to go back out of no more than Stubbornness, and somehow make all come right [...]

Against the Day Title

2007-03-02T22:38:00Z

Bluetail: /* Picture */

'''Note: please keep this analysis general and spoiler-free.'''

==Picture==

David Hockney: "Contre-jour in the French Style - Against the Day dans le style français"
Paris 1974

<ref></http://www.uni-muenster.de/EuropeanPopularScience/win-sample/s-hockn26.jpg>

==Contra Jour==

''Contra Jour'' is a photographic term meaning, literally, 'Against the Day' or 'Against the Light'. This seems particularly relevant given that light is a major theme in the book.

Wikipedia has this as [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contre-jour contre-jour] and that article suggests other reasons for the title. In particular, this technique exaggerates the contrast between light and dark in the picture and emphasises outlines.

==Other books of the same title==

''Against the Day'' is also the title of a book by Michael Cronin, dealing with an alternate history of World War II.

==Biblical connotations==

In his review of ''Against the Day'' in the ''Wall Street Journal'', Alexander Theroux (author of [http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FDarconvilles-Cat-Alexander-Theroux%2Fdp%2F0805043659&tag=hyperartspynchon&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325 ''Darconville's Cat''] and the upcoming [http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FLaura-Warholic-Intellectual-Alexander-Theroux%2Fdp%2F1560977981%2Fsr%3D11-1%2Fqid%3D1164652830&tag=hyperartspynchon&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325 ''Laura Warholic; or The Sexual Intellectual'']) traces the title of Pynchon's novel back to the Bible, 2 Peter 3:7.:

:(5) For this they willfully forget, that there were heavens from of old, and an earth compacted out of water and amidst water, by the word of God;

:(6) by which means the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished:

:(7) but the heavens that now are, and the earth, by the same word have been stored up for fire, being reserved '''against the day''' of judgment and destruction of ungodly men.

:(8) But forget not this one thing, beloved, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.

(Source: [http://www.spcm.org/english/ASB/B61C003.htm American Standard Bible])

Theroux's review can be found in [http://online.wsj.com/home/us The Wall Street Journal], November 24, 2006, Page W8. (The website is only accessible for subscribers.)

'''Romans 2:5'''

"Against the Day" is a fairly common phrase and probably not limited to one meaning, but this passage from the King James Bible is particularly resonant, especially considering the great amount of religious and pseudo-religious imagery in the book:

The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans 2:5 "But after thy hardness and impenitent heart treasurest up unto thyself wrath ''against the day'' of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God" (King James Bible)

The bookends of the word "wrath" around "against the day" make this particularly suggestive of judgement day or the day of wrath. The passages around this one and around Matthew: 6:34 where Webb's "Sufficient unto the day" (p.96) appears dwell on judgement: "Judge not, that ye be not judged. 7:2 For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again."

'''Proverbs 21:31'''

"The horse is prepared against the day of battle: but safety is of the LORD" (KJV) is another possibility, considering the novel's ominous context of impending war.

==Mormon Sources==

The phrase "against the day," which provides the novel's title, appears on page 805 of the U.S. edition, and while it may carry biblical overtones, it perhaps is more directly derived from The Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

Specifically, Pynchon embeds "against the day" in a larger phrase, "prepare them against the day," which appears in Section 85 of the Doctrine and Covenants, Verse 3: "It is contrary to the will and commandment of God that those who receive not their inheritance by consecration, agreeable to his law, which he has given, that he may tithe his people, to prepare them against the day of vengeance and burning, should have their names enrolled with the people of God."

Section 85 is part of a response by Joseph Smith to one W. W. Phelps "to answer questions about those saints who had moved to Zion, but who had not received their inheritances according to the establish order in the Church."

[http://scriptures.lds.org/en/dc/85 '''Doctrine and Covenants, Section 85''']

Other potential Doctrine and Covenants sources include Section 29, Verse 8 ("the decree hath gone forth from the Father that they shall be gathered in unto one place upon the face of this land, to prepare their hearts and be prepared in all things against the day when tribulation and desolation are sent forth upon the wicked") and Section 109, Verse 46 ("Therefore, O Lord, deliver thy people from the calamity of the wicked; enable thy servants to seal up the law, and bind up the testimony, that they may be prepared against the day of burning").

[http://scriptures.lds.org/en/dc/29 '''Doctrine and Covenants, Section 29'''] and [http://scriptures.lds.org/en/dc/109 '''Doctrine and Covenants, Section 109''']

==The themes of the book==

The title, ''Against the Day,'' contains references to many of the primary themes of the novel: light, opposites, mirror imagery... Travel backward through time is quite literally traveling "against the day"; the idea of such surfaces frequently in the book. The search for eternal life might also be considered a literal struggle "against the day", or the inevitable effects of living through any measured length of time.

Another great writer full of Biblical allusions, William Faulkner, used the phrase in a 1955 speech: “We speak now against the day when our Southern people who will resist to the last these inevitable changes in social relations, will, when they have been forced to accept what they at one time might have accepted with dignity and goodwill, will say, "Why didn't someone tell us this before? Tell us this in time?"

That it is all too late for America, that we the people might feel that we should have been told before, told in time, might describe a Pynchon theme throughout all his work. See [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Education_of_Henry_Adams The Education of Henry Adams] and its relationship to [http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ ''Gravity's Rainbow''].

==Appearances of "against the day" in other Pynchon works==

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mason_and_Dixon '''Mason & Dixon''']

p. 125
:Mason nods, gazing past the little Harbor, out to Sea. None of his business where Maskelyne goes, or comes, — God let it remain so. The Stars wheel into the blackness of the broken steep Hills guarding the Mouth of the Valley. Fog begins to stir against the Day swelling near. Among the whiten'd Rock Walls of the Houses seethes a great Whisper of living Voice.

p. 683
: [...] till the Moment they must pass over the Crest of the Savage Mountain, does there remain to them, contrary to Reason, against the Day, a measurable chance, to turn, to go back out of no more than Stubbornness, and somehow make all come right [...]

ATD Reviews

2007-03-02T22:28:39Z

Bluetail:

==Review aggregators==

:[http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/popus/pynchon.htm The Complete Review]

:[http://www.metacritic.com/books/authors/pynchonthomas/againsttheday Metacritic]

==Reviews==

'''Please add any relevant reviews as they come in. Blog reviews are fine as long as they're substantial and more than a few paragraphs.'''

2/6/07 - '''[http://desicritics.org/2007/02/06/043833.php Desicritics.org]''' - Richard Marcus: "While ''Against The Day'' has much more the feel of his earlier work, there are still moments where its intellectualism overwhelms,..."

1/28/07 - '''[http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/archive/2007/January/28/style/stories/06style.htm Santa Cruz Sentinel]''' - Matt King: "You'll have to read it twice."

1/25/07 - '''[http://www.signandsight.com/features/1158.html SignAndSight.com]''' - Denis Sheck: "''Against the Day'' is a unique book, in the sense of being utterly original. At its best moments emotionally electrifying and intellectually brilliant, moving but never sentimental, sometimes terribly sad, sometimes side-splittingly funny, and to the very last page as unforeseeable as a roller coaster ride in the dark."

1/19/07 - '''[http://media.www.utahstatesman.com/media/storage/paper243/news/2007/01/19/Diversions/Book-Review.Against.The.Day-2655377.shtml The Utah Statesman]''' - Ben Clarke: "''Against the Day'' doesn't meet the expectations of its own rhetoric and expansive plot,..."

1/18/07 - '''[http://artvoice.com/issues/v6n3/book_reviews/against_the_day ArtVoice]''' - Todd Natti: "''Against the Day'' just feels like it should have been more, only not lengthwise."

1/16/07 - '''[http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0116/p13s01-bogn.html The Christian Science Monitor]''' - Yvonne Zipp: "...if ''Against the Day'' is the most infuriating novel I've read in a year, it's also among the most imaginative."

1/13/07- '''[http://gregoryfeeley.blogspot.com/2007/01/short-article-on-thomas-pynchon.html "Day Tripper" Short Article on Thomas Pynchon]''' by Greg Feeley appeared in the New Haven Advocate. Posted at his website.

1/11/07 - '''[http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19771 New York Review of Books]''' - Luc Sante: "Pynchon thinks on a different scale from most novelists, to the point where you'd almost want to find another word for the sort of thing he does, since his books differ from most other novels the way a novel differs from a short story, in exponential rather than simply linear fashion."

1/10/07 - '''[http://www.dradio.de/dkultur/sendungen/kritik/581275 Deutschlandradio]''': Denis Scheck: "Ein Roman als Wunderkammer".
The same author at '''[http://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/archiv/11.01.2007/3013820.asp Der Tagesspiegel]''' "Kugelblitz, Dynamit und Quaternionen"

1/5/07 - '''[http://www.prospect.org/web/view-web.ww?id=12356 The American Prospect]''' - Eric Rauchway: "But if Pynchon is a hippie he also drank his Protestantism deeply, and his sense of ineffable divinity sits uneasily alongside the certainty Christianity Americans often profess."

1/5/07 - '''[http://derstandard.at/?url=/?id=2716016 Der Standard (Austria)]''' - Sebastian Fasthuber: "Von A(narchie) bis Z(eta-Funktion): ''Against The Day''."

1/4/07 - '''[http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n01/wood01_.html London Review of Books]''' - Michael Wood: "...''Against the Day'' goes to great lengths to show that dreams of other worlds haunt mathematics, indeed perhaps are mathematics."

1/1/07 - '''[http://www.vaildaily.com/article/20070101/AE/101010043 Vail Daily News]''' - Matt Zalaznick: "[''Against the Day''] may serve as its own crystal through which to look back on Pynchon's previous works and find the emotional gold ready to transmuted from the obscuring silver."

12/31/06 - '''[http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06365/749719-148.stm Pittsburgh Post-Gazette]''' - Kristofer Collins: "...the prose is drained of all vigor and the convolutions of Pynchon's sentences..., are merely evidence of a writer no longer at the top of his game."

12/23/06 - '''[http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20952474-5003900,00.html The Australian]''' - Don Anderson: "But an 1100-page novel? What can justify this economy?...I won't attempt to justify Pynchon's decision, in this never-repetitious novel, merely suggest that, in the words at the head of the last page of the greatest American novel: "And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.""

12/18/06 - '''[http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/0,1518,455565,00.html Der Spiegel]''' Matthias Matussek, Philipp Oehmke, Doja Hacker und Malte Herwig: "Das grosse, wilde Spiel"

12/18/06 - '''[http://nymag.com/arts/cultureawards/2006/25308/index1.html New York Magazine]''' - Best Books of 2006, Honorable Mention: "The Wild West anarchist-revenge tale at the heart of Thomas Pynchon’s ''Against the Day'' — cut out the other 600 pages and you’ve got the best novel of the year."

12/17/06 - '''[http://grubstreetgrackle.com/preludefugue.html#fugue Grub Street Grackle]''' - "...an Odyssey (or rather four Odyssean threads braided into one long rope) with no Ithaca, a long journey that, at the end of the day, must fantasize, improvise, and consolidate its own destination."

12/15/06 - '''[http://www.smh.com.au/news/book-reviews/against-the-day/2006/12/15/1165685879188.html The Sydney Morning Herald (AU)]''' - Anthony Macris: "Yet for all its outlandish characterisations and cartoonish carryings-on, Pynchon's sensibility is ultimately both omniscient and omnivorous, driven by a ferocious intelligence that, with every new novel, is ever more determined to devour as much of the world as it can."

12/15/06 - '''[http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/reviews/article2074052.ece The Independent (UK), II]''' - David Goldblatt: "Pynchon's scope is so mad, so grand, that he glides lightly across this terrain. I hoped early on in the book that he might stay the course, but the wild hinterlands of intoxication and irrationality called him away."

12/15/06 - '''[http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/review?oid=oid%3A429221 Austin Chronicle]''' - James Renovitch: "''Against the Day'' leaves you holding your head laden with the possible futures of both society and the individual: the former, frightening; the latter, uplifting."

12/14/06 - '''[http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=4753&IssueNum=184 LA City Weekly]''' - Anthony Miller: "''Against the Day'' is a luminous novel that sets off an anarchic explosion of the imagination to demolish our simple myths of progress, which would only strand us in the dark, and carry careful and faithful readers further into the light."

12/13/06 - '''[http://www.thelondonpaper.com/cs/Satellite/london/books/article/1157142606554?packedargs=suffix%3DArticleController The London Paper]''' - Stuart McGurk: "...if ''Gravity’s Rainbow'' was Pynchon’s ''Ulysses'', this is his ''Finnegan's Wake''. Baffling? Certainly. Brilliant? Without a doubt."

12/10/06 - '''[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2006/12/10/bopyn25.xml Daily Telegraph]''' - Michael Moorcock: "Gloriously, demandingly, daringly, Pynchon has rediscovered vulgarity and continues to prove that the novel has never been more vibrant, more various or better able to represent our complex world. Give this book your time – you'll agree it's worth it."

12/10/06 - '''[http://www.accessatlanta.com/arts/content/printedition/2006/12/10/bkpynchon1210a.html Atlanta Journal-Constitution]''' - Donna Seaman: "Verdict: A rich, imaginative epic of wonder and depravity."

12/10/06 - '''[http://www.sptimes.com/2006/12/10/Books/A_world_of_possibilit.shtml St. Petersburg Times]''' - Colette Bancroft: "Pynchon's novels are all about quests, and, with main characters bearing surnames like Traverse and Rideout, ''Against the Day'' is no different. The book has a cast of dozens wandering in and out of almost as many plot lines (and Pynchon acolytes are already busy annotating it; see against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com)."

12/10/06 - '''[http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/12/10/RVGFPMO15S1.DTL&type=books San Francisco Chronicle]''' - David Hellman: "''Against the Day'' is probably the most brilliant book most people will never read....Either enter the light of this book, and seek those dark corners where the answers may await, or run for the hills and take cover."

12/10/06 - '''[http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2102-2487609,00.html The Sunday Times (UK)]''' - John Dugdale: "''Against the Day'' resembles Moby Dick in its vast scale, its displays of learning, its engaging larkiness. But it’s a Moby Dick with no Ahab, and no whale."

12/10/06 - '''[http://washingtontimes.com/books/20061209-102724-5433r.htm Washington Times]''' - Bruce Allen: "And yet -- wonder of wonder, miracle of miracles -- a novel designed to demonstrate exhaustively that nothing ultimately coheres nevertheless manages to fuse its dozens of disparate, baffling, ragged elements into an imposing and satisfying whole. There's mystery for you."

12/9/06 - '''[http://www.denverpost.com/lifestyles/ci_4799969 Denver Post]''' - Dorman T. Shindler: "''Against the Day'' - funny, wise, poetic and always over-the-top - offers the reader both a way to lose him or herself in a tale of escape and a way to take a hard look anew at the world around us."

12/8/06 - '''[http://pynchonwiki.com/wiki/mp3/nytpynpod.mp3 New York Times podcast discussion of ATD, provided by Toby G. Levy]''' - a conversation with ''Times'' book critic Liesl Schillinger.

12/7/06 - '''[http://www.faz.net/s/Rub79A33397BE834406A5D2BFA87FD13913/Doc~EE48B15855A78439DA1BA2F70FE335DE9~ATpl~Ecommon~Scontent.html Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung]''' -Dietmar Dath: "Freiheit ist Vergangenheit."

12/7/06 - '''[http://www.villagevoice.com/books/0650,haskell,75247,10.html The Village Voice]''' - John Haskell: "The cloud of foreboding that hangs over this book is a fear, a Pynchonian paranoia, that the martial instincts of capitalism, having already corrupted Tesla's idea of free electricity, will come to control and limit the very act of thinking."

12/4/06 - '''[http://nymag.com/arts/books/reviews/24728/ New York Magazine]''' - Keith Gessen: "''Against the Day'' is exhausting, twisted, and paranoid. But that doesn’t mean Pynchon can’t also be fun."

12/4/06 - '''[http://www.newstatesman.com/200612040051 New Statesman (UK))]''' - Rachel Aspden: "The deluge of science can blind us to the fact that he is, temperamentally, a mystic rather than a technician. He writes ''Against the Day'', but seeks what lies beyond or under or above the quotidian."

12/3/06 - '''[http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20061203/1039371.asp Buffalo News]''' - Joseph Conte: " For the reader of this magnificent fiction, "travel to other worlds is therefore travel to alternate versions of the same Earth." The enjoyment, then, is determining which of all the possible versions one has blithely wandered into."

12/3/06 - '''[http://www.nypost.com/seven/12032006/entertainment/tom__duly_entertainment_quentin_rowan.htm New York Post]''' - Quentin Rowan: "Yet amid all the charms and expert entertainments and quizzical truths of ''Against the Day,'' there is little that sticks in the mind as involuntarily real, as having been other than intellectually achieved."

12/3/06 - '''[http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/entertainment/books/16147270.htm Miami Herald]''' - Ariel Gonzalez: "This is the sort of novel that is displayed on coffee tables by pseudo-intellectuals. But the water is warm enough to merit a toe-dipping, and who knows, you may then want to dive right in."

12/3/06 - '''[http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/entertainment/16134463.htm Kansas City Star]''' - Chris Packham: "...[W]ith Against the Day, Pynchon seems to be addressing the reader directly, without the evasive ironies of past work....With each successively more approachable novel, Pynchon suggests more hopeful possibilities. Or seems to."

12/2/06 - '''[http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20061202.BKPYNC02/TPStory/Entertainment The Globe and Mail (CA)]''' - Greg Hollingshead: "The development from ''Gravity's Rainbow'' to ''Against the Day'' has not been so much organic as a translation to another version, at another time. The result remains extraordinary, but it's at once darker and paler, and less substantial."

12/2/06 - '''[http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,923-2480352,00.html The Times (UK)]''' - Douglas Kennedy: "Certainly, Pynchon’s new novel displays, for all to see, his “lost in the funhouse” narrative proclivities, his intellectual super-nova fireworks and his delight in the arcane, the base, the idiotic."

12/06 - '''[http://contemporarylit.about.com/od/fiction/fr/againstTheDay.htm About.com]''' - Gregory Schneider: "It's...about innocence and experience, light and darkness, ignorance and clarity, love and indifference, serenity and despair, and the interchangeability, the maddening interdependence, of these concepts."

12/06 - '''[http://www.bookpage.com/0612bp/fiction/against_the_day.html BookPage]''' - Robert Weibezahl: "It is, at various points, everything one expects from a Thomas Pynchon novel—tangled, funny, prone to digressions, mind-numbingly convoluted, perceptive, over-the-top, louche, erudite, perplexing, heartfelt, encyclopedic, indulgent and, for the intrepid reader who makes it to the end, ultimately worth the often arduous journey."

12/1/06 - '''[http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/life/books/reviews/4372349.html Houston Chronicle]''' - Terrence Doody: "It is a messy omnium gatherum rather than the summa theologica that at least I was hoping for....Even Homer nods, they say, and Pynchon's gotten slack and sleepy here."

12/1/06 - '''[http://www.ft.com/cms/s/9415c2b4-8040-11db-9096-0000779e2340.html Financial Times (UK)]''' - Ludovic Hunter-Tilney: "There remains much to admire in the workings of his singularly brilliant literary consciousness, but the suspicion remains that Pynchon’s self-removal from public life now extends to the page."

12/1/06 - '''[http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15996230/site/newsweek/ Newsweek Pt. III]''' - Malcom Jones: "Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel is long, densely plotted, long, silly, profound, long—everything most modern novels aren’t—and yet it still works."

12/1/06 - '''[http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/bookreviews/061201/ Chicago Reader]''' - Jonathan Rosenbaum: "The momentary pleasures of reading ''Against the Day'' often come close to seeming random, and reconciling the book's larger aims with all the jazzy improvs is no easy matter -- though that's what Pynchon's game is all about."

12/06-1/07 - '''[http://www.bookforum.net/leclair.html Bookforum]''' - Tom LeClair: "I hope some future scholar will read the novel twenty times and
either illustrate how it recapitulates the whole history of narrative or demonstrate how every piece fits together into a fourfold design that will replace four-base genetics as a model of all life."

12/02/06 - '''[http://www.nzz.ch/2006/12/02/fe/articleEPLSF.html NZZ]''' - Angela Schader: "Höhere Mathematik und Kartoffelsalat. Thomas Pynchon schreibt einen Allerweltsroman - im wahrsten Sinn des Wortes"

11/30/06 - '''[http://nurtext.zeit.de/2006/49/KA-Mittelstueck Die Zeit]''' - Georg Diez: "Das Phantom."

11/30/06 - '''[http://www.economist.com/books/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=8348701 The Economist]''' : "Baffling, yes. Clever and inventive in a cackling, manic, mad-professor kind of way, yes. Intermittently warmed by paragraph-long sunbeams of iridescent prose-poetry, yes. Rambling, pompous and often completely incomprehensible—yes to all that too."

11/29/06 - '''[http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25339-2477997,00.html The Times Literary Supplement (UK)]''' - Sophie Ratcliffe: "This is not to say Pynchon suggests any solution. What he does is highlight how invisible our claims for salvation are, thus disturbing all the familiar comforts they might offer, including the comforts of the novel’s structure. This gets its clearest exposition in his handling of the relentlessly optimistic airborne crew at the novel’s end."

11/28/06 - '''[http://www.ew.com/ew/article/review/book/0,6115,1560896_5_0_,00.html Entertainment Weekly]''' - Ken Tucker: "Beyond his literary accomplishments, this wily 69-year-old's work has influenced, consciously or unconsciously, much of our pop culture, from ''Lost'' to ''The Matrix'' to ''Arrested Development'' to ''Lemony Snicket'' (for what are the Baudelaire children but grimmer Chums of Chance?)."

11/27/06 - '''[http://www.scifi.com/sfw/books/column/sfw14197.html Sci Fi Weekly]''' - John Clute: "The hundreds of figures who jam into ''Against the Day'' are not in fact characters at all, because Pynchon has evacuated his book of that degree of hope. They are ''utterands'': people-shaped utterances who illuminate the stories of the old world that their Author has placed before us in funeral array; they are codes to spell his book with."

11/26/06 - '''[http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20061126/news_mz1v26day.html San Diego Union-Tribune]''' - James Leigh: "Pynchon's books are hugely entertaining; they are also without question heroic attempts to deal with our whole world, and ''Against the Day'' may well be his best yet."

11/26/06 - '''[http://living.scotsman.com/books.cfm?id=1751072006 The Scotsman (UK), Scotland on Sunday]''' - Stuart Kelly: "It is, in places, a raggedy, meandering novel....You might as well complain that a Jackson Pollock painting is a bit splattery, or that Miles Davis sounds a little improvised."

11/26/06 - '''[http://www.projo.com/books/content/BOOK-PYNCHON_11-26-06_K02SPUI.2799ad7.html Providence Journal]''' - Sam Coale: "This is Pynchon’s nightmarish vision of hell, peopled by predatory capitalists, eager anarchists, and stray ghosts. Pynchon imagines a world run amuck. And it is awesome."

11/26/06 - '''[http://www.oregonlive.com/entertainment/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/entertainment/1164056114252360.xml&coll=7 The Oregonian]''' - Richard Melo: "With a writer as publicity-shy as Pynchon, there is no way if with this novel he is calling it a day. If he is, then he's going out with a bang louder than an obliterating asteroid screaming across the Siberian sky."

11/26/06 - '''[http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0,,1956983,00.html The Observer (UK)]''' - David Gale: "None of this detracts from the unique pleasures of a mighty novel that will delight Pynchonians and seduce newcomers....The scale of the novel induces memory loss but as with balloon flight, or fever, the return to terra firma is accompanied by feelings of wise, wide contentment."

11/26/06 - '''[http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/reviews/article2016608.ece The Independent (UK]''' - Tim Martin: "Against the Day is a startlingly discontinuous novel, a work of full-spectrum intelligence and erudition that is at times bafflingly tiresome and ungenerous to the reader....Something in it will mean something important to almost anybody. But the parts make a chaotic whole."

11/26/06 - '''[http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/books/review/Schillinger.t.html New York Times] (Sunday book review)''' - Liesl Schillinger: "In ''Against the Day,'' Pynchon’s voice seems uncharacteristically earnest. He interrupts his narrative from time to time to lay down pronouncements that, taken together, probably constitute the fullest elaboration of his philosophy yet seen in print."

11/26/06 - '''[http://www.faz.net/s/Rub79A33397BE834406A5D2BFA87FD13913/Doc~E6C145F0F3FBD4A3792D32580D3C22BFE~ATpl~Ecommon~Scontent.html FAZ]''' - Peter Körte: "Der Mäandertaler".

11/25/06 - '''[http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0,,1956362,00.html The Guardian (UK)]''' - James Lasdun: "...the book itself has no particular reason to end where it does, other than perhaps the adhesive limits of book-binding glue."

11/25/06 - '''[http://living.scotsman.com/books.cfm?id=1746102006 The Scotsman]''' - Tom Adair: "...a gaze that holds you in its grip for a thousand pages. Quite a feat."

11/24/06 - '''[http://spectatorpynchon.blogspot.com/ The Spectator (UK)]''' - Sam Leith: "It is virtuoso nonsense; it is a giant shaggy dog story, serious as history; it is by turns mind-crushingly tedious and utterly exhilarating; it is remorselessly facetious and yet deeply moving."

11/24/06 - '''[http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=534435 Milwaukee Sentinel Journal]''' - Mike Fischer: "Ever since ''V.'' rocked the literary world in 1963, Pynchon has sought this crest with a single-minded intensity unmatched by any American writer since Melville. ''Against the Day,'' his brilliant new novel, gets him there."

23/11/06 - '''[http://www.nzz.ch/2006/11/23/fe/articleEOMOG.html NZZ]''' - Andrea Köhler: "Der Potter der Postmoderne. Thomas Pynchons neuer Roman stürzt die Kritiker in Verlegenheit"

11/23/06 - '''[http://www.metro.co.uk/metrolife/books/article.html?in_article_id=26438&in_page_id=28 Metro (UK)]''' - Robert Murphy: "...the novel is longer than even Pynchon's energies can justify but nonetheless, it is an unmistakable masterpiece."

11/22/06 - '''[http://www.thenation.com/doc/20061211/leonard/ The Nation]''' - John Leonard: "It's a Perils of Pauline plot as pulpy and fibrous, as gnarly and pantophagic, as a thicket of bamboo."

11/21/06 - '''[http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15841357/site/newsweek/ Newsweek Pt. II]''' - Malcom Jones: "Now halfway through, the reviewer knows the new Thomas Pynchon novel is full of doubles, an ocean liner that morphs into a destroyer and the kind of detail that's only fun if you slow down and enjoy it."

11/21/06 - '''[http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6393529.html Library Journal]''' - Barbara Hoffert: "Brilliant if sometimes exasperating, Pynchon's latest is highly recommended for any library that takes its fiction seriously, with the warning that it does not yield easy pleasures and should not be read on deadline."

11/21/06 - '''[http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/john_crace/2006/11/gravitys_author_just_got_heavi.html The Guardian/Comment Is Free (UK)]''' - John Crace: "You can read it or you can weigh it. My guess is that most people will opt for the latter."

11/21/06 - '''[http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/11/21/pynchon/index_np.html Salon]''' - Laura Miller: "[I]t's obvious [Pynchon's] disciples now write better Big Idea novels than he does."

11/20/06 - '''[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/11/20/nbook20.xml The Telegraph (UK)]''' - Alex Massie: "Although Pynchon's devoted fans, whose enthusiasm can border on the cultish, will queue up to embrace his latest work, some critics have wondered if Pynchon's exuberant style masks a lack of substance."

11/20/06 - '''[http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Nov06/Jacobs20.htm Dissident Voice'''] - Ron Jacobs: "Despite the bleakness of the times that these tales are told, an indomitable beauty resides within them, thanks in large part to the characters Mr. Pynchon creates, the stories that they live, and the approach to the telling by the author."

11/20/06 - '''[http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=ab6WLEn2ciGU&refer=muse Bloomberg News]''' - Craig Seligman: "...I felt like an exhausted swimmer crawling onto the far shore of a body of water that turned out to be even wider than it looked. And like the swimmer, I remember more about the effort than the scenery I passed along the way."

11/20/06 - '''[http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/reviews/2006-11-20-thomas-pynchon_x.htm USA Today]''' - Bob Minzesheimer: "Falling into a novel can be like enjoying a weekend trip to a place you've never been. Against the Day is more like going away for a month, getting lost on your way there and back, returning exhausted, but with bags full of stories."

11/20/06 - '''[http://www.themodernword.com/reviews/pynchon_atd.html The Modern Word]''' - Allen Ruch: "[F]or those willing to suspend disbelief and leave the ground behind, Pynchon’s great Inconvenience proves to be one hell of a ride."

11/20/06 - '''[http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/articles/061127crbo_books New Yorker]''' - Louis Menand: "[W]ith this one there is the feeling that the magician has fallen in love with his own stunts, as though Pynchon were composing a pastiche of a Pynchon novel."

11/20/06 - '''[http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/20/books/20kaku.html New York Times]''' - Michiko Kakutani: "It is a humongous, bloated jigsaw puzzle of a story, pretentious without being provocative, elliptical without being illuminating, complicated without being rewardingly complex." (Written by [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michiko_Kakutani Michiko Kakutani], so let the reader ''definitely'' beware!)

11/19/06 '''[http://www.tbo.com/entertainment/books/MGBPR0W8NUE.html Tampa Tribune]''' - Kevin Walker: "It's a complex, raunchy, funny, I-better-read-that-paragraph-again-what-just-happened sort of novel."

11/19/06 - '''[http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/entertainment/16037282.htm Philadelphia Inquirer]''' - Carlin Romano: "''Positive adjectives:'' Audacious, bodacious, entropic, synoptic, electric, eclectic, entertaining, hyperbraining, high-roller, tripolar. ''Negative adjectives:'' Rambling, shambling, self-indulgent, non-refulgent, overlong, full-of-bad-song, seriously scattered, plainly mad-hattered."

11/19/06 - '''[http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/cuyahoga/1163842776251970.xml&coll=2 Cleveland Plain-Dealer]''' - Jean Dubail: " All I can say is that the novel ends the way a Shakespearean comedy does, in which a measure of happiness redeems much of the horror and heartache that precede it. So, is the book worth the trouble? It was for me, but I'm a Pynchon fan, and bafflement comes with the territory."

11/19/06 - '''[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/16/AR2006111601252.html Washington Post]''' - Steven Moore: “Pynchon fans will accept this gift from the author with gratitude, but I’m not so sure about mainstream readers.”

11/19/06 - '''[http://www.calendarlive.com/books/bookreview/cl-bk-sorrentino19nov19,0,3649673.htmlstory?coll=cl-books-features Los Angeles Times]''' - Christopher Sorrentino: “A book this long that amazes even 50% of the time is amazing.”

11/19/06 - '''[http://www.statesman.com/life/content/life/stories/books/11/19/19pynchon.html Austin American-Statesman]''' - Roger Gathman: "Forget it, fellow Pynchonians. [Against the Day] isn’t “Gravity’s Rainbow II.” That time, that place and that writer won’t ever come together again.”

11/19/06 - '''[http://www.newsday.com/features/booksmags/ny-bkcov4977785nov19,0,7633389.story?coll=ny-bookreview-headlines Newsday]''' - Scott McLemee: "[A] novel as exhilarating, tiresome, unnerving and exhausting as all the others put together.”

11/19/06 - '''[http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2006/11/19/inspired_chaos/?page=full Boston Globe]''' - Mark Feeney: "There's a bop electricity to Pynchon: the furious tempos and difficult harmonies, the maverick stance and hipster attitude....[M]aybe another Pynchon novel? If one comes, let it be as rich and sweeping, wild and thrilling, as this one."

11/17/06 - '''[http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/artsentertainment/2003433850_pynchon19.html Seattle Times]''' - John Freeman: "It's like dropping a penny into an open manhole — the novel simply swallows the time and asks for more. And yet, Pynchon does reward the effort."

11/17/06 - '''[http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15771953/site/newsweek/ Newsweek Pt. I]''' - Malcom Jones: "But you’ve got to understand that this novelistic mountain we’re climbing, well, I’ve never been to the top either. Just a reminder. Stay tuned. Next time: are Thomas Pynchon and Bob Dylan the same person? "

11/16/06 - '''[http://www.timeout.com/newyork/Details.do?page=1&xyurl=xyl://TONYWebArticles1/581/books/against_the_day.xml Time Out New York]''' - Joshua Rothkopf: "Pynchon’s gift for language remains undiminished, a roiling, imaginative flood that makes his voice utterly unique, and his latest a must-read."

11/15/06 - '''[http://www.nysun.com/article/43545 New York Sun]''' - Adam Kirsch: "The silliness of "Against the Day" about the very subjects where we are most urgently in quest of wisdom proves that, whatever he once was, Thomas Pynchon is no longer the novelist we need."

11/14/06 - '''[http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/popus/pynchon.htm The Complete Review]''': "[I]mpressive in its parts, but near confounding as a whole."

11/14/06 - '''[http://www.thephoenix.com/article_ektid27434.aspx The Phoenix]''' - Peter Keough: “Undaunted in the past by the big questions that bug a guy, he here takes on, in addition to the elusive quality of light... time travel, multiple universes, the death struggle between anarchism and capitalism, the dance of order and chaos.”

11/13/06 - '''[http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1558326-1,00.html Time]''' - Richard Lacayo: “More than in any of Pynchon’s previous books, just what it all means is a problem in Against the Day, where plots and ideas and fantastic developments pile up in exhausting profusion.”

11/3/06 - '''[http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/paper_earlyatd.html The Modern Word]''' (first impressions): "It seems like the logical evolution/conclusion to Pynchon’s career as a prose experimentalist."

10/24/06 - '''[http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6384205.html?rssid=105 Publisher's Weekly]''': "[R]eads like half a dozen books duking it out for his, and the reader’s, attention. Most of them shine with a surreal incandescence, but even Pynchon fans may find their fealty tested now and again."

{{ATD Alpha Nav}}

Against the Day Title

2007-03-02T22:17:58Z

Bluetail:

ATD Reviews

2007-03-02T22:09:20Z

Bluetail: /* Reviews */

==Review aggregators==

:[http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/popus/pynchon.htm The Complete Review]

:[http://www.metacritic.com/books/authors/pynchonthomas/againsttheday Metacritic]

==Reviews==

'''Please add any relevant reviews as they come in. Blog reviews are fine as long as they're substantial and more than a few paragraphs.'''

2/6/07 - '''[http://desicritics.org/2007/02/06/043833.php Desicritics.org]''' - Richard Marcus: "While ''Against The Day'' has much more the feel of his earlier work, there are still moments where its intellectualism overwhelms,..."

1/28/07 - '''[http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/archive/2007/January/28/style/stories/06style.htm Santa Cruz Sentinel]''' - Matt King: "You'll have to read it twice."

1/25/07 - '''[http://www.signandsight.com/features/1158.html SignAndSight.com]''' - Denis Sheck: "''Against the Day'' is a unique book, in the sense of being utterly original. At its best moments emotionally electrifying and intellectually brilliant, moving but never sentimental, sometimes terribly sad, sometimes side-splittingly funny, and to the very last page as unforeseeable as a roller coaster ride in the dark."

1/19/07 - '''[http://media.www.utahstatesman.com/media/storage/paper243/news/2007/01/19/Diversions/Book-Review.Against.The.Day-2655377.shtml The Utah Statesman]''' - Ben Clarke: "''Against the Day'' doesn't meet the expectations of its own rhetoric and expansive plot,..."

1/18/07 - '''[http://artvoice.com/issues/v6n3/book_reviews/against_the_day ArtVoice]''' - Todd Natti: "''Against the Day'' just feels like it should have been more, only not lengthwise."

1/16/07 - '''[http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0116/p13s01-bogn.html The Christian Science Monitor]''' - Yvonne Zipp: "...if ''Against the Day'' is the most infuriating novel I've read in a year, it's also among the most imaginative."

1/13/07- '''[http://gregoryfeeley.blogspot.com/2007/01/short-article-on-thomas-pynchon.html "Day Tripper" Short Article on Thomas Pynchon]''' by Greg Feeley appeared in the New Haven Advocate. Posted at his website.

1/11/07 - '''[http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19771 New York Review of Books]''' - Luc Sante: "Pynchon thinks on a different scale from most novelists, to the point where you'd almost want to find another word for the sort of thing he does, since his books differ from most other novels the way a novel differs from a short story, in exponential rather than simply linear fashion."

1/10/07 - '''[http://www.dradio.de/dkultur/sendungen/kritik/581275/]''' - Denis Scheck: "Ein Roman als Wunderkammer".
The same author at '''[http://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/archiv/11.01.2007/3013820.asp]''' "Kugelblitz, Dynamit und Quaternionen"

1/5/07 - '''[http://www.prospect.org/web/view-web.ww?id=12356 The American Prospect]''' - Eric Rauchway: "But if Pynchon is a hippie he also drank his Protestantism deeply, and his sense of ineffable divinity sits uneasily alongside the certainty Christianity Americans often profess."

1/5/07 - '''[http://derstandard.at/?url=/?id=2716016 Der Standard (Austria)]''' - Sebastian Fasthuber: "Von A(narchie) bis Z(eta-Funktion): ''Against The Day''."

1/4/07 - '''[http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n01/wood01_.html London Review of Books]''' - Michael Wood: "...''Against the Day'' goes to great lengths to show that dreams of other worlds haunt mathematics, indeed perhaps are mathematics."

1/1/07 - '''[http://www.vaildaily.com/article/20070101/AE/101010043 Vail Daily News]''' - Matt Zalaznick: "[''Against the Day''] may serve as its own crystal through which to look back on Pynchon's previous works and find the emotional gold ready to transmuted from the obscuring silver."

12/31/06 - '''[http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06365/749719-148.stm Pittsburgh Post-Gazette]''' - Kristofer Collins: "...the prose is drained of all vigor and the convolutions of Pynchon's sentences..., are merely evidence of a writer no longer at the top of his game."

12/23/06 - '''[http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20952474-5003900,00.html The Australian]''' - Don Anderson: "But an 1100-page novel? What can justify this economy?...I won't attempt to justify Pynchon's decision, in this never-repetitious novel, merely suggest that, in the words at the head of the last page of the greatest American novel: "And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.""

12/18/06 - '''[http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/0,1518,455565,00.html Der Spiegel]''' Matthias Matussek, Philipp Oehmke, Doja Hacker und Malte Herwig: "Das grosse, wilde Spiel"

12/18/06 - '''[http://nymag.com/arts/cultureawards/2006/25308/index1.html New York Magazine]''' - Best Books of 2006, Honorable Mention: "The Wild West anarchist-revenge tale at the heart of Thomas Pynchon’s ''Against the Day'' — cut out the other 600 pages and you’ve got the best novel of the year."

12/17/06 - '''[http://grubstreetgrackle.com/preludefugue.html#fugue Grub Street Grackle]''' - "...an Odyssey (or rather four Odyssean threads braided into one long rope) with no Ithaca, a long journey that, at the end of the day, must fantasize, improvise, and consolidate its own destination."

12/15/06 - '''[http://www.smh.com.au/news/book-reviews/against-the-day/2006/12/15/1165685879188.html The Sydney Morning Herald (AU)]''' - Anthony Macris: "Yet for all its outlandish characterisations and cartoonish carryings-on, Pynchon's sensibility is ultimately both omniscient and omnivorous, driven by a ferocious intelligence that, with every new novel, is ever more determined to devour as much of the world as it can."

12/15/06 - '''[http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/reviews/article2074052.ece The Independent (UK), II]''' - David Goldblatt: "Pynchon's scope is so mad, so grand, that he glides lightly across this terrain. I hoped early on in the book that he might stay the course, but the wild hinterlands of intoxication and irrationality called him away."

12/15/06 - '''[http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/review?oid=oid%3A429221 Austin Chronicle]''' - James Renovitch: "''Against the Day'' leaves you holding your head laden with the possible futures of both society and the individual: the former, frightening; the latter, uplifting."

12/14/06 - '''[http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=4753&IssueNum=184 LA City Weekly]''' - Anthony Miller: "''Against the Day'' is a luminous novel that sets off an anarchic explosion of the imagination to demolish our simple myths of progress, which would only strand us in the dark, and carry careful and faithful readers further into the light."

12/13/06 - '''[http://www.thelondonpaper.com/cs/Satellite/london/books/article/1157142606554?packedargs=suffix%3DArticleController The London Paper]''' - Stuart McGurk: "...if ''Gravity’s Rainbow'' was Pynchon’s ''Ulysses'', this is his ''Finnegan's Wake''. Baffling? Certainly. Brilliant? Without a doubt."

12/10/06 - '''[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2006/12/10/bopyn25.xml Daily Telegraph]''' - Michael Moorcock: "Gloriously, demandingly, daringly, Pynchon has rediscovered vulgarity and continues to prove that the novel has never been more vibrant, more various or better able to represent our complex world. Give this book your time – you'll agree it's worth it."

12/10/06 - '''[http://www.accessatlanta.com/arts/content/printedition/2006/12/10/bkpynchon1210a.html Atlanta Journal-Constitution]''' - Donna Seaman: "Verdict: A rich, imaginative epic of wonder and depravity."

12/10/06 - '''[http://www.sptimes.com/2006/12/10/Books/A_world_of_possibilit.shtml St. Petersburg Times]''' - Colette Bancroft: "Pynchon's novels are all about quests, and, with main characters bearing surnames like Traverse and Rideout, ''Against the Day'' is no different. The book has a cast of dozens wandering in and out of almost as many plot lines (and Pynchon acolytes are already busy annotating it; see against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com)."

12/10/06 - '''[http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/12/10/RVGFPMO15S1.DTL&type=books San Francisco Chronicle]''' - David Hellman: "''Against the Day'' is probably the most brilliant book most people will never read....Either enter the light of this book, and seek those dark corners where the answers may await, or run for the hills and take cover."

12/10/06 - '''[http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2102-2487609,00.html The Sunday Times (UK)]''' - John Dugdale: "''Against the Day'' resembles Moby Dick in its vast scale, its displays of learning, its engaging larkiness. But it’s a Moby Dick with no Ahab, and no whale."

12/10/06 - '''[http://washingtontimes.com/books/20061209-102724-5433r.htm Washington Times]''' - Bruce Allen: "And yet -- wonder of wonder, miracle of miracles -- a novel designed to demonstrate exhaustively that nothing ultimately coheres nevertheless manages to fuse its dozens of disparate, baffling, ragged elements into an imposing and satisfying whole. There's mystery for you."

12/9/06 - '''[http://www.denverpost.com/lifestyles/ci_4799969 Denver Post]''' - Dorman T. Shindler: "''Against the Day'' - funny, wise, poetic and always over-the-top - offers the reader both a way to lose him or herself in a tale of escape and a way to take a hard look anew at the world around us."

12/8/06 - '''[http://pynchonwiki.com/wiki/mp3/nytpynpod.mp3 New York Times podcast discussion of ATD, provided by Toby G. Levy]''' - a conversation with ''Times'' book critic Liesl Schillinger.

12/7/06 - '''[http://www.faz.net/s/Rub79A33397BE834406A5D2BFA87FD13913/Doc~EE48B15855A78439DA1BA2F70FE335DE9~ATpl~Ecommon~Scontent.html Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung]''' -Dietmar Dath: "Freiheit ist Vergangenheit."

12/7/06 - '''[http://www.villagevoice.com/books/0650,haskell,75247,10.html The Village Voice]''' - John Haskell: "The cloud of foreboding that hangs over this book is a fear, a Pynchonian paranoia, that the martial instincts of capitalism, having already corrupted Tesla's idea of free electricity, will come to control and limit the very act of thinking."

12/4/06 - '''[http://nymag.com/arts/books/reviews/24728/ New York Magazine]''' - Keith Gessen: "''Against the Day'' is exhausting, twisted, and paranoid. But that doesn’t mean Pynchon can’t also be fun."

12/4/06 - '''[http://www.newstatesman.com/200612040051 New Statesman (UK))]''' - Rachel Aspden: "The deluge of science can blind us to the fact that he is, temperamentally, a mystic rather than a technician. He writes ''Against the Day'', but seeks what lies beyond or under or above the quotidian."

12/3/06 - '''[http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20061203/1039371.asp Buffalo News]''' - Joseph Conte: " For the reader of this magnificent fiction, "travel to other worlds is therefore travel to alternate versions of the same Earth." The enjoyment, then, is determining which of all the possible versions one has blithely wandered into."

12/3/06 - '''[http://www.nypost.com/seven/12032006/entertainment/tom__duly_entertainment_quentin_rowan.htm New York Post]''' - Quentin Rowan: "Yet amid all the charms and expert entertainments and quizzical truths of ''Against the Day,'' there is little that sticks in the mind as involuntarily real, as having been other than intellectually achieved."

12/3/06 - '''[http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/entertainment/books/16147270.htm Miami Herald]''' - Ariel Gonzalez: "This is the sort of novel that is displayed on coffee tables by pseudo-intellectuals. But the water is warm enough to merit a toe-dipping, and who knows, you may then want to dive right in."

12/3/06 - '''[http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/entertainment/16134463.htm Kansas City Star]''' - Chris Packham: "...[W]ith Against the Day, Pynchon seems to be addressing the reader directly, without the evasive ironies of past work....With each successively more approachable novel, Pynchon suggests more hopeful possibilities. Or seems to."

12/2/06 - '''[http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20061202.BKPYNC02/TPStory/Entertainment The Globe and Mail (CA)]''' - Greg Hollingshead: "The development from ''Gravity's Rainbow'' to ''Against the Day'' has not been so much organic as a translation to another version, at another time. The result remains extraordinary, but it's at once darker and paler, and less substantial."

12/2/06 - '''[http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,923-2480352,00.html The Times (UK)]''' - Douglas Kennedy: "Certainly, Pynchon’s new novel displays, for all to see, his “lost in the funhouse” narrative proclivities, his intellectual super-nova fireworks and his delight in the arcane, the base, the idiotic."

12/06 - '''[http://contemporarylit.about.com/od/fiction/fr/againstTheDay.htm About.com]''' - Gregory Schneider: "It's...about innocence and experience, light and darkness, ignorance and clarity, love and indifference, serenity and despair, and the interchangeability, the maddening interdependence, of these concepts."

12/06 - '''[http://www.bookpage.com/0612bp/fiction/against_the_day.html BookPage]''' - Robert Weibezahl: "It is, at various points, everything one expects from a Thomas Pynchon novel—tangled, funny, prone to digressions, mind-numbingly convoluted, perceptive, over-the-top, louche, erudite, perplexing, heartfelt, encyclopedic, indulgent and, for the intrepid reader who makes it to the end, ultimately worth the often arduous journey."

12/1/06 - '''[http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/life/books/reviews/4372349.html Houston Chronicle]''' - Terrence Doody: "It is a messy omnium gatherum rather than the summa theologica that at least I was hoping for....Even Homer nods, they say, and Pynchon's gotten slack and sleepy here."

12/1/06 - '''[http://www.ft.com/cms/s/9415c2b4-8040-11db-9096-0000779e2340.html Financial Times (UK)]''' - Ludovic Hunter-Tilney: "There remains much to admire in the workings of his singularly brilliant literary consciousness, but the suspicion remains that Pynchon’s self-removal from public life now extends to the page."

12/1/06 - '''[http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15996230/site/newsweek/ Newsweek Pt. III]''' - Malcom Jones: "Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel is long, densely plotted, long, silly, profound, long—everything most modern novels aren’t—and yet it still works."

12/1/06 - '''[http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/bookreviews/061201/ Chicago Reader]''' - Jonathan Rosenbaum: "The momentary pleasures of reading ''Against the Day'' often come close to seeming random, and reconciling the book's larger aims with all the jazzy improvs is no easy matter -- though that's what Pynchon's game is all about."

12/06-1/07 - '''[http://www.bookforum.net/leclair.html Bookforum]''' - Tom LeClair: "I hope some future scholar will read the novel twenty times and
either illustrate how it recapitulates the whole history of narrative or demonstrate how every piece fits together into a fourfold design that will replace four-base genetics as a model of all life."

12/02/06 - '''[http://www.nzz.ch/2006/12/02/fe/articleEPLSF.html]''' - Angela Schader: "Höhere Mathematik und Kartoffelsalat. Thomas Pynchon schreibt einen Allerweltsroman - im wahrsten Sinn des Wortes"

11/30/06 - '''[http://nurtext.zeit.de/2006/49/KA-Mittelstueck]''' - Georg Diez: "Das Phantom."

11/30/06 - '''[http://www.economist.com/books/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=8348701 The Economist]''' : "Baffling, yes. Clever and inventive in a cackling, manic, mad-professor kind of way, yes. Intermittently warmed by paragraph-long sunbeams of iridescent prose-poetry, yes. Rambling, pompous and often completely incomprehensible—yes to all that too."

11/29/06 - '''[http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25339-2477997,00.html The Times Literary Supplement (UK)]''' - Sophie Ratcliffe: "This is not to say Pynchon suggests any solution. What he does is highlight how invisible our claims for salvation are, thus disturbing all the familiar comforts they might offer, including the comforts of the novel’s structure. This gets its clearest exposition in his handling of the relentlessly optimistic airborne crew at the novel’s end."

11/28/06 - '''[http://www.ew.com/ew/article/review/book/0,6115,1560896_5_0_,00.html Entertainment Weekly]''' - Ken Tucker: "Beyond his literary accomplishments, this wily 69-year-old's work has influenced, consciously or unconsciously, much of our pop culture, from ''Lost'' to ''The Matrix'' to ''Arrested Development'' to ''Lemony Snicket'' (for what are the Baudelaire children but grimmer Chums of Chance?)."

11/27/06 - '''[http://www.scifi.com/sfw/books/column/sfw14197.html Sci Fi Weekly]''' - John Clute: "The hundreds of figures who jam into ''Against the Day'' are not in fact characters at all, because Pynchon has evacuated his book of that degree of hope. They are ''utterands'': people-shaped utterances who illuminate the stories of the old world that their Author has placed before us in funeral array; they are codes to spell his book with."

11/26/06 - '''[http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20061126/news_mz1v26day.html San Diego Union-Tribune]''' - James Leigh: "Pynchon's books are hugely entertaining; they are also without question heroic attempts to deal with our whole world, and ''Against the Day'' may well be his best yet."

11/26/06 - '''[http://living.scotsman.com/books.cfm?id=1751072006 The Scotsman (UK), Scotland on Sunday]''' - Stuart Kelly: "It is, in places, a raggedy, meandering novel....You might as well complain that a Jackson Pollock painting is a bit splattery, or that Miles Davis sounds a little improvised."

11/26/06 - '''[http://www.projo.com/books/content/BOOK-PYNCHON_11-26-06_K02SPUI.2799ad7.html Providence Journal]''' - Sam Coale: "This is Pynchon’s nightmarish vision of hell, peopled by predatory capitalists, eager anarchists, and stray ghosts. Pynchon imagines a world run amuck. And it is awesome."

11/26/06 - '''[http://www.oregonlive.com/entertainment/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/entertainment/1164056114252360.xml&coll=7 The Oregonian]''' - Richard Melo: "With a writer as publicity-shy as Pynchon, there is no way if with this novel he is calling it a day. If he is, then he's going out with a bang louder than an obliterating asteroid screaming across the Siberian sky."

11/26/06 - '''[http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0,,1956983,00.html The Observer (UK)]''' - David Gale: "None of this detracts from the unique pleasures of a mighty novel that will delight Pynchonians and seduce newcomers....The scale of the novel induces memory loss but as with balloon flight, or fever, the return to terra firma is accompanied by feelings of wise, wide contentment."

11/26/06 - '''[http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/reviews/article2016608.ece The Independent (UK]''' - Tim Martin: "Against the Day is a startlingly discontinuous novel, a work of full-spectrum intelligence and erudition that is at times bafflingly tiresome and ungenerous to the reader....Something in it will mean something important to almost anybody. But the parts make a chaotic whole."

11/26/06 - '''[http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/books/review/Schillinger.t.html New York Times] (Sunday book review)''' - Liesl Schillinger: "In ''Against the Day,'' Pynchon’s voice seems uncharacteristically earnest. He interrupts his narrative from time to time to lay down pronouncements that, taken together, probably constitute the fullest elaboration of his philosophy yet seen in print."

11/26/06 - '''[http://www.faz.net/s/Rub79A33397BE834406A5D2BFA87FD13913/Doc~E6C145F0F3FBD4A3792D32580D3C22BFE~ATpl~Ecommon~Scontent.html]''' - Peter Körte: "der Mäandertaler".

11/25/06 - '''[http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0,,1956362,00.html The Guardian (UK)]''' - James Lasdun: "...the book itself has no particular reason to end where it does, other than perhaps the adhesive limits of book-binding glue."

11/25/06 - '''[http://living.scotsman.com/books.cfm?id=1746102006 The Scotsman]''' - Tom Adair: "...a gaze that holds you in its grip for a thousand pages. Quite a feat."

11/24/06 - '''[http://spectatorpynchon.blogspot.com/ The Spectator (UK)]''' - Sam Leith: "It is virtuoso nonsense; it is a giant shaggy dog story, serious as history; it is by turns mind-crushingly tedious and utterly exhilarating; it is remorselessly facetious and yet deeply moving."

11/24/06 - '''[http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=534435 Milwaukee Sentinel Journal]''' - Mike Fischer: "Ever since ''V.'' rocked the literary world in 1963, Pynchon has sought this crest with a single-minded intensity unmatched by any American writer since Melville. ''Against the Day,'' his brilliant new novel, gets him there."

23/11/06 - '''[http://www.nzz.ch/2006/11/23/fe/articleEOMOG.html]''' - Andrea Köhler: "Der Potter der Postmoderne. Thomas Pynchons neuer Roman stürzt die Kritiker in Verlegenheit"

11/23/06 - '''[http://www.metro.co.uk/metrolife/books/article.html?in_article_id=26438&in_page_id=28 Metro (UK)]''' - Robert Murphy: "...the novel is longer than even Pynchon's energies can justify but nonetheless, it is an unmistakable masterpiece."

11/22/06 - '''[http://www.thenation.com/doc/20061211/leonard/ The Nation]''' - John Leonard: "It's a Perils of Pauline plot as pulpy and fibrous, as gnarly and pantophagic, as a thicket of bamboo."

11/21/06 - '''[http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15841357/site/newsweek/ Newsweek Pt. II]''' - Malcom Jones: "Now halfway through, the reviewer knows the new Thomas Pynchon novel is full of doubles, an ocean liner that morphs into a destroyer and the kind of detail that's only fun if you slow down and enjoy it."

11/21/06 - '''[http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6393529.html Library Journal]''' - Barbara Hoffert: "Brilliant if sometimes exasperating, Pynchon's latest is highly recommended for any library that takes its fiction seriously, with the warning that it does not yield easy pleasures and should not be read on deadline."

11/21/06 - '''[http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/john_crace/2006/11/gravitys_author_just_got_heavi.html The Guardian/Comment Is Free (UK)]''' - John Crace: "You can read it or you can weigh it. My guess is that most people will opt for the latter."

11/21/06 - '''[http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/11/21/pynchon/index_np.html Salon]''' - Laura Miller: "[I]t's obvious [Pynchon's] disciples now write better Big Idea novels than he does."

11/20/06 - '''[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/11/20/nbook20.xml The Telegraph (UK)]''' - Alex Massie: "Although Pynchon's devoted fans, whose enthusiasm can border on the cultish, will queue up to embrace his latest work, some critics have wondered if Pynchon's exuberant style masks a lack of substance."

11/20/06 - '''[http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Nov06/Jacobs20.htm Dissident Voice'''] - Ron Jacobs: "Despite the bleakness of the times that these tales are told, an indomitable beauty resides within them, thanks in large part to the characters Mr. Pynchon creates, the stories that they live, and the approach to the telling by the author."

11/20/06 - '''[http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=ab6WLEn2ciGU&refer=muse Bloomberg News]''' - Craig Seligman: "...I felt like an exhausted swimmer crawling onto the far shore of a body of water that turned out to be even wider than it looked. And like the swimmer, I remember more about the effort than the scenery I passed along the way."

11/20/06 - '''[http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/reviews/2006-11-20-thomas-pynchon_x.htm USA Today]''' - Bob Minzesheimer: "Falling into a novel can be like enjoying a weekend trip to a place you've never been. Against the Day is more like going away for a month, getting lost on your way there and back, returning exhausted, but with bags full of stories."

11/20/06 - '''[http://www.themodernword.com/reviews/pynchon_atd.html The Modern Word]''' - Allen Ruch: "[F]or those willing to suspend disbelief and leave the ground behind, Pynchon’s great Inconvenience proves to be one hell of a ride."

11/20/06 - '''[http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/articles/061127crbo_books New Yorker]''' - Louis Menand: "[W]ith this one there is the feeling that the magician has fallen in love with his own stunts, as though Pynchon were composing a pastiche of a Pynchon novel."

11/20/06 - '''[http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/20/books/20kaku.html New York Times]''' - Michiko Kakutani: "It is a humongous, bloated jigsaw puzzle of a story, pretentious without being provocative, elliptical without being illuminating, complicated without being rewardingly complex." (Written by [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michiko_Kakutani Michiko Kakutani], so let the reader ''definitely'' beware!)

11/19/06 '''[http://www.tbo.com/entertainment/books/MGBPR0W8NUE.html Tampa Tribune]''' - Kevin Walker: "It's a complex, raunchy, funny, I-better-read-that-paragraph-again-what-just-happened sort of novel."

11/19/06 - '''[http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/entertainment/16037282.htm Philadelphia Inquirer]''' - Carlin Romano: "''Positive adjectives:'' Audacious, bodacious, entropic, synoptic, electric, eclectic, entertaining, hyperbraining, high-roller, tripolar. ''Negative adjectives:'' Rambling, shambling, self-indulgent, non-refulgent, overlong, full-of-bad-song, seriously scattered, plainly mad-hattered."

11/19/06 - '''[http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/cuyahoga/1163842776251970.xml&coll=2 Cleveland Plain-Dealer]''' - Jean Dubail: " All I can say is that the novel ends the way a Shakespearean comedy does, in which a measure of happiness redeems much of the horror and heartache that precede it. So, is the book worth the trouble? It was for me, but I'm a Pynchon fan, and bafflement comes with the territory."

11/19/06 - '''[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/16/AR2006111601252.html Washington Post]''' - Steven Moore: “Pynchon fans will accept this gift from the author with gratitude, but I’m not so sure about mainstream readers.”

11/19/06 - '''[http://www.calendarlive.com/books/bookreview/cl-bk-sorrentino19nov19,0,3649673.htmlstory?coll=cl-books-features Los Angeles Times]''' - Christopher Sorrentino: “A book this long that amazes even 50% of the time is amazing.”

11/19/06 - '''[http://www.statesman.com/life/content/life/stories/books/11/19/19pynchon.html Austin American-Statesman]''' - Roger Gathman: "Forget it, fellow Pynchonians. [Against the Day] isn’t “Gravity’s Rainbow II.” That time, that place and that writer won’t ever come together again.”

11/19/06 - '''[http://www.newsday.com/features/booksmags/ny-bkcov4977785nov19,0,7633389.story?coll=ny-bookreview-headlines Newsday]''' - Scott McLemee: "[A] novel as exhilarating, tiresome, unnerving and exhausting as all the others put together.”

11/19/06 - '''[http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2006/11/19/inspired_chaos/?page=full Boston Globe]''' - Mark Feeney: "There's a bop electricity to Pynchon: the furious tempos and difficult harmonies, the maverick stance and hipster attitude....[M]aybe another Pynchon novel? If one comes, let it be as rich and sweeping, wild and thrilling, as this one."

11/17/06 - '''[http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/artsentertainment/2003433850_pynchon19.html Seattle Times]''' - John Freeman: "It's like dropping a penny into an open manhole — the novel simply swallows the time and asks for more. And yet, Pynchon does reward the effort."

11/17/06 - '''[http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15771953/site/newsweek/ Newsweek Pt. I]''' - Malcom Jones: "But you’ve got to understand that this novelistic mountain we’re climbing, well, I’ve never been to the top either. Just a reminder. Stay tuned. Next time: are Thomas Pynchon and Bob Dylan the same person? "

11/16/06 - '''[http://www.timeout.com/newyork/Details.do?page=1&xyurl=xyl://TONYWebArticles1/581/books/against_the_day.xml Time Out New York]''' - Joshua Rothkopf: "Pynchon’s gift for language remains undiminished, a roiling, imaginative flood that makes his voice utterly unique, and his latest a must-read."

11/15/06 - '''[http://www.nysun.com/article/43545 New York Sun]''' - Adam Kirsch: "The silliness of "Against the Day" about the very subjects where we are most urgently in quest of wisdom proves that, whatever he once was, Thomas Pynchon is no longer the novelist we need."

11/14/06 - '''[http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/popus/pynchon.htm The Complete Review]''': "[I]mpressive in its parts, but near confounding as a whole."

11/14/06 - '''[http://www.thephoenix.com/article_ektid27434.aspx The Phoenix]''' - Peter Keough: “Undaunted in the past by the big questions that bug a guy, he here takes on, in addition to the elusive quality of light... time travel, multiple universes, the death struggle between anarchism and capitalism, the dance of order and chaos.”

11/13/06 - '''[http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1558326-1,00.html Time]''' - Richard Lacayo: “More than in any of Pynchon’s previous books, just what it all means is a problem in Against the Day, where plots and ideas and fantastic developments pile up in exhausting profusion.”

11/3/06 - '''[http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/paper_earlyatd.html The Modern Word]''' (first impressions): "It seems like the logical evolution/conclusion to Pynchon’s career as a prose experimentalist."

10/24/06 - '''[http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6384205.html?rssid=105 Publisher's Weekly]''': "[R]eads like half a dozen books duking it out for his, and the reader’s, attention. Most of them shine with a surreal incandescence, but even Pynchon fans may find their fealty tested now and again."

{{ATD Alpha Nav}}

W

2007-02-10T22:29:52Z

Bluetail:

'''Wackett Punches''' 
53; used to quiet cattle or horses

'''Wagwheel, Tansy''' 
178;

'''Waite, Arthur Edward (1857 - 1942)''' 
225; occultist and co-creator of the Rider-Waite Tarot deck. "This was notable for being one of the first decks to illustrate all 78 cards fully, as opposed to the 22 major arcana. Golden Dawn member Pamela Colman Smith illustrated the cards. The deck was first published in 1910." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Edward_Waite Wikipedia entry]

'''Walker, Foley''' 
31; special assistant to Scarsdale Vibe, "deputy of Wealth", 99; [[Substitute conscripts during the American Civil War|substitute conscript for Vibes during the Civil War]], subsequently taking a bullet to the head, which gives him the ability to hear "communications from far, far away," 100ff; 156; 330-333; "righteous men who believed it was God they heard whispering" 334; in Göttingen "the angel, if not of death at least of deep shit," 619;

There is a possible connection to playwright Christopher 'Kit' Marlowe (author of Dr Faustus) here, in that Chris 'Kit' Traverse makes a Faustian bargain with Vibe, via Foley Walker, Walker perhaps playing Mephistopheles to Vibe's Lucifer. There's also a hint of bilocation in Mephistopheles's claim to be simultaneously with Faustus and in Hell. Also, the three men present during the fight in which Marlowe was fatally stabbed were Ingram Frizer, Nicholas Skeres and Robert Poley, this last being not too far from 'Foley'. Also, among the sixteen jurors at the inquisition into Marlowe's death was one Adrian Walker. So, Poley and Walker, Foley Walker. Coincidence?

Coalhouse Walker is a character in E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime, a novel that overlaps with ATD in some time frames and in some themes.

'''Wall o' Death''' 
476; town in Missouri

[[image:Cycledrome.jpg|thumb|Cycledrome, aka Wall of Death|right]]'''Wall of Death''' 
184; The Wall of Death is a circus sideshow featuring a drum- or barrel-shaped wooden board wall around which stunt motorcyclists drive and carry out tricks. The audience views from the top of the drum looking down. The bikes start in the middle at the bottom of the drum and drive up an initial ramped section until they gain enough velocity to drive horizontal to the floor, defying gravity. this is a famous act in British society and is often scene in towns and fairs. In modern society there are only a few remaining tours of the wall of death, the most notable of which is [http://www.wall-of-death.co.uk "the wall of death world tour", created and run by the Fox family]. [http://thewallofdeath.com Wall of Death Website]

'''Wardenclyffe''' 
326; on Long Island, where Tesla built his Tower

'''Washoe process''' 
375;

'''Wave functions''' 
426; 536;

'''Waziri's from Waziristan''' 
23;

'''Weedon''' 
495; at Cambridge

'''Weierstrass, Karl (1815-1897)''' 
500; a German mathematician who is often cited as the "father of modern analysis"; Weierstrass functions, 594; [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Weierstrass Wikipedia entry]

'''Wells, Bulkley''' 
179; referred to as "Buck Wells" by Lew Basnight; "mine manager and cavalry commander at Telluride"; 279; 285; "Cap'n Wells"; Wells was the (real life) manager of Smuggler Mine c. 1911 [http://ftp.rootsweb.com/pub/usgenweb/co/sanmiguel/directories/1911-smuggler.txt]; the book, [http://www.spesindeopublications.com/corpse.html ''Corpse on Boomerang Road: Telluride's War on Labor, 1899-1908''] gives a lot more information on Wells and Bob Meldrum.

'''Wells, H. G.''' 
398; 407; 412; [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.g._wells Wikipedia entry]

'''Wensleydale''' 
37; confronts Baslight

'''Werfner, Dr.''' 
226; Renfrew's "opposite number"; 499; 602; 680; 719;

'''Western Reserve''' 
59; in Ohio

'''Whiskey Hill''' 
60; in Cleveland; 62;

'''Whistler''' 
578;

'''Whitechapel''' 
678; Whitechapel is a place in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, England. It is a built-up inner city district located 3.4 miles (5.5 km) east of Charing Cross and roughly bounded by the Bishopsgate thoroughfare on the west, Hanbury Street on the north, Brady Street and Cavell Street on the east and Commercial Road on the south. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_the_Ripper Jack the Ripper], the unidentified serial killer (or killers), was active in the largely impoverished Whitechapel area and adjacent districts of London in the latter half of 1888. The name "Jack the Ripper" is taken from a letter to the Central News Agency by someone claiming to be the murderer, published at the time of the killings; Rippercetta, 680; [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitechapel Wikipedia entry]]

'''White City, The''' 
[[Image:whitecity.jpg|thumb|The White City, Chicago, 1893|right]]3; Costing over a half billion in today's dollars and covering 686 acres, the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and Fair in Chicago was a grand sight to its 27 million visitors -- a planned layout of large, classically inspired buildings (what we now call the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaux-Arts_architecture Beaux Arts] style) all built on the same scale and all painted white -- hence, the nickname of "The White City." And within and around those white buildings was the most amazing display of 65,000 exhibits depicting (to quote the Exposition promoters) "all of the highest and best achievements of modern civilization; all that was strange, beautiful, artistic, and inspiring; a vast and wonderful university of the arts and sciences, teaching a noble lesson in history, art, science, discovery and invention, designed to stimulate the youth of this and future generations to greater and more heroic endeavor." 10; 36; Dally think about, in Chicago, 336; [http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1386.html More from the "Encyclopedia of Chicago"]

'''White City Investigations''' 
36;

'''Whitehall''' 
444; Whitehall is a road in Westminster in London, the capital of the United Kingdom. It is the main artery running north from Parliament Square, centre of national government, towards the traditional Charing Cross, now at the southern end of Trafalgar Square and marked by the statue of Charles I, which is often regarded as the heart of London for its residents and tourists. Along its way it is lined by many government ministries; "Whitehall" is therefore also frequently used as a metonym for governmental administration, as well as being a geographic name for the surrounding district; [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitehall Wikipedia entry]

'''White Wings''' 
150;

'''Whittaker, Edmund''' 
542; English mathematician;

'''Wilde, Oscar''' 
185; 536;[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Wilde Wikipedia entry]; Wilde's lecture tour of the USA in 1882 took him to Leadville; while there he was invited by the mayor to tour the Matchless silver mine and open their new lode. It was in a Leadville bar that Wilde saw the notice,
"Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leadville,_Colorado Wikipedia entry (Leadville)]

'''Wilhelm''' 
543;

'''Wilhelmstrausse''' 
686; 690;

'''Williams and Walker''' 
344; "coon review"; Bert Williams and George Walker, in the first decade of the twentieth century, became the most famous black entertainers in the world. They had teamed up in California in 1893, came to New York in 1896 as "Two Real Coons," and two years later were making a dance called the cakewalk all the rage. Williams and Walker, as they were then known, made American theatrical history by bringing the first black musical, In Dahomey, to Broadway in 1902.

'''Windy City''' 
3; aka Chicago the origins of the nickname are in dispute and they are explored in this [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windy_City%2C_Origin_of_Name_(Chicago) Wikipedia entry].

'''Wings''' 
"wings cast long shadows," "wing-flapping miracles of ornithurgy," 27; "White Wings," 150; "God's wing," 211; "wings moving against the moon like clouds," 379; 389;

'''Witherspoon Street''' 
159, in Princeton, NJ [[Witherspoon Street|DISCUSSION]]

'''Woevre, Piet''' 
540; formerly of the Force Publique; 558;

'''Wolf-Ferrari''' 
512;

'''Wordsworth''' 
535'

'''''Workers' Own Songbook''''' 
49; [[ Workers' Own Songbook|DISCUSSION ]]

'''World-Island''' 
"the Great Wife-Bazaar of the World-Island,'' 433; 445;
Pynchon's unique, it sems, way of naming the Earth, which makes everything
related to it, a kind of sea/navel happening metaphorically.

'''World-System''' 
33; Tesla's free power; [[Tesla's_World_System|Read Tesla's "World System of Wireless Transmission of Energy"]]

'''World War I''' 
578;

'''Wyman, Pap''' 
88; Owns the eponymous Pap Wyman's Saloon where Mayva is working when she meets Webb Traverse. Bartenders at the saloon are "Adolph" and "Ernst".

{{ATD_Alpha_Nav}}

ATD 243-272

2007-02-10T20:54:45Z

Bluetail: /* Page 259 */

:'''<big>Please keep these annotations SPOILER-FREE by not revealing information from later pages in the novel.</big>''' 

==Page 243==

'''The Chums return''' 
When were the Chums last seen in AtD? As far back as page 142?

A brief reminder of who the Chums are and what we know about them so far:
:'''Randolph St. Cosmo''', commander.
:'''Lindsay Nosegay''', Master-at-Arms (second in command), hates slackers and slang.
:'''Miles Blundell''', handyman, awkward, with an "ample waist" (11), also ship's Commissary, whose cooking ranges from pure cordon bleu to inedible. (110)
:'''Darby Suckling''', the baby of the crew, served "as both factotum and mascotte". By page 141 or so, has transformed from spirited youth to bomb obsessed, (111) sneering, snide cynic. Because of hitting adolescence?
:'''Chick Counterfly''', the newest member of the crew, picked up by the Chums in the South while on the run from the KKK. At last appearance, had become Dr. Counterfly, knowledgeable Science Officer aboard the Inconvenience (141). Reliably humorous. (110)

[[image:fumaioli.jpg|thumb|150px|Fumaioli in Venice|right]]'''''fumaioli''''' 
Italian: ''funnels''; fumaioli are large wide-topped chimneys, common to the rooftops of Venice.

'''''certo''''' 
sure, certain.

'''''Seccatura''''' 
Italian: ''Inconvenience''

==Page 244==

'''''ragazza''''' 
Italian: ''girl''.

'''Picardy thirds''' 
The use of a major chord at the end of a musical section in a minor key. Miles seems just as moved by them as Lew. [[ATD_26-56#Page_50 | Cf p50]]

The gondolier is singing harmony with himself, or else Miles is imagining the accompaniment.

'''''stabilimento''''' 
Italian: establishment.

==Page 245==
'''Garibaldi''' 
Famous Italian leader, major figure in the Italian Unification. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garibaldi Wikipedia]

'''''"Ehi, sugo!"''''' 
"Hey, sauce!" Does this make sense to anyone?
It does not make any sense in Italian.

'''twentyfold''' 
5 chums times 4 suspects each.

'''''osteria''''' 
tavern.

'''San Polo''' 
The smallest district/area in Venice, and among the oldest. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Polo Wikipedia]

'''''rio''''' 
narrow waterway in Venice.

'''''calli''''' 
Venetian 'street' or 'lane'.

==Page 246==

'''''sotoporteghi''''' 
passageways. See picture for one example [http://www.dialetto-veneto.it/images/FotoComano/Comano-Cattognano.jpg].

'''''"Sa stai, O! Lungo, ehi!"''''' 
It does not mean nothing in Italian nor in Venice dialect. Only possibility is to mimic the callouts of people faring gondolas. ''Lungo'' could be someone's nickname. 
Other possibility is a wrong lettering of: ''Xa star, oh! Lungo, ehi!'', meaning ''Ehi, Lungo, let it be and let's go!'' or something similar.

'''''cameriere''''' 
waitresses.

'''''pallonisti''''' 
ballonists.

'''''Ehi, macché, Pina! ''''' 
"Ehi, Giusep(Pina), what are you telling me?"

'''''giadrul''''' 
Doesn't mean anything neither in Italian nor in Venice dialect.

'''"with all the spaghetti-joints in this town to choose from, are you saying those dadblame Russians have come in ''here''?"''' 
reminiscent of a similar line from the film ''Casablanca'', spoken by Humphrey Bogart: "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine."

==Page 247==

'''tacchino''' 
turkey.

'''''Dum vivimus, bibamus''''' 
While we live, let us drink. Corruption of "Dum vivimus, vivamus".

'''vini frizzanti''' 
sparkling wine.

'''SANGUIS RUBER, MENS PURA''' 
Latin: Red blood, clean mind.

'''''Serrata del Maggior Consiglio''''' 
Great Council Lockout, 1297. Link to the "Maggior Consiglio" entry on Reference.com [http://www.reference.com/browse/all/Maggior%20Consiglio]

'''Napoleon's abolition''' 
1797. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doge_of_Venice Wikipedia]

'''Polos' return''' 
Marco Polo together with his father and uncle returned to Venice in 1295 from their travel to China started in 1271. 

''Marco Polo'' (1254-1324), a Venetian traveller. Was born of a nobel family at Venice, while his father and uncle had gone on a mercantile expedition by Constantinople and the Crimea to Bokhara and to Cathy (China). The Mongol prince commissioned them as envoys to the Pope, a commission they tried in vain to carry out in Italy (1269). The Polos started again a new trip to China in 1271, taking with them young Marco,
and arrived at the court of Kublai Khan in 1275 by way of Kashgar, Yarkand, and Khotan to Lop Nor, then across the Gobi desert to Kansu and Shang-tu. Marco Polo entered the diplomatic service of Kublai Khan and was sent on missions to various parts of the Mongol empire. The Polos left China on 1282 and returned by way of Sumatra, India, and Persia to Venice (1295). In 1298 Marco was in command of a galley at the battle of Curzola, where the Venetians were defeated by the Genoese, and he was a prisoner for a year at Genoa. Here it was thought that he dictated to another captive an account of his travels, published under the title of ''Divisamemt dou monde''. (English title: ''The Travels of Marco Polo''.) ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marco_Polo Marco Polo].)

''Kublai Khan'' (1214-94), Mongol khan, emperor of China, grandson of Jenghiz Khan. He completed the conquest of northern China and became the first foreigner ever to rule China. An enegetic prince, he suppressed his rivals, adopted the Chinese mode of civilisation, encouraged men of letters and made Buddhism the state religion. But his attempt to invade Janpan ended in disaster. His dominions extended from Arctic Ocean to the Strait of Malacca, and from Korea to Asia Minor and the confines of Hungary. The splendor of his court inspired the graphic pages of Marco Polo. (from Chambers Biographical Dictionary, 1984 edition.)

==Page 248==

'''''Attenzione al culo''''' 
Literally: "watch your ass."

[[image:doge.jpg|thumb|100px|Doge by Giovanni Bellini|right]]'''Doge's hat''' 
For some thousand years, the chief magistrate and leader of the Most Serene Republic of Venice was styled the Doge, a rare but not unique Italian title derived from the Latin Dux, as the major Italian parallel Duce and the English Duke. Doges of Venice were elected for life by the city-state's aristocracy. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doge_of_Venice Wikipedia entry]

'''Shambhala''' 
In Tibetan Buddhist tradition, Shambhala is a mystical kingdom hidden somewhere beyond the snowpeaks of the Himalayas. Shambhala is believed to be a society where all the inhabitants are enlightened. During the 19th century, Theosophical Society founder H.P. Blavatsky alluded to the Shambhala myth, giving it currency for Western occult enthusiasts. Later esoteric writers further emphasized and elaborated on the concept of a hidden land inhabited by a hidden mystic brotherhood whose members labor for the good of humanity. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shambhala Wikipedia entry]

'''an episode of intentional blindness''' 
Echoes the "denial of ordinary vision" that Lew sees when he meets Professor Renfrew (p. 240). Might these "blind spots" in sense evoke Iceland Spar?

==Page 249==

'''"Those whose enduring object is power in this world are only too happy to use without remorse the others, whose aim is of course to transcend all question of power. Each regards the other as a pack of deluded fools."''' 
Over time, Pynchon appears to have come to a belief in a massive conflict between cultures "valuing anaysis and differentiation" and those valuing "unity and integration". The two alternate maps of Asia could be a reference to these disparate worldviews.[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V. Wikipedia entry on V.]

'''The problem lies with the projection''' 
(a) Projection by each group of its own obsession onto the other group. (b) Cartographic projection, i.e., how the round world gets imaged onto a flat sheet of paper.

'''paramorphoscope''' 
AtD is itself a paramorphoscope; satire and science fiction typically hold up a distorting mirror to the world in which they are written, and present worlds "set to the side of the one we have taken". In the end the correct paramorphic "mirror" shows the world clearly.

'''the asylum on San Servolo''' 
First established as a military hospital in 1715, later became a mental asylum. Seems that San Servolo is to Venice what Bedlam is to London. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Servolo Wikipedia]

'''Clifford's term''' 
W.K. Clifford, (1845-1879): an English mathematician. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kingdon_Clifford Wikipedia]

==Page 250==

[[Image:stmarks.jpg|thumb|200px|right|St Mark's Basilica (Basilica di San Marco) in Venice]]
'''Dr. Cantor''' 
Georg Cantor (1845 - 1918), German mathematician. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor%27s_theorem Cantor's Theorem] is what is most relevant to his mention here.

'''the plano-convex designs of Griendl von Ach''' 
For a brief history of the compound-lens microscope, and the roles played by the Italians and the Dutch, including Griendl von Ach, see:
http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Microscope

'''prophetic vision of St. Mark''' 
Mark the Evangelist (1st century) is traditionally believed to be the author of the Gospel of Mark and a companion of Peter. From [http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/brown-venice.html this site]: "...a prophetic dream that Mark was said to have experienced during his earlier, supposed ministry in the area of the Venetian lagoon. In it he was visited by an angel who told him that he would find his final resting place on the very site where San Marco would later be built." In the first century there was no settlement worth mentioning in the Lagoon yet. The prophecy was "fulfilled" in 828 when the saint's remains stolen on orders of Doge Giustiniano Participazio in Alexandria were brought to Venice. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_the_Evangelist Wikipedia entry] St. Mark is represented by a winged lion and is the patron saint of Venice [http://www.catholic-forum.com/SAINTS/saintm08.htm].

'''''but in reverse''''' 
Miles now takes the place of the angel. Who or what is the "Being" and what form does the prophecy take?

'''neither sails, masts, nor oars''' 
???

==Page 251==

[[Image:stmarklion.jpg|thumb|600px|center|The Lion of St. Mark, by Carpaccio]]

'''Lion of St. Mark by Carpaccion''' 
Vittore Carpaccio (c.1460–1525/6) was a Venetian painter. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vittore_Carpaccio Wikipedia entry]

'''the vision of St. Mark, but in reverse''' 
In St. Mark's vision, an angel appeared to Mark and informed him that his remains would one day end up in his present location, which later became Venice. Here, Miles seems to assume the form of the angel (in the form of a lion?) and the 'promise' Pynchon mentions seems to be the angel's promise to Mark.

'''our own duty, our own fate... the real journey''' 
Pynchon's one-paragraph summation of human life and its meaning recalls a letter Pynchon wrote in the early 1960s, [[The_World_is_at_Fault|The World is at Fault]], in which he also summed up the entirety of human life in a few tidy sentences. Both employ the word 'pilgrimage.'

==Page 252==

'''''sotopòrteghi''''' 
Tunnels or passageways under large buildings.

'''Glagolitic''' 
The Glagolitic Alphabet is the oldest known Slavic alphabet (9th c.). It originated as a tactic to lessen the dependence of the subjects of the Prince of Greater Moravia on Frankish priests, who banned it but could not suppress it; it played a similar role in preserving Bulgarian independence from Byzantium. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic] It appears to be a nexus of the kind of simultaneous temporal and spiritual tasks the Chums of Chance are now involved in. In this, it raises the issues first explored by Pynchon in the "Tchitcherine in Kyrghizia" sections of ''Gravity's Rainbow'' in which the introduction of a written alphabet causes immense political and social change.

'''Gauloise''' 
famous French cigarette. See [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauloise Wikipedia].

'''''scusi''''' 
excuse me.

'''''Affascinante, caro''''' 
Fascinating, dear.

'''''ragazzo''''' 
boy.

'''''Mattoidi''''' 
Borderland cases between sanity and insanity.

'''''Prego''''' 
Please.

==Page 253==

'''Pozzuoli''' 
A city in the Province of Naples (''Napoli'') in the region of Campania. See [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pozzuoli Wikipedia].

'''''sfumato''''' 
It refers to a well known painting method which blends so subtly the colors and tones that no perceptible transition as demonstrated by Leonardo da Vince's ''Mona Lisa''. See [http://en/wikipedia.org/wiki/Sfumato Wikipedia].
The context seems to imply ''smoke'', then '''''fumo''''' instead should be used.

==Page 254==

'''''Pax tibi''''' 
Peace to you.

'''like some damned ''Farewell'' Symphony''' 
Franz Josef Haydn, 1772, Hungary. Musicians at Count Esterházy's court had been kept too long on duty (and away from their families). Going on strike would have been disrespectful, so in the last movement of Haydn's hinting work, the players one by one extinguish their candles and exit, leaving two violins to play the last phrases.

'''"Chums of Chance were expected to die on the job. Or else live forever, there being two schools of thought, actually."''' 
Possibly a reference to the fact that the Chums seem to live simultaneously in the "real" world of the novel and also in fictional stories within the novel.

==Page 255==

'''Mostruccio''' 
Literally ''small monster'', meant as a lovely nickname

[[Image:samoyeds.jpg|thumb|150px|right|Samoyeds]]
'''Samoyeds''' 
These nomadic reindeer herders help with the herding, pull sleds, and are sometimes called "the smiley dog" in reference to their seemingly smiling faces. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samoyed_(dog) Wikipedia]

'''Bastille Day''' 
The Campanile di San Marco collapsed 14 July 1902. Pynchon Wiki on the [[Campanile]].

'''''lasagnoni''''' 
Lasagnone = blowhard, braggart

A hint may come from an Italian dictionary: a lasagnone being an akward, simple person, the kind of loafers who abound on city squares or street corners and which, consequently, may appear on tourists' pictures.

==Page 256==
[[Image:Campanile.jpg|thumb|200px|right]]

'''dual citizenship''' 
They live in two places, there are two skycraft, they point a gun at one place but the shell strikes a different place. Lots of '''bi-''' somethings in this passage.

'''four-brick groupings''' 
Padzhitnoff sees the Campanile come apart as a game of Tetris! The "four-brick groupings [...] begin their gentle, undeadly descent, rotating and translating in all available modes". (See [[ATD_119-148|page 123]] for more on Tetris.)

'''the tower collapses''' 
Might have some relation to the final poem of ''Gravity's Rainbow''.

==Page 257==

'''deciduous''' 
Something that falls, drops or is shed, like leaves from a tree or baby teeth.

'''neuræsthenic prostration''' 
This is the third (at least) time Randolph has exhibited this tendency.

==Page 258==

'''Tetralith''' 
Modern math term for three dimensional solid formed by merging three hyperbolic paraboloids in a manner that they have a common midpoint. See [http://www.tetranometry.com/#tetralith Tetralith Photo #2]. Pynchon just means a Tetris-shaped projectile, a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetromino Tetromino].

'''Japanese character for "four" being same as that for "death"''' 
Not quite correct. The Japanese characters for four 四 and death 死 are quite distinct, but can be pronounced in the same way, hence the taboo.

'''Ryohei Uchida''' 
Ultra-nationalist, founder of the Black Dragon Soceity (see below), a right-wing, paramilitary organization. See [http://members.tripod.com/ravenshrine/uchida.html Ryohei Uchida].

'''''polny pizdets''''' 
sad state of affairs.

Crude Russian: a total screwup.

'''Black Dragon Society''' 
A paramiltary, ultra-nationalist, right-wing organization in Japan founded by Ryohei Uchida in 1901. Its initial public goal was to support Janpanese expansion in Manchuria. Therefore, during the period from 1901 to the end of World War I, it aimed to help the Japanese government drive the Russian presence out of that region. During the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 (a war fought over Manchuria, with the Russians soundly defeated) it was active in espionage, sabotage and assassination against the Russians. During the 20's, 30's and later periods the Black Dragon Society evolved and expanded its activities around the world, including the United States. It was finally disbanded in 1946 by General MacArthur after World War II. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kokuryu-kai Wikipedia entry].

'''''Smirno''''' 
Russian: quiet!

==Page 259==

'''''dov'era, com'era''''' 
where it was, as it was. See [http://veniceblog.typepad.com/veniceblog/2003/12/comera_dovera.html veniceblog]. On July 14, 1902 the St. Mark's Campanile in Piazza San Marco, Venice, mysteriously and totally collapsed. Under the 'battle cry' of '''''com'era, dov'era''''' it was rebuilt. The Campanile was reopened on April 25 (St. Mark's Day) 1912. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Mark's_Campanile Wikipedia]. Also, Cf p.255.

''''La Marangona''''' 
The largest bell in the campanile is called la Marangona. At midnight, that massive bell resounds alone from high in the Piazza, and can be heard from almost any point in the city. There are four other bells in the campanile and they each have a name.

==Page 260==

'''Deuce and Sloat return''' 
These two, it will be recalled, are the men hired by the mine owners to kill Webb Traverse. (193) It is unclear who is whose sidekick. ([[ATD_171-198#Page_195|195]]) Sloat tends to bodies, Deuce the spirit. ([[ATD_171-198#Page_197|197]])

'''Curly Dee''' 
Mathematicians call the "partial derivative" symbol "curly d." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_derivative Wikipedia shows the symbol.]

'''inside out''' 
Optical illusion.

==Page 261==

'''Mayva and Lake''' 
Webb Traverse's wife and daughter.

'''lard smoke''' 
Cf. p. 10, "tall smokestacks unceasingly vomiting black grease-smoke," and p. 216, "Just greasy ashes by the trailside."

'''biscuit-shooter''' 
I.e., a cook.

'''Cañon City''' 
Site of the Colorado State Penitentiary, meant to suggest Deuce and Sloat had done time there.

'''gong''' 
???
17:18, 1 January 2007 (PST)[[User:Bklyn48|Bklyn48]]

==Page 262==

'''Willis Turnstone''' 
???

==Page 263==

'''"Crazier."''' 
Cf Bonnie and Clyde.

'''Oleander Prudge''' 
???

==Page 264==

'''single-jacker''' 
A miner who with a hammer and spike cuts a hole into rock for placement of a stick of dynamite. A set of holes are cut for each "synchronized" blast.
(Double jackers work as a team.)
Infer (this) one as a loner, a bit crazy, single minded, silent, easily hurt or misunderstood, doesn't play well with others...

==Page 265==

'''gullet of days''' 
???

==Page 266==

'''white-throated swift''' 
A swift is a small plainly colored bird similar to a swallow. The [http://identify.whatbird.com/obj/187/_/White-throated_Swift.aspx white-throated species,] which breeds in the western U.S. and winters in Mexico, is less plain than some. And get the species name: '''''Aeronaut'''es saxatalis.''

'''November''' 
November 1903.

'''nymph du pave''' 
should probably read "nymphE du pave": [http://dict.die.net/nymphe%20du%20pave/ street-whore]. Theoretically this could also translate as: (image of a) nymph on a mosaic (tesselated floor) - like the huge roman one of Ariadne in the Rue du Pavé in Avenche (Switzerland) [http://www.stub.unibe.ch/welten/texte/herzig.html german weblink]

'''geometric episode''' 
Vaguely reminiscent of Proust on Combray: "And on one of the longest walks we ever took from Combray there was a spot where the narrow road emerged suddenly on to an immense plain, closed at the horizon by strips of forest over which rose and stood alone the fine point of Saint-Hilaire's steeple, but so sharpened and so pink that it seemed to be no more than sketched on the sky by the finger-nail of a painter anxious to give to such a landscape, to so pure a piece of 'nature,' this little sign of art, this single indication of human existence." [http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/8swnn10.txt etext]

'''Engelmann spruce''' 
[http://www.cnr.vt.edu/dendro/dendrology/syllabus/factsheet.cfm?ID=175 Picea engelmannii] A short biography of Dr. Engelmann (lit. Angel-Man) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Engelmann Wikipedia-Entry], more elaborated on [http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Engelmann german site]

'''albatross cloth''' 
Evidently a distinct color/design for a wedding or wedding party dress in the West at the time. I have no OED at the moment, but there are at least two online "diaries" or descriptions using the phrase. Here is one: "We were married August 6, 1896 at 7:30 AM at my folk’s residence among friends and relatives. To honor the event, my folks had our parlor decorated with many flowers including roses, myrtle and geraniums. I wore an elegant gown of white silk and albatross cloth."

==Page 267==

'''Jemt-land''' 
A Province in the center of Sweden [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A4mtland Wikipedia]

==Page 268==

'''side hobbles''' 
???

==Page 269==

'''items, nearly always stolen''' 
Cf bower-bird.

'''marmot''' 
A stout-bodied, short-legged rodent that has coarse fur, a short bushy tail, and very short ears, lives in burrows, and hibernates in winter; also: a prairie dog or one of the larger ground squirrels. Marmots are native to Colorado and live at the higher altitudes. They are about the size of a weasel.

'''''"huevón"''''' 
From hueva (egg). According to [http://juantornoe.blogs.com/hispanictrending/2004/06/huevon_and_guey.html this blog] huevon "literally refers to the size of a mans "cojones" (another pseudo decent word that has seen a lot of mainstream play). It is commonly used to indicate how lazy someone is. The bigger the "huevon" you are, the lazier. As with "guey", however, this too has often been used to say dude or buddy."

'''''pinche cabron''''' 
fucking asshole.

==Page 271==

'''skip''' 
A wagon or basket on a track in a mine, or generally any scooter.

'''ex-Danite''' 
Danites were Joseph Smith's vigilantes, "Armies of Israel", during the Mormon War 1838 in Missouri, i.e., before travel to Utah.

'''"Avenging Angels"''' 
Brigham Young's group with similar purpose as Danite above, sometimes called Danites as well.

==Page 272==

'''the Delores''' 
Dolores River runs through Cortez (where Deuce seems to be, next to exploding cactus p270). "We woke up in the Dolores... [VALLEY/REGION/HOTEL]"

==Annotation Index==
{{ATD PbP}}

ATD 243-272

2007-02-10T20:38:43Z

Bluetail: /* Page 255 */

:'''<big>Please keep these annotations SPOILER-FREE by not revealing information from later pages in the novel.</big>''' 

==Page 243==

'''The Chums return''' 
When were the Chums last seen in AtD? As far back as page 142?

A brief reminder of who the Chums are and what we know about them so far:
:'''Randolph St. Cosmo''', commander.
:'''Lindsay Nosegay''', Master-at-Arms (second in command), hates slackers and slang.
:'''Miles Blundell''', handyman, awkward, with an "ample waist" (11), also ship's Commissary, whose cooking ranges from pure cordon bleu to inedible. (110)
:'''Darby Suckling''', the baby of the crew, served "as both factotum and mascotte". By page 141 or so, has transformed from spirited youth to bomb obsessed, (111) sneering, snide cynic. Because of hitting adolescence?
:'''Chick Counterfly''', the newest member of the crew, picked up by the Chums in the South while on the run from the KKK. At last appearance, had become Dr. Counterfly, knowledgeable Science Officer aboard the Inconvenience (141). Reliably humorous. (110)

[[image:fumaioli.jpg|thumb|150px|Fumaioli in Venice|right]]'''''fumaioli''''' 
Italian: ''funnels''; fumaioli are large wide-topped chimneys, common to the rooftops of Venice.

'''''certo''''' 
sure, certain.

'''''Seccatura''''' 
Italian: ''Inconvenience''

==Page 244==

'''''ragazza''''' 
Italian: ''girl''.

'''Picardy thirds''' 
The use of a major chord at the end of a musical section in a minor key. Miles seems just as moved by them as Lew. [[ATD_26-56#Page_50 | Cf p50]]

The gondolier is singing harmony with himself, or else Miles is imagining the accompaniment.

'''''stabilimento''''' 
Italian: establishment.

==Page 245==
'''Garibaldi''' 
Famous Italian leader, major figure in the Italian Unification. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garibaldi Wikipedia]

'''''"Ehi, sugo!"''''' 
"Hey, sauce!" Does this make sense to anyone?
It does not make any sense in Italian.

'''twentyfold''' 
5 chums times 4 suspects each.

'''''osteria''''' 
tavern.

'''San Polo''' 
The smallest district/area in Venice, and among the oldest. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Polo Wikipedia]

'''''rio''''' 
narrow waterway in Venice.

'''''calli''''' 
Venetian 'street' or 'lane'.

==Page 246==

'''''sotoporteghi''''' 
passageways. See picture for one example [http://www.dialetto-veneto.it/images/FotoComano/Comano-Cattognano.jpg].

'''''"Sa stai, O! Lungo, ehi!"''''' 
It does not mean nothing in Italian nor in Venice dialect. Only possibility is to mimic the callouts of people faring gondolas. ''Lungo'' could be someone's nickname. 
Other possibility is a wrong lettering of: ''Xa star, oh! Lungo, ehi!'', meaning ''Ehi, Lungo, let it be and let's go!'' or something similar.

'''''cameriere''''' 
waitresses.

'''''pallonisti''''' 
ballonists.

'''''Ehi, macché, Pina! ''''' 
"Ehi, Giusep(Pina), what are you telling me?"

'''''giadrul''''' 
Doesn't mean anything neither in Italian nor in Venice dialect.

'''"with all the spaghetti-joints in this town to choose from, are you saying those dadblame Russians have come in ''here''?"''' 
reminiscent of a similar line from the film ''Casablanca'', spoken by Humphrey Bogart: "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine."

==Page 247==

'''tacchino''' 
turkey.

'''''Dum vivimus, bibamus''''' 
While we live, let us drink. Corruption of "Dum vivimus, vivamus".

'''vini frizzanti''' 
sparkling wine.

'''SANGUIS RUBER, MENS PURA''' 
Latin: Red blood, clean mind.

'''''Serrata del Maggior Consiglio''''' 
Great Council Lockout, 1297. Link to the "Maggior Consiglio" entry on Reference.com [http://www.reference.com/browse/all/Maggior%20Consiglio]

'''Napoleon's abolition''' 
1797. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doge_of_Venice Wikipedia]

'''Polos' return''' 
Marco Polo together with his father and uncle returned to Venice in 1295 from their travel to China started in 1271. 

''Marco Polo'' (1254-1324), a Venetian traveller. Was born of a nobel family at Venice, while his father and uncle had gone on a mercantile expedition by Constantinople and the Crimea to Bokhara and to Cathy (China). The Mongol prince commissioned them as envoys to the Pope, a commission they tried in vain to carry out in Italy (1269). The Polos started again a new trip to China in 1271, taking with them young Marco,
and arrived at the court of Kublai Khan in 1275 by way of Kashgar, Yarkand, and Khotan to Lop Nor, then across the Gobi desert to Kansu and Shang-tu. Marco Polo entered the diplomatic service of Kublai Khan and was sent on missions to various parts of the Mongol empire. The Polos left China on 1282 and returned by way of Sumatra, India, and Persia to Venice (1295). In 1298 Marco was in command of a galley at the battle of Curzola, where the Venetians were defeated by the Genoese, and he was a prisoner for a year at Genoa. Here it was thought that he dictated to another captive an account of his travels, published under the title of ''Divisamemt dou monde''. (English title: ''The Travels of Marco Polo''.) ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marco_Polo Marco Polo].)

''Kublai Khan'' (1214-94), Mongol khan, emperor of China, grandson of Jenghiz Khan. He completed the conquest of northern China and became the first foreigner ever to rule China. An enegetic prince, he suppressed his rivals, adopted the Chinese mode of civilisation, encouraged men of letters and made Buddhism the state religion. But his attempt to invade Janpan ended in disaster. His dominions extended from Arctic Ocean to the Strait of Malacca, and from Korea to Asia Minor and the confines of Hungary. The splendor of his court inspired the graphic pages of Marco Polo. (from Chambers Biographical Dictionary, 1984 edition.)

==Page 248==

'''''Attenzione al culo''''' 
Literally: "watch your ass."

[[image:doge.jpg|thumb|100px|Doge by Giovanni Bellini|right]]'''Doge's hat''' 
For some thousand years, the chief magistrate and leader of the Most Serene Republic of Venice was styled the Doge, a rare but not unique Italian title derived from the Latin Dux, as the major Italian parallel Duce and the English Duke. Doges of Venice were elected for life by the city-state's aristocracy. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doge_of_Venice Wikipedia entry]

'''Shambhala''' 
In Tibetan Buddhist tradition, Shambhala is a mystical kingdom hidden somewhere beyond the snowpeaks of the Himalayas. Shambhala is believed to be a society where all the inhabitants are enlightened. During the 19th century, Theosophical Society founder H.P. Blavatsky alluded to the Shambhala myth, giving it currency for Western occult enthusiasts. Later esoteric writers further emphasized and elaborated on the concept of a hidden land inhabited by a hidden mystic brotherhood whose members labor for the good of humanity. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shambhala Wikipedia entry]

'''an episode of intentional blindness''' 
Echoes the "denial of ordinary vision" that Lew sees when he meets Professor Renfrew (p. 240). Might these "blind spots" in sense evoke Iceland Spar?

==Page 249==

'''"Those whose enduring object is power in this world are only too happy to use without remorse the others, whose aim is of course to transcend all question of power. Each regards the other as a pack of deluded fools."''' 
Over time, Pynchon appears to have come to a belief in a massive conflict between cultures "valuing anaysis and differentiation" and those valuing "unity and integration". The two alternate maps of Asia could be a reference to these disparate worldviews.[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V. Wikipedia entry on V.]

'''The problem lies with the projection''' 
(a) Projection by each group of its own obsession onto the other group. (b) Cartographic projection, i.e., how the round world gets imaged onto a flat sheet of paper.

'''paramorphoscope''' 
AtD is itself a paramorphoscope; satire and science fiction typically hold up a distorting mirror to the world in which they are written, and present worlds "set to the side of the one we have taken". In the end the correct paramorphic "mirror" shows the world clearly.

'''the asylum on San Servolo''' 
First established as a military hospital in 1715, later became a mental asylum. Seems that San Servolo is to Venice what Bedlam is to London. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Servolo Wikipedia]

'''Clifford's term''' 
W.K. Clifford, (1845-1879): an English mathematician. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kingdon_Clifford Wikipedia]

==Page 250==

[[Image:stmarks.jpg|thumb|200px|right|St Mark's Basilica (Basilica di San Marco) in Venice]]
'''Dr. Cantor''' 
Georg Cantor (1845 - 1918), German mathematician. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor%27s_theorem Cantor's Theorem] is what is most relevant to his mention here.

'''the plano-convex designs of Griendl von Ach''' 
For a brief history of the compound-lens microscope, and the roles played by the Italians and the Dutch, including Griendl von Ach, see:
http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Microscope

'''prophetic vision of St. Mark''' 
Mark the Evangelist (1st century) is traditionally believed to be the author of the Gospel of Mark and a companion of Peter. From [http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/brown-venice.html this site]: "...a prophetic dream that Mark was said to have experienced during his earlier, supposed ministry in the area of the Venetian lagoon. In it he was visited by an angel who told him that he would find his final resting place on the very site where San Marco would later be built." In the first century there was no settlement worth mentioning in the Lagoon yet. The prophecy was "fulfilled" in 828 when the saint's remains stolen on orders of Doge Giustiniano Participazio in Alexandria were brought to Venice. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_the_Evangelist Wikipedia entry] St. Mark is represented by a winged lion and is the patron saint of Venice [http://www.catholic-forum.com/SAINTS/saintm08.htm].

'''''but in reverse''''' 
Miles now takes the place of the angel. Who or what is the "Being" and what form does the prophecy take?

'''neither sails, masts, nor oars''' 
???

==Page 251==

[[Image:stmarklion.jpg|thumb|600px|center|The Lion of St. Mark, by Carpaccio]]

'''Lion of St. Mark by Carpaccion''' 
Vittore Carpaccio (c.1460–1525/6) was a Venetian painter. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vittore_Carpaccio Wikipedia entry]

'''the vision of St. Mark, but in reverse''' 
In St. Mark's vision, an angel appeared to Mark and informed him that his remains would one day end up in his present location, which later became Venice. Here, Miles seems to assume the form of the angel (in the form of a lion?) and the 'promise' Pynchon mentions seems to be the angel's promise to Mark.

'''our own duty, our own fate... the real journey''' 
Pynchon's one-paragraph summation of human life and its meaning recalls a letter Pynchon wrote in the early 1960s, [[The_World_is_at_Fault|The World is at Fault]], in which he also summed up the entirety of human life in a few tidy sentences. Both employ the word 'pilgrimage.'

==Page 252==

'''''sotopòrteghi''''' 
Tunnels or passageways under large buildings.

'''Glagolitic''' 
The Glagolitic Alphabet is the oldest known Slavic alphabet (9th c.). It originated as a tactic to lessen the dependence of the subjects of the Prince of Greater Moravia on Frankish priests, who banned it but could not suppress it; it played a similar role in preserving Bulgarian independence from Byzantium. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic] It appears to be a nexus of the kind of simultaneous temporal and spiritual tasks the Chums of Chance are now involved in. In this, it raises the issues first explored by Pynchon in the "Tchitcherine in Kyrghizia" sections of ''Gravity's Rainbow'' in which the introduction of a written alphabet causes immense political and social change.

'''Gauloise''' 
famous French cigarette. See [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauloise Wikipedia].

'''''scusi''''' 
excuse me.

'''''Affascinante, caro''''' 
Fascinating, dear.

'''''ragazzo''''' 
boy.

'''''Mattoidi''''' 
Borderland cases between sanity and insanity.

'''''Prego''''' 
Please.

==Page 253==

'''Pozzuoli''' 
A city in the Province of Naples (''Napoli'') in the region of Campania. See [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pozzuoli Wikipedia].

'''''sfumato''''' 
It refers to a well known painting method which blends so subtly the colors and tones that no perceptible transition as demonstrated by Leonardo da Vince's ''Mona Lisa''. See [http://en/wikipedia.org/wiki/Sfumato Wikipedia].
The context seems to imply ''smoke'', then '''''fumo''''' instead should be used.

==Page 254==

'''''Pax tibi''''' 
Peace to you.

'''like some damned ''Farewell'' Symphony''' 
Franz Josef Haydn, 1772, Hungary. Musicians at Count Esterházy's court had been kept too long on duty (and away from their families). Going on strike would have been disrespectful, so in the last movement of Haydn's hinting work, the players one by one extinguish their candles and exit, leaving two violins to play the last phrases.

'''"Chums of Chance were expected to die on the job. Or else live forever, there being two schools of thought, actually."''' 
Possibly a reference to the fact that the Chums seem to live simultaneously in the "real" world of the novel and also in fictional stories within the novel.

==Page 255==

'''Mostruccio''' 
Literally ''small monster'', meant as a lovely nickname

[[Image:samoyeds.jpg|thumb|150px|right|Samoyeds]]
'''Samoyeds''' 
These nomadic reindeer herders help with the herding, pull sleds, and are sometimes called "the smiley dog" in reference to their seemingly smiling faces. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samoyed_(dog) Wikipedia]

'''Bastille Day''' 
The Campanile di San Marco collapsed 14 July 1902. Pynchon Wiki on the [[Campanile]].

'''''lasagnoni''''' 
Lasagnone = blowhard, braggart

A hint may come from an Italian dictionary: a lasagnone being an akward, simple person, the kind of loafers who abound on city squares or street corners and which, consequently, may appear on tourists' pictures.

==Page 256==
[[Image:Campanile.jpg|thumb|200px|right]]

'''dual citizenship''' 
They live in two places, there are two skycraft, they point a gun at one place but the shell strikes a different place. Lots of '''bi-''' somethings in this passage.

'''four-brick groupings''' 
Padzhitnoff sees the Campanile come apart as a game of Tetris! The "four-brick groupings [...] begin their gentle, undeadly descent, rotating and translating in all available modes". (See [[ATD_119-148|page 123]] for more on Tetris.)

'''the tower collapses''' 
Might have some relation to the final poem of ''Gravity's Rainbow''.

==Page 257==

'''deciduous''' 
Something that falls, drops or is shed, like leaves from a tree or baby teeth.

'''neuræsthenic prostration''' 
This is the third (at least) time Randolph has exhibited this tendency.

==Page 258==

'''Tetralith''' 
Modern math term for three dimensional solid formed by merging three hyperbolic paraboloids in a manner that they have a common midpoint. See [http://www.tetranometry.com/#tetralith Tetralith Photo #2]. Pynchon just means a Tetris-shaped projectile, a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetromino Tetromino].

'''Japanese character for "four" being same as that for "death"''' 
Not quite correct. The Japanese characters for four 四 and death 死 are quite distinct, but can be pronounced in the same way, hence the taboo.

'''Ryohei Uchida''' 
Ultra-nationalist, founder of the Black Dragon Soceity (see below), a right-wing, paramilitary organization. See [http://members.tripod.com/ravenshrine/uchida.html Ryohei Uchida].

'''''polny pizdets''''' 
sad state of affairs.

Crude Russian: a total screwup.

'''Black Dragon Society''' 
A paramiltary, ultra-nationalist, right-wing organization in Japan founded by Ryohei Uchida in 1901. Its initial public goal was to support Janpanese expansion in Manchuria. Therefore, during the period from 1901 to the end of World War I, it aimed to help the Japanese government drive the Russian presence out of that region. During the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 (a war fought over Manchuria, with the Russians soundly defeated) it was active in espionage, sabotage and assassination against the Russians. During the 20's, 30's and later periods the Black Dragon Society evolved and expanded its activities around the world, including the United States. It was finally disbanded in 1946 by General MacArthur after World War II. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kokuryu-kai Wikipedia entry].

'''''Smirno''''' 
Russian: quiet!

==Page 259==

'''''dov'era, com'era''''' 
where it was, as it was. See [http://veniceblog.typepad.com/veniceblog/2003/12/comera_dovera.html veniceblog]. On July 14, 1902 the St. Mark's Campanile in Piazza San Marco, Venice, mysteriously and totally collapsed. Under the 'battle cry' of '''''com'era, dov'era''''' it was rebuilt. The Campanile was reopened on April 25 (St. Mark's Day) 1912. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Mark's_Campanile Wikipedia]. Also, Cf p.255.

==Page 260==

'''Deuce and Sloat return''' 
These two, it will be recalled, are the men hired by the mine owners to kill Webb Traverse. (193) It is unclear who is whose sidekick. ([[ATD_171-198#Page_195|195]]) Sloat tends to bodies, Deuce the spirit. ([[ATD_171-198#Page_197|197]])

'''Curly Dee''' 
Mathematicians call the "partial derivative" symbol "curly d." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_derivative Wikipedia shows the symbol.]

'''inside out''' 
Optical illusion.

==Page 261==

'''Mayva and Lake''' 
Webb Traverse's wife and daughter.

'''lard smoke''' 
Cf. p. 10, "tall smokestacks unceasingly vomiting black grease-smoke," and p. 216, "Just greasy ashes by the trailside."

'''biscuit-shooter''' 
I.e., a cook.

'''Cañon City''' 
Site of the Colorado State Penitentiary, meant to suggest Deuce and Sloat had done time there.

'''gong''' 
???
17:18, 1 January 2007 (PST)[[User:Bklyn48|Bklyn48]]

==Page 262==

'''Willis Turnstone''' 
???

==Page 263==

'''"Crazier."''' 
Cf Bonnie and Clyde.

'''Oleander Prudge''' 
???

==Page 264==

'''single-jacker''' 
A miner who with a hammer and spike cuts a hole into rock for placement of a stick of dynamite. A set of holes are cut for each "synchronized" blast.
(Double jackers work as a team.)
Infer (this) one as a loner, a bit crazy, single minded, silent, easily hurt or misunderstood, doesn't play well with others...

==Page 265==

'''gullet of days''' 
???

==Page 266==

'''white-throated swift''' 
A swift is a small plainly colored bird similar to a swallow. The [http://identify.whatbird.com/obj/187/_/White-throated_Swift.aspx white-throated species,] which breeds in the western U.S. and winters in Mexico, is less plain than some. And get the species name: '''''Aeronaut'''es saxatalis.''

'''November''' 
November 1903.

'''nymph du pave''' 
should probably read "nymphE du pave": [http://dict.die.net/nymphe%20du%20pave/ street-whore]. Theoretically this could also translate as: (image of a) nymph on a mosaic (tesselated floor) - like the huge roman one of Ariadne in the Rue du Pavé in Avenche (Switzerland) [http://www.stub.unibe.ch/welten/texte/herzig.html german weblink]

'''geometric episode''' 
Vaguely reminiscent of Proust on Combray: "And on one of the longest walks we ever took from Combray there was a spot where the narrow road emerged suddenly on to an immense plain, closed at the horizon by strips of forest over which rose and stood alone the fine point of Saint-Hilaire's steeple, but so sharpened and so pink that it seemed to be no more than sketched on the sky by the finger-nail of a painter anxious to give to such a landscape, to so pure a piece of 'nature,' this little sign of art, this single indication of human existence." [http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/8swnn10.txt etext]

'''Engelmann spruce''' 
[http://www.cnr.vt.edu/dendro/dendrology/syllabus/factsheet.cfm?ID=175 Picea engelmannii] A short biography of Dr. Engelmann (lit. Angel-Man) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Engelmann Wikipedia-Entry], more elaborated on [http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Engelmann german site]

'''albatross cloth''' 
Evidently a distinct color/design for a wedding or wedding party dress in the West at the time. I have no OED at the moment, but there are at least two online "diaries" or descriptions using the phrase. Here is one: "We were married August 6, 1896 at 7:30 AM at my folk’s residence among friends and relatives. To honor the event, my folks had our parlor decorated with many flowers including roses, myrtle and geraniums. I wore an elegant gown of white silk and albatross cloth."

==Page 267==

'''Jemt-land''' 
A Province in the center of Sweden [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A4mtland Wikipedia]

==Page 268==

'''side hobbles''' 
???

==Page 269==

'''items, nearly always stolen''' 
Cf bower-bird.

'''marmot''' 
A stout-bodied, short-legged rodent that has coarse fur, a short bushy tail, and very short ears, lives in burrows, and hibernates in winter; also: a prairie dog or one of the larger ground squirrels. Marmots are native to Colorado and live at the higher altitudes. They are about the size of a weasel.

'''''"huevón"''''' 
From hueva (egg). According to [http://juantornoe.blogs.com/hispanictrending/2004/06/huevon_and_guey.html this blog] huevon "literally refers to the size of a mans "cojones" (another pseudo decent word that has seen a lot of mainstream play). It is commonly used to indicate how lazy someone is. The bigger the "huevon" you are, the lazier. As with "guey", however, this too has often been used to say dude or buddy."

'''''pinche cabron''''' 
fucking asshole.

==Page 271==

'''skip''' 
A wagon or basket on a track in a mine, or generally any scooter.

'''ex-Danite''' 
Danites were Joseph Smith's vigilantes, "Armies of Israel", during the Mormon War 1838 in Missouri, i.e., before travel to Utah.

'''"Avenging Angels"''' 
Brigham Young's group with similar purpose as Danite above, sometimes called Danites as well.

==Page 272==

'''the Delores''' 
Dolores River runs through Cortez (where Deuce seems to be, next to exploding cactus p270). "We woke up in the Dolores... [VALLEY/REGION/HOTEL]"

==Annotation Index==
{{ATD PbP}}