Thomas Pynchon Wiki - User contributions [en]

ATD 588-614

2009-02-02T12:59:55Z

Imehling: /* Page 605 */

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

==Page 588==

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

'''Gottlob''' 
Literally "praise to God", as an exclamation also "Thank God!". Though it is rare, it is a real German name. 
Very much so: for example of mathematician/philospher Gottlob Frege, who did study at Göttingen, but not at this time.

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

'''Gauss's brain''' 
After Carl Friedrich Gauss died in 1855, his brain was preserved for research purposes. To this day, it is in the possession of the University of Göttingen. Cf [[ATD_489-524#Page 498|page 498:Gauss]].

'''impervious to the wind''' 
(Attribute of tanned leather?)

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

'''It is she, she!''' 
probably an allusion to H. Rider Haggard's She. See Wikipedia entry. She has been purified by a pillar of fire. In ''Against the day'', she rises from the swamp. Carl Jung, who used the novel ''She'' (1887) as an example of anima, posited the anima is an archetypical form, expressing the fact that a man has a minority of female genes. Haggard's Queen Ayesha is an unmistakable anima type the ultimate guide and mediator to the inner world. The idea has also connections with the observations of James Frazer in his classical study ''The Golden Bough''. Haggard's idea of a journey into the "darkest Africa," which turns into a spiritual search, has been used by a number of writers, including Joseph Conrad in ''Heart of Darkness'' (1902). 
"My empire is of thy imagination", She says in the novel, "She". Cf. a line, [which I am checking] in "The Crying of Lot 49".

She is 'discovered' somewhere in unknown Africa by some British 'explorers' in a hidden kingdom, and she first appears in a sort of late 19th century private boudoir there. She came to that place via a complicated story some 2000 years earlier, and is of Yemenite origin, having come to the world in pretty much the normal fashion. Yashmeen seems indeed to be based on some fin-de-siecle imaginations of the 'ideal' woman (her looks in general, and the often mentioned streaming black hair of hers), but unlike Haggard's She, Yashmeen is rather powerless in the long run, despite her obvious erotic influence on the men and women in ATD. - Tommaso

:Powerless is a term worth lots of discussion here. [User: MKOHUT]

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

'''Kovalevskaia''' 
Sofia Kovalevskaia, 1850-1891. Russian mathematician, in 1884 appointed professor in Stockholm. The third female professor in Europe ever. Cf [[ATD_489-524#Page 500|page 500:Sofia Kovalevskaia]] and (Wikipedia)

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

'''''natürlich''''' 
German: naturally.

==Page 589==

'''Those curves are everywhere continuous but nowhere differentiable''' 
This is exactly a description of a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weierstrass_function Weierstrass function] (1872), a pathological example of a real-valued function on the real line. This function was cited on page 594 by Yashmeen as one of the crises in mathermatics. Also see [http://mathworld.wolfram.com/WeierstrassFunction.html Weierstrass function from MathWorld] and Cf [[ATD_489-524#Page 500|page 500:Karl Weierstrass]].

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

:If a curve is nowhere differentiable then there will be no tangents anywhere. The curve is everywhere ''untouchable''.

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

or, in the immortal words of MC Hammer; "You can't touch this"

'''And is that a revolver you're carrying''' 
Implying, perhaps, an unvocalized "or are you just happy to see me?" Which would be in accord with Kit's reaction to the sight of a woman wearing a toque.

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

==Page 590==

'''Hadamard... Poussin... Prime Number Theorem''' 
Hadamard and Poussin independently proved the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_number_theorem prime number theorem] in 1896, relying on Riemann's Zeta function.

[http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Hadamard.html Jacques Hadamard] (1865-1963), a French mathematician best known for his proof of the Prime Number Theorem in 1896.

[http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Vallee_Poussin.html de la Vallée Poissin] (1866-1962), a Belgian mathematician best known for his proof (independently) of the Prime Number Theorem and his major work ''Cours d'Analyse''.

'''patent ''Kühlbox''''' 
''Kühlbox'' here just means "icebox" or "cooler." Refrigerators were available at the time of the action but not widely used, so an icebox is more likely. It's upstairs in Kit's room, so not necessarily portable.

"Patent," attached to a noun like [[ATD_429-459#Page_457|leather or pencil,]] could mean really, officially patented ''or'' novel and gimmicky. Patent medicines are sold under protected names but not genuine patents in most cases. So the icebox features some radical or distinctive design. My money's on asbestos insulation between the zinc sheets.

[http://www.dhm.de/datenbank/index.html?/datenbank/rb00/rb000891.html Pic of a ca. 1920 Eiskiste-model]. According to German Wikipedia, the mobile "Eiskiste" (icebox) had to be filled with (natural) ice, while its successor, the Kühlbox, worked/works with "Kühlaggregate" (cooling units). The contributor is not sure if suchlike were around at that time. German Wikipedia on [http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiskiste Eiskiste] and [http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BChlbox Kühlbox].

'''beleaguered subset''' 
a group (from the whole) under attack

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

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

:It seems the Prime Number Theorem says something about π(n)(ln n)/n approaches a limit as n increases indefinitely. π (n) is the number of primes.

==Page 591==

'''prats''' 
Literally the buttocks. As a slang term, a 'prat' is an [[Idiots and Idiocy in Against the Day|idiot]].

'''''Die Nullstellen der ζ-Funktion''''' 
German: the zeroes of the ζ function. (Null = zero; Stelle = location.) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_zeta_function#Zeros_of_the_Riemann_zeta_function Wikipedia] on the "Zeros of the Riemann zeta-function".

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

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

'''seldom, if ever''' 
Cf p559 re Umeki!?

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

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

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

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

==Page 592==

'''upside-down triangles''' 
Also Pléiade p538. In mathematics that would be the operator ''del'' [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Del Wikipedia]. Since pre-history and across most cultures the upside-down triangle is a symbol for the female (genitals).

Florian Cajori's ''A History of Mathematical Notations'' (v.2 p.135) states that the del (aka Hamiltonian operator) was introduced by William Hamilton in his 1853 lecture on Quaternions. Rumour has it that it is supposed to be a drawing of an ancient Hebrew harp (nabla). It is also known as the atled (backword delta).

This in turn suggests (within the context of AtD (atled??) a reversal of time or a mirror image of change.

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

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

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

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

[Not sure about the "chums" idea, but more confusion between public and private space on pg. 155 -- Hunter Penhallow leaving the ruined city, presumably in a time machine: "At some point he must have come indoors, entering a sort of open courtyard....Without intending to, he was walking through inhabited rooms."]

'''Weenderstrasse '''
The main shopping street in Göttingen.

'''Prinzenstrasse and Weenderstrasse''' 
A street corner at the very center of Göttingen ([http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=g%C3%B6ttingen,+germany&ie=UTF8&om=1&z=17&ll=51.534284,9.935417&spn=0.006107,0.010793&t=h Google Maps]), "known to mathematicians here as the origin of the city of Göttingen's coordinate system". 
The intersection of these two streets is colloquial called "the navel". For visitors it is not that spectacular, but it's the number one meeting point for people who live in Göttingen before going to a cafe or pub. (I don't know, why we allways meet there, but we allways do!) So Pynchon definitley knows, why he compares this street corner with the origin of Göttingen's coordinate system. 
By the way, one of the oldest bookstores of Göttingen is situated right at the described corner of Prinzen- and Weenderstrasse.

==Page 593==

'''twenty marks''' 
A mark is short for deutschemark, a German monetary unit. 
That was the case after the Second World War, but the unit was just called the mark until at least the end of the empire. [http://www.thegoldcoinstore.com/WorldGold/German_Gold_20_Marks_Kaizer_Wilhelm_II.php Here] is a picture of a 20 mark coin from the period of the action.

'''''der Pistolenheld''''' 
German: the pistol hero. Meaning: the gunman. 'Pistolenheld' seems rather funny, the correct German word is: der Revolverheld.

'''automorphic functions and the Anharmonic Pencil''' 
[http://mathworld.wolfram.com/AutomorphicFunction.html Automorphic Functions] are generalizations of trigonometric functions and elliptic functions.

Anharmonic Pencil see [[ATD_525-556#Page 532|page 532:Anharmonic Pencil]].

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

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

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

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

'''Felix Klein''' 
[http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Klein.html Felix Klein] (1849-1925), a German mathematician, best known for his work in non-Euclidean goemetry, for his work on the connections between geometry and group theory, and for results in function theory. Cf [[ATD_557-587#Page 565|page 565:Felix Klein]].

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

'''Leopold Kronecker''' and '''Cantor''' 
[http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Kronecker.html Leopold Kronecker] (1823-1891), a German mathematician, primary contributions were in the theory of equations. He made major contributions in elliptic functions and the theory of algebraic numbers.

[http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Cantor.html Georg Cantor] (1845-1918), a German mathematician. He founded set theory and introduced the concept of infinite numbers with his discovery of cardinal numbers. He also advanced the study of trigonometric series. (Cf [[ATD_243-272#Page 250|page 250:Dr. Cantor]]).

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

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

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

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

:That last paragraph makes an excellent point.

'''the square root of minus one''' 
The imaginary number ''i''. Cf [[ATD_119-148#Page 133|page 133:Imarginary Number]].

'''the square root of ''plus two''' 
From Carl B. Boyer's ''A History of Mathematics'', 2nd Ed. 1991, pp.564 & 565): 
The domain of rational numbers can be extended to form a continuum of real numbers if one assumes Cantor-Dedekind axiom that the points on a line can be put into one-to-one correspondence with the real numbers. "Arithmetically expressed, this means that for every division of the rational numbers into two classes A and B such that every number of the first class, A, is less than every number of the second class, B, there is one and only one real number producing this ''Schnitt'', or . . . cut. If A has a largest number, or if B contains a smallest number, the cut defines a rational number; but if A has no largest number and B no smallest, then the cut defines an irrational number. If, for example, we put in A all negative rational numbers and also all positive rational numbers whose squares are less than 2, and in B all positive rational numbers whose squares are more than 2, we have subdivided the entire field of rational numbers in a manner defining an irrational number—in this case the number that we usually write as" ''suqare root of 2''. In fact, the squae root of ''plus two'' "can be defined simply as that segment or subclass of the set of rational numbers made up of all positive rational numbers whose squares are less than 2 and also of all negative rational numbers." —— This is what Kronecker did not believe.

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

==Page 594==

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

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

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

'''chloral hydrate''' 
A/k/a "knockout drops" a/k/a a "Mickey Finn". Hence the ''Mickifest''. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chloral_hydrate Wikipedia entry].

'''''Kneipe''''' 
German: pub

'''Gauss passing to Weber a remark''' 
Carl Friedrich Gauss (Gauß) (30 April 1777 – 23 February 1855) was a German mathematician and scientist of profound genius who contributed significantly to many fields, including number theory, analysis, differential geometry, geodesy, magnetism, astronomy and optics. Sometimes known as "the prince of mathematicians" and "greatest mathematician since antiquity", Gauss had a remarkable influence in many fields of mathematics and science and is ranked as one of history's most influential mathematicians. (Cf [[ATD_489-524#Page 498|page 498:Gauss]].)

That influence is seen in the field of statistics where the Gaussian distribution (also known as the normal distribution, popularly known as the bell curve) is named after him. With its ability to correctly model "psychological measurements and physical phenomena" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution] and its resemblance to both the rainbow and the rocket's arc, there's no surprise Pynchon references it often in GR, even having Roger Mexico quote the formula as "an old saying among my people" (p.709).

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Eduard_Weber Wilhelm Weber] (1804-91), a noted German physicist. He studied magnetism with Gauss and in 1831, on the recommendation of Gauss, he was appointed as professor of physics at Göttingen. And in 1833 Gauss and Weber constructed the first electromagnetic telegraph. The SI unit of magnetic flux, the ''weber'', is named after him.

In 1831 Gauss developed a fruitful collaboration with the physics professor Wilhelm Weber; it led to new knowledge in the field of magnetism (including finding a representation for the unit of magnetism in terms of mass, length and time) and the discovery of Kirchhoff's circuit laws in electricity. Gauss and Weber constructed the first electromagnetic telegraph in 1833, which connected the observatory with the institute for physics in Göttingen. Gauss ordered a magnetic observatory to be built in the garden of the observatory and with Weber founded the magnetischer Verein ("magnetic club"), which supported measurements of earth's magnetic field in many regions of the world. He developed a method of measuring the horizontal intensity of the magnetic field which has been in use well into the second half of the 20th century and worked out the mathematical theory for separating the inner (core and crust) and outer (magnetospheric) sources of Earth's magnetic field

'''Göttingen . . . in the war with Prussia''' 
This refers to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austro-Prussian_war Austro-Prussian War], (also called Seven Weeks' War), June 15–August 23, 1866, between Prussia, allied with Italy, and Austria, allied with Bavaria, Wüttemberg, Saxony (where Göttingen is located), Hanover, Baden and several other smaller German states. It was Bismarck's aim to expel, by force, Austria from the German Confederation as a step toward the unification of Germany under Prussian dominace.
:Göttingen is in Saxony now (specifically the state of ''Niedersachsen'' or Lower Saxony), but until 1866 it was an important city in the Kingdom of Hanover.

'''political crisis in Europe''' 
The period of 1870 to 1914 was characterized by the Anglo-German naval race and European powers - Germany, Italy, Belgium, Britain and France - scrambled for Africa. The major events in Europe were: 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian War; 1905 Russian Revolution; 1908 Bosnia Crisis; 1911-12 Italian Turkish War; 1912-13 Balkan War; 1914 World War I began.

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

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

==Page 595==

'''That winter, in St. Petersburg . . . Hundreds were killed and wounded.''' 
22 Jan 1905, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Sunday_%281905%29 Bloody Sunday]. 

The event on January 22, 1905, ''Bloody Sunday'', was a watershed in the Russian history. 
Russia's armies were losing to the Japanese in the Far East. Her workers at home were challenging the rule of Romanov's Autocracy. At the beginning of 1905, the worker of ''Putilov Works'' of St. Petersburg, the capital of Russia, went on stike for better living and working conditions. They were joined by many from other factories. Father Gapon, a priest, urged the striking workers to present directly to the Tsar on January 22, 1905 a petition to seek justice and protection. They would beg Nicholas II to come to their aid. The morning of January 22 was very cold (about five degrees below freezing) and some 200,000 workers and their wives and children came peacefully and orderly carrying icons, portraits of Nicholas, and no revolutionary placards not even red handkerchiefs. To stop the workers' march upon the Palace Square barracades were set across several avenues that connected to the city center. At each of these points, soldiers tried to turn back the marchers and, at several of them, officers ordered to fire into the crowds. The worst slaughter took place on the Winter Palace Square itself, between 150 and 200 men, women, and children lay shot dead and another 450 to 800 had been wounded while the Cossacks charged into the dispersing crowds with sabers drawn. 
Bloody Sunday, as that tragic day soon became known, marked the beginning of what the Tsar's mother called the "year of nightmares", and the beginning of what many others called the "year of revolution". (Based on W. Bruce Lincoln's ''Romanovs'' (1981)).

'''Grand Duke Sergei''' 
Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich Romanov (1857-1905) was the uncle and brother-in-law of Tsar Nicholas II (1868-1918, Reign: 1894-1917). In 1891 he was appointed as Moscow Governor General. In 1894 he also was a member of the State Council. He resigned from the Governorship on January 1, 1905 but continued as Commander of the Moscow military district. In the afternoon of February 17, 1905, in a carriage leaving the Kremlin Grand Duke Sergei was killed by a nitroglycerine bomb thrown by a Socialist Revolutionary terrorist directly into his lap. He was literally blown to bits and pieces. The assassination of Grand Duke Sergei signaled the beginning of a broader wave of popular unrest that had been sparked by the events of Bloody Sunday and swept the whole nation. Many more assassinations, strikes, disorders and uprisings followed during the year.
(Grand Duke Sergei's replacement, Shurvalov, was assassinated on July 11 of the same year.)

'''More strikes . . . peasant and military insurections . . . into the summer''' 
In January-February, turbulent reaction to Bloody Sunday spread across neighboring regions, especially the industrial centers which experienced spontaneous workers' strikes: Vilno, Kovno, Kiev, Moscow were paralyzed. In February-March the labor unrests reached Saratov Province and the Caucasus, and Siberia. Labor unrests were persistent throughout Russia into August. In early March university students left their classrooms, and at the end of the month the authorities closed down all the universities throughout the whole country for the rest of the academic year. (Student unrest even reached Orthodox seminaries.) 
In March, peasant unrests erupted widely, especially in Kursk, and Chernigov and Orel provinces and northwest regions of European Russia. In June, the Battleship ''Potemkin'' mutinied and in the Black Sea port city Odessa there was a large scale uprising by the sailors, soldiers, workers and ordinary citizens. On June 28 afternoon hundreds of protesters were killed on the Odessa Steps which was immortalized by the classic movie sequence in the 1925 Eisenstein's [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Batlleship_Potemkin ''The Battleship Potemkin''] (considered by some one of the greatest films of all time). In summer widespread peasants' attacks on landowners' estates dramatically increased throughout Russia. The Peasant Union was organized at a secret August 13-14 Moscow conference.

'''Kronstadt''' 
Kronstadt was a naval fortress in the Gulf of Finland 18 miles west of St. Petersburg. Following the destruction of the Baltic Fleet by the Japanese in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05) (Cf [[ATD_318-335#Page 318|page 318: The Russo-Japanese War]]) Kronstadt joined the general uprising which swept the whole Russian country. The first Kronstadt uprising on November 8-9, 1905, participated in by the majority of Kronstadt's 13,000 sailors and soldiers, was basically a large armed riot accompanied by liberal political demands. It lasted only two days. Kronstadt's second uprising took place in July 1906 but was brutally suppressed.

'''Sebastopol''' 
A port city of Russia (now, Sevastopol of Ukrain), located on the Black Sea coast of the Crimean peninsula west of Yalta. Sebastopol was associated with rebellion, mutiny and civil war. 
On June 27, 1905 the battleship ''Potemkin'' sailed from Sebastopol to Odessa and to mutiny against the ship's oppressive officers. The mutineers killed seven of the eighteen officers, including the Captain and the Second in Command. The ship eventually sailed to Romania and turned over to the authority there on July 7. (Sergei Eisenstein's ''The Battlehip Potemkin'' made her famous well beyond Russia.) 
On October 1, 1905, citizen of Sebastopol and sailors from the Black Fleet demonstrated in the city center demanding the authority to free political presoners, etc, but were met with gun fire. Wide spread unrest and naval mutinies followed. In November the cruiser ''Ochakov'' led a rebellion joined by several other warships. The rebellion was eventually suppressed by a stronger government force a couple of months later.

'''Black Hundreds''' 
Anti-Semitic vigilantes.

The name was a derogatory one, adapted from the term "White Hundreds", which was used in medieval Russia for the privileged caste of nobles and wealthy merchants. The lower-class types who joined the Black Hundreds were not in this class hence their ironic nomenclature. It was formed in response to the October Manifesto by those who had either lost or were afraid of losing their petty status in the social hierachy as a result of modernization and reform. They blamed the Jews as the ultimate cuase for Tsar's retreat. Fighting revolution in the streets was their way of revenging themselves, a means of putting the clock back and restoring the social and racial hierarchy. (Based on Orlando Figes' ''A People's Tragedy'' (1996))

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

By January 1905 the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo_Japanese_War Russo-Japanese War (1904-05)] had been going on in Manchuria for nearly a year. In the summer of 1904, the Russia's Pacific Fleet was bottled up inside Port Arthur (now, Lüshun, Liaoning, China) and the port was under siege as from August. In October, the Tsar sent the entire Baltic Fleet to relief the siege. At the beginning of 1905, Port Arthur finally fell after a siege and bombardment lasted 156 days. In March 1905 Russia and Japan fought the greatest land battle in the history up to then at Mukden (Shenyang, Liaoning). Each side committed more than 300,000 troops and over 1,000 pieces of artillery. After nearly one month's fighting both lost more than 50,000 killed and wounded, but the Russians withrew 40 miles to the north. After streaming halfway around the world in a grueling voyage of many months without adequate logistic support, on May 27 the Russian fleet met the waiting Japanese (under Admiral Togo) in the Tsuhsima Straits that separated Japan and Korea. The [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tsushima Battle of Tsushima Straits (May 27-28)] was one of the most decisive naval battles in history. Even though the Russians had more ships and more heavy guns, but within a few hours, they lost 8 battleships, 3 cruisers, 5 minelayers and 4 other ships. Four more battleship surrendered next day, and the Russian commanding admiral (Admiral Rozhdestvenskii) was also captured. The Japanese lost only a total of 3 torpedo boats. (Based on W. Bruce Lincoln's ''Romanovs'' (1981)). 
After two months' negotiation, the Russo-Japanese War officially ended with the signing of the Peace Treaty of Porstmouth (New Hampshire) on September 5, 1905.

'''A general strike in the autumn . . .''' 
In late September a printer's trike in Moscow was in progress for over a fortnight. By October 18 it seemed that the strike was losing steam. But on October 20 railroad workers struck the Moscow-Kazan Railway and the strike spread outward along all the railroad lines: to St Petersburg in the west, to Voronesh and Kharkov in the south; and by October 23 it had reached Siberia. Twenty-six thougsand miles of track were immobilized as 750,000 railroad employees struck. At this time much of European Russia was in the grip of one of the greatest and most effective general strikes in the history of labor protest anywhere in the world. All of Russia's industry ground to a halt, everyone stopped work. Factory workers, servants, postal workers, telegraph operatiors, janitors, and hackney drivers all walked off their wjobs, as did bank clerks, shop clerks, and clerks in government office. Doctors, laywers, shcoolteachers, university professors, even the entire corps de ballet of the great Imperaial Mariinskii Theatre—all joined the strike. There were no newspapers, no streetlights, no tramcars . . . As all rail traffic stopped and telegraph line dead, Russia was isolated from the rest of the world. At the same time, the revolutionary groups organized a new body for coordinating the activities of the striking workers and for expressing their joint political and economic demands: the "St. Petersburg
''Soviet'' of Workers' Deputies". Many other Soviets were set up and developed later as alternate governing organizations. The name and organization ''Soviet'' (Russian word ''Sovet'' means council) took on a legendary meaning from then on and became historical. 
With the regime on the verge of collapse, in response, the Tsar, advised by the Prime Minister, issued the famouse ''October Manifesto'' on October 30, 1905, by which Nicholas granted to all Russian civil rights, agreed to summon a Duma (Parliament) elected by wide (though not universal) suffrage, and agreed that all laws must be approved by the Duma. In the meantime, on December 16, troops were sent to arrest some three hundred members of the St. Petersburg Soviet of Workers' Deputies. The Revolution of 1905 in the Capital passed into history.

'''In December . . . another major uprising''' 
In Moscow, the Soviet of Workers' Deputeis proclaimed a general strike for December 20. When the authorities moved to arrest the stike leaders, an armed uprising broke out. Barricades went up in workers' quarter of the city, and revolutionaries from St. Petersburg, Odessa, and elsewhere joined in the struggle. Nicholas dispatched elite troops with artillery which reduced the rebels' area to ruins. By December 31, the rebellion in Moscow was over. The number of killed and wounded totaled over a thousand.

'''In the East . . . up and down the railroad lines''' 
The Russo-Japanese War was officially ended with the signing of the Treaty of Portsmouth on August 23, 1905. In late summer there were numerous minor mutinies by troop returning from Manchuria on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Fighting between the left and the right erupted on October 20 around Tomsk. On November 12, mutinous soldiers and sailors destroyed much of Vladivostok on the Pacific coast, the end of the Trans-Siberian. There were unrests and prisings in Chita (November 29), Irkutsk (December 13), and Novorossiisk (December 22) as well.

'''Muslim rebellion''' 
The downfall of the Ottoman Empire by Turkey?

:No. In this whole paragraph Pynchon only factually describes the events in Russia and the Russian 1905 Revolution.

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

:The text said "'''''a''''' Muslim rebellion". Anyone knows this 1905 Muslim Rebellion in Russia?

'''the year that followed . . . Russians everywhere''' 
The well-known 1905 Revolution in Russian history was the beginning of the fall of the ''Old Regime''. The text "as the Revolution went collapsing" refered exactly to this one, not the February and October Revolutions in 1917. So "the year that followed" refered to 1906. In fact, Pynchon explicitly stated on page 602: "''By 1906'' there were Russians everywhere, . . ."

Soon after the collapse of the 1905 Revolution many Russians emmigrated abroad. They were 1) opponents to the Tsar regime feared of reprisal and backlash; 2) intelligentsia who were frightened by what just happened and afraid of a more violent upheaval in the future (Maxim Gorky, the writer, left Russia in the spring of 1906); 3) Jews, the victims of the large scale pogroms in 1905-06 (1964 Broadway musical ''Fiddler on the Roof'' told the story of how one Jewish family being forced to leave Russia in 1906); 4) youngsters who escaped the compulsory millitary service or looked for a quieter place for education. This was the second wave (1905-1917) of Russian emmigration. (1st wave: 1880-1905; 3rd: 1917-1939; 4th: 1945-1960; 5th: 1991-current).

'''as the Revolution went collapsing''' 
The first paragraph of this page is a factual description of the revolutionary events occured in Russia in 1905 which wwere later collectively called [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Revolution_of_1905 1905 Revolution]. It was the foreshock of that of 1917. It had all of Russia in its grip, and its outbreak had not been planned; it had simply grown spontaneously. It failed under the usual combination of repression and concessions. (see Richard Pipes' ''The Russian Revolution'' (1990)). In Soviet Marxist history 1905 Revolution is second only in importance to 1917 October Revolution, one of the most important revolutionary iconic events. (The 1917 Frebruary Revolution, the one actually overthrew the Tsar's Regime, was lightly mentioned because it was considered a ''bourgeois revolution''.) Numerous books, songs, poems, films . . . had been devoted to this Revolution. To the west the most memorable are the Eisenstein's silent film ''Battleship Potmekin'' (1925) and Shostakovich's ''Symphony No 11: The year 1905'' (1957).

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

'''kazatsky''' 
A Cossack dance, stereotypical Russian behavior.

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

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

:Worth noting, perhaps, that Yashmeen came from Russia and had been ''transported'' to Waziristan for sale as a slave.

==Page 596==

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

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

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

'''. . . the Revolution''' 
Russian 1905 Revolution.

'''...it all finds its way back to the T.W.I.T. people....'''

"and what comes out of their shop can surprisingly often be trusted"

Suggestive of the CIA's Stargate Project in Remote Viewing

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

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

'''Afghani dirhan''' 
An Afghani coin, more usually transliterated as "dirham". [http://ghaznavid.ancients.info/ This site] has pictures and more information.

'''Ghaznivid Empire''' 
Usually transliterated as [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghaznavid_Empire Ghaznavid Empire] (Wikipedia)

'''coffee scion''' 
Coffee motif. More likely: coffee heir.

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

'''less than universally respected Ludwig Boltzmann''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Boltzmann Boltzmann] proposed an explanation of thermodynamics based on the statistical behaviour of atoms. Many influential colleagues at the time did not believe in the reality of atoms and thus worked to discredit Boltzmann.

==Page 597==

'''Gymnasium child''' 
A Gymnasium is a German secondary school

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

'''one measure of the chaos''' 
Cf. p. 188, where Neville and Nigel are referred to as "the N's," and to the proliferation of N name in T.W.I.T. in general.

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

One of Pynchon's central themes and best depicted in The Crying of Lot 49 which can be read as a satire on the order of crime novels and a comment on the central order of narrative structures. Certainly ATD can be read as a vast extension on this theme. The chaos/ order binary has already been a introduced a couple of lines above.

Humfried's comment reiterates something Pynchon says in his essay 'Is it O.K. to be a Luddite?', in virtually the same words.

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

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

'''Rathaus square''' 
The square in front of City Hall.

==Page 598==

'''Axioms of Zermelo''' 
The basic axioms of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zermelo-Frankel_set_theory#The_axioms Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory].

'''Poincaré''' 
Henri Poincaré (1854-1912), one of France's greatest mathermaticians and theorectical physicists. ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Poincar%C3%A9 Wikipedia])

'''Cauchy''' 
Augustin Louis Cauchy (1789-1857), a French mathematician. His name was connected with many other mathematicians mentioned in ATD: Cauchy-Riemann equation, Cauchy-Frobenious lemma, Cauchy-Euler equation, Cauchy-Kovalevskaia theorem. ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustin_Louis_Cauchy Wikipedia])

'''Whittaker and Watson''' 
A standard mathematics textbook of the time ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whittaker_and_Watson Wikipedia])

'''two point one''' 
(Cf Sondheim lyric, "A Little Night Music" [http://lynxfeather.net/nest/lyrics/nightmusic-nowlatersoon.html lyrics].)

:I think here just point-by-point listing was being used: 1); 2); 2.1).

==Page 599==

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

'''dueling-society cap''' 
Probably student corporation insignia.

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

'''''Liebchen''''' 
German, "sweetheart"

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

Meine Schatze literally means "my treasure" and is the term of endearment I used with my German girlfriend. She never mentioned it being "improper".

:"Meine Schatze" is definitely no German phrase, and it also sounds really strange to my (Austrian German) ears. "Meine Schätze" would be the plural, but that does not seem to make sense in this context. "Mein Schatz" instead would fit perfectly.

'''''Schläger''''' 
A specialized weapon for student duels. See Wikipedia's [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_fencing Academic fencing] article.

'''Krummsäbel''' 
German, "scimitar".

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

'''épée''' 
French for sword

A sharp-pointed duelling sword.

==Page 600==

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

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

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

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

'''restoring moment, elastic constants''' 
Günther's scar is tilde-shaped because as his opponent's sword passed across his face it vibrated up and down once and returned to its starting position. The following would be a reasonable problem for a high-school physics student: If you know how fast the blade tip was traveling side to side and you're allowed to measure the scar, what was the frequency of the up-and-down motion? A second-year university physics student could work out the frequency of vibration given certain properties of the sword and swordsman. A ''restoring moment'' acts to swing the blade back to its mean position when it is deflected; the duelist's wrist exerts one restoring moment and the elasticity of the steel exerts a second one. The restoring moment depends in part on a number called ''elastic constant'' that relates force to linear deflection (think of the classic fisherman's scale, where more weight extends the spring farther).

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

'''Geheimrat Hilbert''' 
German: confidential counsellor. A title of honor given to prominent civilian figures in Germany. For Hilbert Cf [[ATD_318-335#Page 324|page 324:Dr. Hilbert]].

==Page 601==

'''''Ehrenkodex''''' 
German, "code of honor"

'''Tyrolean hats''' 
[http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=tirolerhut&btnG=Search+Images Images]

'''''Schnurrbartbinde''''' 
A device to keep one's mustache safe from entanglement when sleeping, like [http://www.volkskrantblog.nl/pub/mm/2006/01/1137360569.70341.gif this].

'''Zeiss "Palmos Panoram"''' 
An early panoramic camera, mentioned in the 1911 Britannica's [http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Photography Photography] article.

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

'''Andaman Islands''' 
[http://www.openencyclopedia.net/index.php/Andaman_Islands Here]'s a mention of tattooing practices in the Andaman Islands

'''Stephanie du Motel... group-theory godfather Évariste Galois''' 
Évariste Galois died in a duel at the age of 20. Though much confusion surrounds the affair, it is suspected that he provoked the duel after being rejected by one Stéphanie-Felice du Motel. ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evariste_Galois#Final_days Wikipedia])

==Page 602==

'''By 1906 there were Russians everywhere, flown and fleeing westward''' 
Cf [[ATD_588-614#Page 595|page 595:the year that followed . . . Russians everywhere]]. fleeing westward: most popular destination for Russian refugees was then France, later America.

'''young Ouspensky''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Uspensky Peter D. Ouspensky] (1878-1947), Russian mystic and philosopher, author of ''The Fourth Dimension'', appropriate to Pynchon's themes in ''ATD''.

An anachronism: Ouspensky's ''The Fourth Dimension'' wasn't published until 1909. (See Linda Dalrymple Henderson's ''The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art''.)

'''Theosophoid''' 
A Pynchonism. From Theosophist Cf [[ATD_219-242#Page 219|page 219:Madame Blavatsky, Theosophical Society]]. the suffix "oid" often used in mathematics, indicates a "similarity, not necessarily exact, to something else". (android: similar to a man, ovoid: similar to an egg, etc.) As it is explained in the next sentence, "That's a Theosophist, only not entirely". Fitting, in a book that is obsessed with doppelgängers and people who are at once themselves, but not quite (see the transformations of Dr. V Ganesh Rao)

'''Chong''' 
A strange and seemingly unlikely visitor to Göttingen. The name might be taken from the Chinese philosopher Wang Chong, or Wang Ch'ung. Could also be Cheech Marin's partner, Tommy Chong (C.Marin alluded to earlier p.477). - This is Sidney Reilly, a famous spy of the time, in disguise. See the note on Sidney below.

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

'''Chinese Bolshevik''' 
Chinese Communist. For the true meaning of Bolshevik Cf [[ATD_615-643#Page 616|page 616:Bolshevists]]

'''Sidney . . . Kensington Sid''' 
Kensington is where elected officials worked. 

This is Sidney Reilly, the famous Ace of Spies. The reference is made clear by Swome on page 630, and, to the extent that any appearance here makes sense, a spy makes more sense than a political theorist. An annotation on page 630 includes a Wikipedia reference for Reilly. I don't know whether Reilly (or British spies of the day in general) had a particular association with Kensington, or whether the reference is to Chunxton Crescent, which is placed in roughly that part of London.

'''transtriadic''' 
Beyond the three.

==Page 603==

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

'''Applied Mechanics Institute''' 
An institute of the University of Göttingen

'''Prandtl's recent discovery of the boundary layer''' 
Ludwig Prandtl ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Prandtl Wikipedia]) in 1904 developed the theory of the boundary layer ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary%20layer Wikipedia]) in aerodynamics, greatly simplifying aerodynamic calculations.

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

'''brambled guttie''' 
A proto golf-ball, see [http://www.che.rochester.edu/users/dafoster/ChE243/SciAm%20GolfBall.pdf here].

'''Bürgerstrasse''' 
German, "Citizen's Street", a street in Göttingen.<bre>
This translation is correct but here "Bürger" refers to the German poet Gottfried August Bürger (1748 - 1794) who lived in Göttingen.

'''brambling''' 
The [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brambling Brambling] (''Fringilla montifringilla'') is a finch related to chaffinches, and is plumed orange, black, and white. Widespread in northern Europe and Asia, it occasionally strays to Alaska and farther south.

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

'''Zhukovsky's Transformation''' 
The [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joukowsky_transform Joukowsky Transform] maps the unit circle in the complex plane to a shape very much like an airfoil.

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

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

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

'''''"...according to Spiral Theory, up to infinity." "And beyond, " added Gunther, nodding earnestly.''''' 
Reference to Buzz Lightyear's stock character phrase in 1995's TOY STORY (Pixar/Disney):
"To Infinity... and Beyond!"
--[[User:Btchakir|Btchakir]] 07:43, 19 December 2006 (PST)
: The text said nothing about Spiral Theory, I believe.
This reminded me of the caption "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite" in the movie ''2001: A Space Odyssey''. [[User:WolfgangFaber|WolfgangFaber]] 07:44, 10 October 2008 (PDT)

'''according to Spectral Theory, up to infinity''' 
Cf [[ATD_318-335#Page 324|page 324:Spectral Theory]] and [[ATD_318-335#Page 324|page 324:''infinite'' dimensions]].

==Page 604==

'''nontrivial zeroes''' 
The Riemann zeta function has two classes of zeros, the trivial zeroes being at negative even integers (-2, -4...), the non-trivial complex numbers, believed (but not proven) to have Re(z)=1/2. See [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_hypothesis Wikipedia]. or Cf [[ATD_489-524#Page 496|page 496:Zeta function conjecture]].

'''much-noted talk''' 
At the 1900 International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris, Hilbert proposed a research programme of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_problems#Tabulated_information 23 problems]. The Riemann hypothesis is number 8 on the list.

'''Sorbonne''' 
Until 1971, the name ''Sorbonne'' refered to the historic University of Paris in Paris, France, one of the best universities in France. The name is derived from the ''Collège de Sorbonne'', founded in 1257 by Robert de Sorbon as one of the first significant colleges of the medieval University of Paris; the university itself as such predates the college by about a centure. In 1971, after the univeristy reforms, the five faculties of the former University of Paris were split and then reformed into thirteen interdisciplinary universities. Three of them as true "heirs" to the original, have kept the Sorbonne name as part of their official title: Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV), the New Sorbonne, and the Panthéon-Sorbonne. [http://www.paris4.sorbonne.fr/en/sommaire.php3 The University of Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV)] was the inheritor of the former University of Paris' Arts and Sciences Faculties.

'''the outstanding problems in mathematics''' 
Hilbert's Problems are 23 (originally) unsolved problems in mathematics proposed by Hilbert. Of the 23 total appearing in the printed address, 10 were actually presented at the Second International Congress of Mathematics at the Sorbonne, Paris on August 8, 1900. [http://mathworld.wolfram.com/HilbertsProblems.html Hilbert's Problems] were designed to serve as examples for the kinds of problems whose solutions would lead to the furthering of disciplines in mathermatics. As such, some were areas for investigation and therefore not strictly "problems".

'''eigenvalues''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigenvalue Wikipedia] Dudley Eigenvalue, D.D.S., was a character in ''V.''

'''Hermitian operator''' 
A Hermitian operator generalises some of the ideas of symmetry when complex numbers are involved. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermitian_operator Wikipedia]

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

:are there any others? Translate the German back to English and you get "backbone of reality"

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

==Page 605==

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

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

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

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

'''baps''' 
soft bread rolls - another Scottish word

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

'''thinned''' 
From full 78. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarot Wikipedia]

'''vegetarian haggis''' 
It exists: [http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22vegetarian+haggis Google search]

==Page 606==

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

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

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

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

'''Cesare Lombroso''' 
Anthropologist who devised a method of identifying criminal "types" from their facial structures. (Cf [[ATD_171-198#Page 172|page 172: Dr. Lombroso]]).

'''Trans-Oxanian''' 
From the other side of the Oxus River (now Amu-Darya) in Central Asia. Cf. [[ATD_429-459#Page 439|page 439:the Oxus]].

'''Graeco-Buddhist''' 
The hybrid cultural background evidenced in Shambhala. Greco-Buddhism, sometimes spelled Graeco-Buddhism, is the cultural syncretism between Hellenistic culture and Buddhism, which developed over a period of close to 800 years in Central Asia in the area corresponding to modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan, between the 4th century BCE and the 5th century CE. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhism Wikipedia] and Cf [[ATD_429-459#Page 438|page 438:Graeco-Buddhist]].

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

==Page 607==

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

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

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

'''Persian''' 
Majority language in Iran, now called Farsi.

'''Pashto''' 
A language spoken in Afghanistan and nearby.

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

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

==Page 608==

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

'''spotted dick''' 
A suet pudding with raisins or currants

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

'''queering the pitch''' 
[http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/297387.html Disrupting someone's business;] compare [[ATD_748-767#Page_758|"yakitori pitches," p. 758.]]

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

'Shape' is another word for blancmange, which is made of gelatin, derived probably from the bones of some animal. Aychrome wonders "what's it made of", to which Lew responds "Maybe you don't want to know." [[User:Nehoccramcire|Nehoccramcire]] 09:14, 12 March 2007 (PDT)

'''the Embankment''' 
Victoria Embankment, London, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotland_yard Scotland Yard] was located there from 1890 to 1967. Scotland Yard was founded on September 29, 1829, on a street off Whitehall; and in 1967 it moved to the present location at 10 Broadway Street, London.

'''blue lamps''' 
Traditionally hung outside police stations in England.

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

'''yarmulke... high crown... dented Trilby style''' 
[http://www.wpclipart.com/clothes/hats/index.html Image of a Trilby hat.]

==Page 609==

'''Bukhara''' 
Cf [[ATD_397-428#Page 425|page 425:Bukhara]]

'''''Kelly's Suburban Dictionary''''' 
The peerless [http://archives.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/europe/10/22/design360.icon.az/index.html ''London A to Z''] did not come along until the 1930s.

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

==Page 610==

'''daylight oil''' 
from the streetlamps, lit up for hours?

'''a moon no one could see''' 
Note that the ''Inconvenience'' is repeatedly referred to as a "moon" ([[ATD_119-148#Page_144|p. 144,]] [[ATD_171-198#Page_187|p. 187]]) and is sometimes seen under other guises ([[ATD_199-218#Page_215|p. 215,]] [[ATD_243-272#Page_272|p. 272]]).

'''refused to dim''' 
(Nicely vivid.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

'''scalene polygons''' 
Polygons with sides of unequal length.

'''jet''' 
jet black, a color.

'''Apotheosis Sparkless Torch''' 

==Page 611==

'''magnalium''' 
An alloy of magnesium and aluminum.

'''Lamont Replevin (for it was he)''' 
Formula from penny-dreadful literature: Open the chapter with an unknown character (referred to ahead of time but never yet making an appearance), describe looks and some little action, then spring the name on the reader.

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

'''gas-head''' 
Cf pothead, acidhead, etc.

'''Pike's Peak''' 
Lew's old stompinground.

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

'''most theft policies''' 
(Fact?)

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

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

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

:Lots of people would say the wiki is wrong then. You can discover sources and you may be able to parse processes (rewrites, selection of information), but the author's intentions are not accessible; only the work is. Therefore (and so on and so forth). A philosophical question and probably not wiki-able.

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

'''burglary insurance''' 
Although TRP writes that most theft policies were written in the US by the time Lew speaks to Replevin, the first burglary policy was in fact offered by Cuthbert Heath, an Underwriter at Lloyd's, London in about 1889, which would seem to be a few years earlier than the scene. Antony Brown, ''Cuthbert Heath'' ( David & Charles, New Abbot London 1984)at pages 72-76. [[User:TheKenoshaKid|TheKenoshaKid]] 15:52, 9 March 2008 (PDT)

==Page 612==

'''''Pavonazzetto''''' 
brecciated white marble with violet veins from Docimia, Asia Minor.

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

'''Atys... Agdistis''' 
From Greek and Roman mythology. Atys (or Attis) is a young lover of the goddess Cybele (also known as Agdistis in Phrygia). When he wished to marry, Cybele drove him mad and he castrated himself. Catullus wrote a poem on the subject.

'''''The Mutilation of Atys''''' 
No images: [http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&lr=&q=%22Mutilation%20of%20Atys&btnG=Search&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi Google image search]

But under the name Attis, this two-panel sequence: [http://www.aztriad.com/aacarati.html page 1,] [http://www.aztriad.com/aacatals.html page 2,] from "Seladore's Historical Cartoons." And [http://paxnortona.notfrisco2.com/?p=2332 a photo] of what appears to be an old statue of Attis.

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

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

'''koumiss vessel''' 
A container for fermented horse's milk. Perhaps like this one:
[http://studentorgs.utexas.edu/husa/origins/szkitahist/scythianvessel.html]

According to the OED, an early form of the word 'koumiss' was 'cosmos' - its appearance here doesn't seem coincidental given the short disquisition on the etymology of 'chaos' soon to follow. For the Greeks 'cosmos' was the antithetical concept to 'chaos'. Pythagoras is said to be the first to apply the original meaning of 'cosmos', i.e., 'an orderly arrangement' to the universe itself.

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

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

==Page 613==

'''tiny German hand camera''' 
Probably a Zeiss Ikon. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeiss Wikipedia Entry]

A Zeiss Ikon would be an anachronism, as this company was created as a merger in 1926.

The description somehow suggests the classic [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minox Minox] "spy cameras", but also these were created only in the 1930ies (originally in Latvia, mass production in Germany).

A small German camera matching the time would be [http://www.camerapedia.org/wiki/Gnom Gnom], a version of which was also sold in the UK.

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

'''Gasophilia''' 
Love of gas.

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

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

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

'''cognizant nose...medium for the most exquisite poetry'''

see Proust

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

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

Occultist Eliphas Levi associated akasa with what he called the "Astral Light". He writes: "[T]his electromagnetic ether, this vital and luminous caloric (Perhaps this explains Pynchon's insistence on the term "luminiferous aether"?), is represented on ancient monuments by the girdle of Isis which twines round two poles and in ancient theogonies by the serpent devouring its own tail, emblem of prudence and of Saturn" -- emblem of infinity, immortality, and Kronos -- 'Time'". He says it is "a force in Nature," by means of which "a single man who can master it... might throw the world into confusion and transform its face"; for it is the "great Arcanum of transcendent Magic." It is a "blind force... which souls must conquer in order to detach themselves from the chains of Earth; 'for if they should not,' they will be absorbed by the same power which first produced them and will return to the central and eternal fire."

It gets better... He writes: "It is through this Force that all the nervous centres secretly communicate with each other; from it -- that sympathy and antipathy are born; from it -- that we have our dreams; and that the phenomena of second sight and extra-natural visions take place... Astral Light, acting under the impulsion of powerful wills, destroys, coagulates, separates, breaks, gathers in all things... God created it on that day when he said: Fiat Lux..." He refers to akasa/Astral Light variably as "the body of the Holy Ghost", the "grand Agent Magique", "Lucifer" and "Baphomet", the winged-goat figure that served as the inspiration for the Devil Tarot card designed by Colman-Smith. [http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/sd/sd1-1-12.htm From Madame Blavatsky's "The Secret Doctrine"][http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/sd/sd2-2-06.htm Más]

[http://laluni.helloyou.ws/askbaba/prasnottaravahini/prasnottara01.html This page] also equates akasa with the ether and sez that "each subsequent element originated from the previous one" with akasa being the first, similar to the Kaballic Tree of Life.

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

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

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

'In his "Physica" (1633), the Rosicrucian alchemist Jan Baptist van Helmont, wrote: "Ad huc spiritum incognitum Gas voco," i.e., "This hitherto unknown Spirit I call Gas." Further on in the same work he says, "This vapor which I have called Gas is not far removed from the Chaos the ancients spoke of."' [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astral_light#Esoteric_conceptions wiki]

'''stridently unpopulated''' 
Cf p610.

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

ATD 429-459

2009-01-13T11:44:38Z

Imehling:

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

==Page 431==

'''metaphorical way''' and '''lateral resurrection''' 
Cf. [[ATD_397-428#Pafe 418|page 418]], where ''metaphor'' and ''lateral'' are also used in quick succession.

'''"Turkish Corner"''' 
The ''coin turquois'' or Turkish corner was an interior decorating fad ([http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/197806/london.s.arab.hall.htm second half of 19th century]). Well-to-do householders had the English furniture removed from a space and put in low tables, divans, cushions, ceiling hangings, nargilehs and so forth.

'''Bactrian''' 
''Camel''. Even-toed ungulate, two-humped (twin-peaked) as compared with the one-humped dromedary.

'''Cameling''' 
Seems to mean riding on a camel, contextually.

'''light might be a ''secret determinant of history''''' 
One of the overarching themes of the book, it seems. Natural light
vs. artificial. A-and in this section the line must be more closely linked
to the Manichaeans and Light [p. 437] and Chick and Darby's remarks on 438. Light as 'Divine' light.......

The [http://etext.virginia.edu/cgi-local/DHI/dhi.cgi?id=dv1-38 ''Dictionary of the History of Ideas''] has a clear, readable essay on causation in history, well worth a look given that we are concerned with "determinants" and the nature of time/sequence/cause-and-effect.

==Page 432==

'''fatal word''' 
"Wife".

'''C.A.C.A.''' 
Caca; Spanish for "shit". The Chums have already begun to suspect the "shit", i.e. the malevolent organization that lies behind their boys' book heroics; the reader is now made aware of a large organization (see B.I.N., below) standing behind the massive airships and their crews. We all know what about the dynamics of large organizations, and the percentage of the time they spend in serving their purported purposes. Reminiscent of Van Vogt's Law: "90% of everything is shit (caca)".
:Not just Spanish; most western European languages. In German it's even pronounced the same as '''K-K''' (Kaiserlich und Königlich, see Max Khäutsch and Franz Ferdinand episodes).

'''Medicine Hat, Alberta''' 
A real city with a population about 56,000. It is located in the southeastern part of the province of Alberta, Canada.

'''Gamomania''' 
"Gamos" is Greek for "marriage," and mania means "mania" or "madness."

'''H.M.S.F.''' 
His Majesty's Subdesertine Frigate (p425).

'''Balaam's ass''' 
refers to Num. 22:21-34 - Balaam rides out with the princes of Moab, but the Lord sends an angel to prevent him. Balaam does not see the angel but his ass does and will not go further. Balaam smites the ass three times, to no avail, until "the Lord opened the mouth of the ass, and she said to Balaam: What have I done unto thee, that thou hast smitten me these three times?" Balaam's ass and the serpent (in the Garden of Eden) are the only speaking animals in the bible.

'''reported as long ago as Marco Polo''' 
From Marco Polo's ''The Travels of Marco Polo'' (1298-99):
:". . . When a man is riding by night through this desert and something happens to make him loiter and lose touch with his companions . . . and afterwards he wants to rejoin them, then he hears spirit talking in such a way that they seem to be his companions. Sometimes, indeed, they even hail him by name. Often these voices make him stray from the path, so that he never finds it again. And in this way many travelers have been lost and have perished. And sometimes in the night they are conscious of a noise like the clatter of a great cavalcade of riders away from the road; and, believing that these are some of their own company, they go where they hear the noise and, when day breaks, find they are victims of an illusion and in an awkward plight. . . Yes, and even by daylight men hear these spirit voices, and often you fancy you are listening to the strains of many instruments, especially drums, and the clash of arms. . . . ." 
:(page 67, ''The Travels of Marco Polo'', The Folio Society 1968 edition.) 
For Marco Polo's bio and more see Cf. [[ATD_243-272#Page 247|page 247]] and [http://www.silk-road.com/artl/marcopolo.shtml Marco Polo and His Travels].

==Page 433==

'''mutatis mutandis''' 
''Medieval Latin.'' A direct translation from Latin of mutatis mutandis would read, 'with those things having been changed which need to be changed'. More colloquially, it can be interpreted as 'the necessary changes having been made,' where "the necessary changes" are usually implied by a prior statement assumed to be understood by the reader. It carries the connotation that the reader should pay attention to the corresponding differences between the current statement and a previous one, although they are analogous. This term is used frequently in economics and in law, to parameterize a statement with a new term, or note the application of an implied, mutually understood set of changes. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutatis_mutandis Wikipedia entry].

This suggests we should view communication from the camel with the same skepticism with which we view the voices, or possibly view this communication as we would that from Balaam's ass.

'''''polygamy''''' 
Cf. Lake's conversion to (de facto) polyandry in Colorado Springs, p. 268. In both cases aquifers are the scene of the activity.

'''pan-spectral fields''' 
Well, ''pan'' means universal. As in ''panorama'', ''Pan-Am''. Another suggestion of possible worlds.

'''World-Island''' 
The phrase was coined by English geographer and geo-politician [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halford_John_Mackinder Sir Halford John Mackinder] who formulated [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartland_%28geopolitics%29 Heartland Theory] (1904) in his address to the Royal Geographic Society, "The Geographical Pivot of History." "World-Island" refers '''not to the Earth''', but to the continuous landmass of Eurasia measuring more than 21 million square miles (54 million km²). This landmass contains no waterways to the ocean and is contained by the Arctic ice cap and drainage to the north, the monsoon lands along the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean, the Near East or land of the Five Seas, and Europe. This landmass is remote and inaccessible to its periphery. Mackinder argued in his address that this was the strategic region of the foremost importance in the World. The Heartland theory hypothesized the possibility for a huge empire being brought into existence in the Heartland, which wouldn't need to use coastal or transoceanic transport to supply its military industrial complex but would instead use railways, and that this empire couldn't be defeated by all the rest of the world against it; [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geopolitics See also '''Geopolitics''' in Wikipedia]

'''"Euphrates" poplars''' 
One of the five classes of Poplars: ''turanga''. Its scientific name is ''populus euphratica'', a subtropical poplar found usually in Southwest Asia.

'''aryq''' 
Most likely variant of Arrack (OED): name applied in Eastern countries to any liquour of native manufacture, usually distilled coconut palm sap. - Or rather arak, the Middle Eastern equivalent of ouzo, Pernod, etc., which, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arak_%28distilled_beverage%29 according to Wikipedia,] should not be confused with southeast Asian arrack.

'''B.I.N.''' 
Biometric Institute of Neuropathy, see p. 432.

As in "Loony bin".

'''seventeen-syllable''' 
Haiku - japanese poems consisting of 17 syllables, classically arranged in three lines of 5 - 7 - 5 syllables each

Brilliant! 
''Still at it, Suckling?'' 
''Insufferable little'' 
''Prick, I'll break your neck!''

==Page 434==

'''Eta/Nu Transformators''' 
Probably an imaginary scientific device. Eta is most likely a reference to the metric tensor of (four dimensional) Minkowski space. Nu sometimes symbolizes frequency.
:Alternate view 
:In classical electromagnetism, Eta is the wave impedance and Nu is the velocity of the wave; both are related to the material parameters of the medium the wave is traveling in. Specifically, Eta determines how a wave moves between different media (reflection, refraction, and transmission), while the velocity is related to the frequency and wavelength of the wave. Thus, the device probably allows the ships inhabitants to see while in the sand.

'''pari passu''' 
on an equal footing

'''Deep Blavatsky''' 
Named for Madame Helena Blavatsky (Helena Petrovna Hahn), founder of the Theosophical Society [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blavatsky]. Cf. [[ATD_219-242#Page 219|page 219]].

==Page 435==

'''Gurkhas''' 
Nepalese forces that have fought alongside British troops.

'''German professors''' 
Likely a double allusion, first to Professor Werfner of Göttingen, referenced on p. 226, and also to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Schliemann Heinrich Schliemann], the German treasure hunter (not actually a professor) who first established the true historical location of Troy, the site of the Trojan War. His accomplishments are sadly underscored by his extremely amateurish excavation technique which destroyed as much as it extracted from the site.

'''"who keep waltzing out here by the wagonload, can dig till they're too blistered to dig any more, and they still won't ever find it, not without the right equipment - the map you fellows brought, plus our ship's Paramorphoscope"''' 
Could also be a nod to Steven Spielberg's 1981 film ''Indiana Jones and The Raiders of the Lost Ark''.

'''General Forrest''' 
Nathan Bedford Forrest, rebel leader in U.S. Civil War. Although he pioneered high-mobility tactics, he may never have uttered the famous quotation; see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Bedford_Forrest Wikipedia entry.]

Also, recognized as founder of the KKK -- see earlier episode in Colorado.

'''archiepiscopal''' 
Pertaining to an archbishop.

'''jewel-studded Victoria Crosses''' 
The VC is the highest medal for valo(u)r in the British military, about on a par with the Medal of Honor in the U.S. Created at the time of Crimean War, the VC was not awarded posthumously until 1907. Adding jewels to the award is pure fantasy.

'''Fabergé''' 
Russian jeweler. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Faberg%C3%A9 Wikipedia entry].

'''"appealing though they be or, shall I say, as they are"''' 
Captain Toadflax's corrects his grammatical mistake, an error that is partially obscured by the inverted construction he employs. If one straightens out his words into a more conventional form, e.g., "though they [secular pleasures] be appealing," the error is clearer: ''they'', the third person plural pronoun, requires ''are'' as a verb, i.e. ''pleasures are'' rather than ''pleasures be''. The ''OED'' lists many examples of ''be'' taking the place of ''are'' in similar contexts, but notes that this usage is either dialectal or archaic.
:Why Toadflax commits this error is less clear than what the error itself is. One possibility is that Pynchon is making an allusion to Captains Bildad and Peleg of ''Moby-Dick'', who speak in an archaic vernacular typical of New England Puritans.
::For more information, see the ''OED'', "be, v.," sub-entry, A.I.h.¶.
:'''It isn't an error!''' Toadflax first correctly uses the subjunctive, "appealing though they be"; the choice of mood says he is making a speculative statement, something like "however appealing they are imagined to be." Then he rephrases—changing the meaning of his statement—to the indicative mood, "appealing as they are," saying that the pleasures definitely, factually ''are'' appealing. The contrast of subjunctive and indicative is becoming archaic now, but it wasn't archaic or even odd coming from an educated speaker in the early 20th century.

'''subarenaceous''' 
Below or beneath the sand (sub) + (arenaceous).

==Page 436==

'''limen''' 
threshold

'''transmundane''' 
Beyond the mundane, beyond the world

'''lamaseries''' 
Domiciles of Buddhist lamas (as in "monasteries").

'''Torriform Inclusion''' 
A made-up condition from Torus==Arch.: a large convex molding, semicircular in cross section, located at the base of a classical column?
From the American Heritage Dictionary.
St. Cosmo has just seen, he thinks, a "watchtower".
'Watchtower'-Cf. the name of the magazine (and building in Brooklyn) that the Jehovah's Witnesses use.
'distinguishing man-made from God-made'...

More likely from ''turris'' (Latin), ''torre'' (Spanish&Italian) or similar meaning "tower."

'''Urban terrain''' 
(But only cities unwisely built on sand.)

'''Stilton Gaspereaux''' 
Stilton is type of blue cheese from England. 
Gaspereaux are alewives, a freshwater fish. [Alewives or "Gaspereaux" are caught fresh as the fish moves upstream our cold Canadian rivers.
www.botsfordfisheries.com/products]

'''Sven Hedin''' 
Swedish explorer, especially of the Asian countries, and excavator of ruins of ancient cities. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sven_Hedin wikipedia] Hedin crossed Taklamakan desert in 1895 and found ruins of the sunken city [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dandan_Oilik Dandan Oilik]. Today he is a controversial figure because of his complicated relations to naziism. Hitler was an admirer of his work.
:That suggests another angle for reading ATD as a novel about the genesis of the 20th century, considering the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahnenerbe Nazi obsession with Tibet]. There is also an alleged [http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/sociopol_shambahla01.htm subterranean Shambhala] connection; the sources are dubious but the legend ''does'' exist.

'''Aurel Stein''' 
Sir Marc Aurel Stein. Hungarian-born explorer later knighted as a British citizen. Credited with the discovery, and arguably the exploitation, of the Mogao Grottoes in China. A rock-carved repository of ancient Buddhist texts and murals, the grottoes are known collectively as 'The Cave of a Thousand Buddhas' and protected a copy of the Mahayana Diamond sutra, acknowledged as the world's oldest dated printed text. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Aurel_Stein Wikipedia entry].

'''first known maps''' 
None of Ptolemy's maps has survived the classical period. They were, however, reconstructed in manuscript and engraved on copper or carved in wood for editions of the Ptolemy atlas. In 1482, the first woodcut edition, containing the first map of the world to include contemporary discoveries, was published in Ulm, Germany. It contains a brightly handcolored map of the Holy Land....

Allusion to the Map/Territory relation—the relationship between symbol and object. Coined by Alfred Korzybski, “The map is not the territory” is a related expression meaning that an abstraction derived from something, or a reaction to it, is not the thing itself, e.g., the pain from a stone falling on your foot is not the stone; one's opinion of a politician, favorable or unfavorable, is not that person; a metaphorical representation of a concept is not the concept itself; and so on. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_map_is_not_the_territory]Here, the (abstract) map itself could be a guide to a spritual quest or to conquest.

==Page 437==

'''Nernst lamps''' 
An electric lamp consisting of a short, slender rod of zirconium oxide (ceramic) in open air, heated to brilliant white incandescence by electrical current. It was developed by the German physicist and chemist Walther Nernst (1864-1941) in 1897 at Goettingen University. In 1905 he formulated the third law of thermodynamics, and in 1920 he received the Nobel Prize in chemistry. For a picture of the lamp [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nernst_lamp Nernst lamp]] and Nernst's bio [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walther_Nernst Nernst.]]

'''range-finder''' 
Cf. 'range', passim

'''level of encryption''' 
(Cf Heisenberg?)Does not seem to allude to Heisenberg and his Uncertainty Principle so much as buried layers of meaning that can hide to invisibility.

'''Mount Kailash''' 
A mountain located in the Chinese Himalayas with great religious significance in Hinduism and Buddhism. In Hinduism, it is seen as the residence of Shiva, God of destruction and regeneration. The mountain is visited every year by many religious pilgrims. In Buddhism, the mountain was believed to be the location of a battle between two ancient sorcerers: Milarepa (Tantric Buddhism) and Naro-Bonchung (Tibetan Bön religion). Pynchon is perhaps alluding to the population dividing nature of religions. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Kailash wikipedia].

'''Shiva''' 
Shiva is the formless, timeless and spaceless Supreme God in Shaivism, one of the major branches of Hinduism practiced in India. Shiva means "One who purifies everyone by the utterance of His name" or "The Pure One". The name Shiva is the Holiest of Holy names. See [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiva Shiva]].

'''polarize light... in time''' 
Thematic.

'''Manichaeans''' 
A gnostic sect that followed the third century Persian prophet Mani (Cf [[ATD_429-459#Page 439|page 439]]). Their main theological belief was in a stark divide between Good and Evil, Light and Darkness.

Basic to Manichaeism's doctrine was the conflicting dualism between the realm of God, represented by ''light'' and by spiritual enlightenment, and the realm of Satan, symbolized by ''darkness'' and by the world of material things. To account for the existence of evil in a world created by God, Mani posited a primal struggle in which the forces of Satan separated from God; humanity, composed of matter, that which belongs to Satan, but infused with a modicum of godly light, was a product of this struggle, and was a paradigm of the eternal war between the forces of ''light'' and those of ''darkness''. Christ, the ideal, light-clad soul, could redeem for each person that portion of light God had allotted. Light and dark were seen to be commingled in our present age as good and evil, but in the last days each would return to its proper, separate realm, as they were in the beginning. The Christian notion of the Fall and of personal sin was repugnent to the Manichaeans; they felt that the soul suffered not from a weak and corrupt will but from contact with matter. Evil was a physical, not a moral thing; a person's misfortunes were miseries, not sins. (taken from ''The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, 2001-2005, [[http://www.bartkeby.com/65/ma/Manichae.html Manichaean]].)

Very relevant here in ADT: one could call their theology, BINARY.

==Page 438==

'''expanded sense... Maxwell... Hertz''' 
All forms of electromagnetic radiation form a spectrum, of which visible light is a small part; all such radiation shares fundamental physical properties.
Cf. range as spectrum.

:Let us quote more fully — '''''the light we see as well as the expanded sense of it prophesied by Maxwell, confirmed by Hertz''''' — it means the ''expanded'' understanding of the nature of the visible light (''the sense of it''). In 1865 Maxwell prophesied that, base on his field equations, "light itself is an electromagnetic disturbance in the form of waves propagated through the electromagnetic field according to electromagnetic laws." (Cf [[ATD_57-80#Page 58|page 58]].) In 1877 Hertz experimentally discovered that light behaves exactly as an electromagnetic wave described by the Maxwell Field Equations and is part of the full electromagnetic spectrum. Therefore, Hertz confirmed what Maxwell predicted about the nature of light. (Cf [[ATD_318-335#Page 318|page 318]].)
:Regardless of how the scientific understanding of the nature of light has been expanded and changed, the Manichaean's view of light as invariant will remain, they will worship light to eternity. All other forms of matter are considered 'darkness'.
:Of course it is impossible for the Manichaens to know the dualism, light/darkness, of their theology has the reflection in the dualism of light. Light is a wave (electromagnetic wave) and simultaneously consists of particles (photons).

''''Perfects'''' 
Perfects are the priests of the Cathar, a pantheistic manicheistic sect from the middle ages.

:Since Gaspereaux (and Pynchon)are still talking about Manichaean, let's just talk about it. 
:Strict virtue for the Manichaean involved necessarily withdrawal from the world. The community was accordingly divided into two groups; the ''Elect'' or the "Perfects", the ''Primates Manichaeorum'', who embraced a rigourous rule, and the ''Hearers'', the ''auditores'',who led a more normal life and supported the ''Elect'' both by works and alms. 
A-and we know Pynchon's view of The Elect.

'''Mysteries''' 
''The Book of Secrets'' (or ''The Book of Mysteries''). The sacred Manichaean text by Mani. Cf [[ATD_429-459#Page 439|page 439]].

'''Graeco-Buddhist''' 
Greco-Buddhism, sometimes spelled Graeco-Buddhism, is the cultural syncretism between Hellenistic culture and Buddhism, which developed over a period of close to 800 years in Central Asia in the area corresponding to modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan, between the 4th century BCE and the 5th century CE. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhism Wikipedia]

'''Italo-Islamic style(s)''' 
A result of the Islamic Conquest of Sicily and parts of southern Italy [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emirate_of_Sicily Wikipedia on the Emirate of Sicily] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Islam_in_southern_Italy 2]

==Page 439==

'''Nuovo Rialto''' 
Seems like Pynchon creating a "New Rialto" city under these sands as many
cities take the name of an older city and add New....

From Wikipedia: Rialto is an area of the San Polo sestiere of Venice, known for its markets and for the Rialto Bridge.

The area was settled by the ninth century, when a small area in the middle of the Realtine Islands either side of the Rio Businiacus was known as the Rivoaltus. Soon, the Businiacus became known as the Grand Canal, and the district became the Rialto, referring to only the area on the left bank.

The Rialto became an important district in 1097, when Venice's market moved there, and in the following century a boat bridge was set up across the Grand Canal providing access to it. This was soon replaced by the Rialto Bridge.

Pynchon seems to love Venice so Nuovo Rialto is very ironically intended given this scene.

'''Mani''' 
Mani (216-276), founder of religion Manichaeism. He was born in the province Babylon which was then under Persian rule. His family was Persian, bu this name is Aramaic. Mani had probably originally belonged to a Christian sect, now called Elkhasitts. Between the age of 12 and 24, Mani had visions where an angel told him that he would be the prophet of a last divine revelation. Around AD 240, at the Persian court of King Shapur 1, Mani established his own religious philosophy. He and his followers (Manichaeans) regarded the world as irreconcilably divided into the kingdoms of light and darkness, good and evil. They practiced extreme asceticism in their struggle toward the light. At 26 he started on a long journey as the "Ambassador of Light" travelling through the Persian Empire and reaching as far as India, where he came under the influence of Buddhism. As Mani's teaching gained ground he came in opposition to the Zoroastrian priests and the Emperor Bahram 1. From 274 Mani lost the emperor's protection, and he either died in prison or was executed. His death was retold as an incident similar to the crucifixion of Jesus.

'''the Oxus''' 
The Oxus River of the Greeks. Its present-day name is the Amu Darya (or Amu river). It is the longest river in Central Asia. For more and map location see [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amu_Darya the Oxus]].

'''Jenghiz Khan''' 
Jenghiz (or Genghis) Khan (1162-1227), born as Temujin, a son of a Mongol chief. At thirteen he was called to succeed his father, and for years to struggle hard against hostile tribes. His ambition awakening with his continued success. He spent six years in subjugating the Naimans, between Lake Balkhash (in Southeastern Kazakhstan) and the Irtish (an enormous river in Western Siberia) , and in conquering Tangut, south of Gobi desert. In 1206 he started to use the name ''Jenghiz Khan'' — "Very Mighty Ruler". In 1211 he overruan the empire of North China, and in 1271 conquered and annexed the Kara-Chitai empire from Lake Balkhash to Tibet.
In 1218 he attacked the powerful empire of Kharezm, bounded by the Jazartes, Indus, Persian Gulf and Caspian, took Bokhara, Smarkand, Kharezm and other chief cities and returned home in 1225. His lieutenants continued to expand Jenghiz Khan's empire further and further. Jenghiz Khan died on August 18, 1227. He was not only a warrior and conqueror, but a skillful administrator and ruler; he not only conquered empires stretching from the Black Sea to the Pacific, but organized them into states which outlasted the short span that usually measures the life of Asiatic sovereignties. (from Chambers Biographical Dictionary, 1984 edition.)

'''crystallography of the silica medium''' 
Computer-base [silicon] allusion!?
:No! The most common constituent of sand, in inland continental or non-tropical coastal settings, is silicon dioxide (''silica'') usually in the form of quartz which is very resistant to weathering.
:And computer chips are made with silicon metal, not silica.

'''clearly a thousand years more recent than they ought to have been''' 
That is, the Manichean shrines date from the fourteenth Century, not the fourth Century when Mani, the founder, started Manicheanism. Pynchon dating 'when it went bad' in history?

'''Passing of the Remarks''' 
Sounds like a humorous reification of what gets said between sailors. Modeled after Changing of the Guard?

'''Steeplechase Park''' 
Steeplechase Park, located at Coney Island, was an amusement park and collection of rides, funhouses and the like. As a child I used to visit in the late 50's.

'''The Book of Secrets''' 
''The Book of Secrets'', (''Safar al–Asrar''), Manichaean sacred text by Mani. It was also called ''The Book of Mysteries'', and Titus just called it simply ''Mysteries''. It was characterized as "polemical and dogmatic." In eighteen chapters it was written to refute the false doctrines of the established sects and creeds n the world, including the sect of Bardesain or Bardesan. The book evidently dealt with the esoteric life of Jesus. The nature of Soul and Body was defined. And it also described reincarnation. A portion of the book was in the form of a dialogue between Jesus and his apostles. [[http://essenes.net/new/maniwritings.html mani's writitngs]].

==Page 440==

'''screaming...with blood''' 
Screaming motif.

'''''chong pir''''' 
Presumably Uyghur for "big lice."

'''Uyghur''' 
Member of an ethnic group in western China. It is sometimes claimed that the Uyghurs are Indo-European in one sense or another.

'''''Pulex''''' 
Flea.

'''voiced interdental fricative''' 
The ''th'' sound, as in "the" or "with." (Bad example—many if not most speakers use the unvoiced sound in "with." Try "then, other, father.") Basically, the lice lisp. This could be meant to suggest that their speech contains static or noise.

'''skeleton rig''' 
The skeleton rig is a shoulder holster for carrying a concealed handgun. They were developed in the 1890s. A very nice looking one, as well as a description thereof, can be purchased at [http://www.holster-connection.com/html/ted_blocker/tb_Skeleton.html First American Ordnance website], which also just so happens to be my source for the above info.

'''andante''' 
Literally "going". An Italian word typically seen in notation for classical music. It denotes a moderately slow pace.

'''Sandman Saloon''' 
Tavern for the 'sandmen', without those great tavern names in the above-ground world. Negative associations to this saloon, it seems, unlike the usual saloons in TRP's world. A Neil Gaiman allusion?

==Page 441==

'''Leonard and Lyle''' 
Google comes up with mentioning Sir Leonard Lyle [http://www.parkexplorer.org.uk/park_intro.asp?ID=new16 1], sugar-magnate and heir to Abram Lyle [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abram_Lyle 2] and "Lyle‘s Golden Syrup" [http://www.lylesgoldensyrup.com/LylesGoldenSyrup/PastPresent/default.htm 3]. Thats one interesting logo, what with the dead lion/bees and the tibetan stamp on ATD, btw. Golden Syrup = oil?

'''Baku''' 
Cf [[ATD_149-170#Page_168|page 168: Baku]].

'''''teke''''' 
From this [http://home.earthlink.net/~lkritikos/glossary.html glossary on greek rembetiko music]: "teke (pl. tekedhes): A club where one could buy hashish and the use of a narghile in which to smoke it"

An American fraternity or a member thereof. Tau Kappa Epsilon. Founded in the 1890s; has had a reputation for being a bit wilder than many fraternities.

'''Spindletop''' 
From wikipedia: Spindletop is a salt dome oil field located in south Beaumont, Texas (approx. 30.02 -94.07) in the United States. On January 10, 1901, the well "Lucas 1" came in at Spindletop, marking the birthdate of the modern petroleum industry. At 100,000 barrels of oil a day, the gusher tripled U.S. oil production overnight, ensuring the second industrial revolution would be fueled not by wood and coal but by oil and its byproducts. Some of the companies chartered to exploit the wealth of Spindletop are some of today's largest and well known corporations such as ExxonMobil, and Texaco.

'''Groznyi''' 
Grozny or Groznyy (Russian: Гро́зный; Chechen: Соьлж-ГIала, Syolzh-Ghaala) is the capital of the Chechen Republic in Russia. The city lies on the Sunzha River....As most of the residents there were Terek Cossacks, the town grew slowly until the development of Oil reserves in the early 20th century. This spiralled development of industry and petrochemical production. In addition to the oil drilled in the city itself, the city became a geographical centre of Russia's network of oil fields, and also in 1893 became part of the Transcaucasia - Russia Proper railway. From wikipedia

'''calyx bits''' 
Bits used for taking core samples in oil exploration. Rods are screwed together to make up the "drill string," with the bit at the bottom end. After exploration, the calyx bit is replaced with a rock bit; the borehole is stabilized with a "casing string" made of pipe (tubing) a little bigger than the bit.

Presumably some kind of mining drill-related equipment. "The mining operations were unusual in that much of the mining was done through large diameter holes drilled with calyx bits." [http://www.ut.blm.gov/sanrafaelohv/explore/historicmining.htm]

'''adults''' 
Chums not adults, then? No,they do not age, it seems.

'''''ässalamu äläykum''''' 
A muslim greeting. Translates to "Peace be with you."

'''anticline''' 
An underground rock structure with a shape resembling a ridge on the surface. Oil exploration focuses on "domes" (like salt domes, see Spindletop entry above) and anticlines, because either of these provides a volume where oil—ascending because it's lighter than rock or water—can collect to make a "pool" that can be exploited.

==Page 442==
'''Had it not (p440) ....someones hidden plans''' 
This whole conversation implies a coming war over oil, being sold as a holy mission... why does that sound familiar? Of course, once again, "No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred."

'''''equine altitude''''' 
High horse.

'''allure of Veneto-Uyghur women''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adriatic_Veneti Veneti] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanais Veneto] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghurs Uyghurs] Long distance trade (like wars and tourism in general) is very likely to enforce the intermingling of different [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_pool Gene Pools], which, more often than not, results in particularily beautiful specimens of the kinds involved. Travels of mediterrenean merchants along the various branches of the Silk Road seem to have been pretty common from at least 14th century on - see [http://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/texts/pegol.html Pegelotti‘s Merchant Handbook] (ca. 1340) which partially reads like a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonely_planet Lonely Planet Guide] of back then. During the Renaissance most of the merchants (from Florence/Venice/Geneva) set out from [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanais Tana/Tanais] which some sources put as a trade-post if not colony of the "West".

'''2 percent . . . most of them''' 
Implies at least 150 in crew.

'''Marco Querini''' 
An oasis named after Marco Querini? i.e. ''Oasi Marco Querini''. In January 1571, Venetians under Marco Querini defeated Turks near Famagusta, Cyprus.

'''Terrenascondite''' 
Italian: terre (pl. of terra) = lands; ascondito, an archaic form of the past participle of the verb nascondere (archaic: ascondere)= to hide. Translation is undoubtedly "hidden lands".

'''Pozzo San Vito''' 
Italian: Pozzo means well; San Vito is a Saint. Well of San Vito. ''Oasi Pozzo San Vito.'' San Vito, according [http://www.catholic-forum.com/saints/saintv07.htm to this site], died by being boiled in oil, other sources say it was lead - a hint to the subterranean resources here? Cfr. Italian: "Ballo di San Vito", that is, Saint Vitus' Dance, a syndrome having as a consequence tics or jerks. It may be an allusion to involuntary movements or disconntected behaviour(?).

'''all that incarnation and slaughter will transpire in silence''' 
Calls to mind the silent battle scene in Akira Kurosawa's samurai retelling of ''King Lear'', titled ''Ran'', which translates roughly to "chaos."

==Page 443==

'''peterman option''' 
A 'peterman' is a slang term for a safe-blower.

'''Consommé Imperial''' 
A gingered chicken broth with julienne of carrots and leeks.

'''Timbales de Suprêmes de Volailles''' 
Chicken Supreme Pudding ? Um, Suprêmes de Volailles means the white meat of chicken prepared with a fortified white sauce. To make timbales, the meat is chopped and placed in individual molds, a little grated Gruyère cheese on top, and baked in a water bath (just like some puddings).

'''Gigot Grillé a la Sauce Piquante''' 
A 'gigot' is a leg of lamb or haunch of veal. 'Sauce Piquante' is a spicy sauce.

'''aubergines à la Sauce Mousseline''' 
Eggplants with mussel sauce. -No, the French for mussels is moules, not moussel. A Sauce Mousseline is Hollandaise lightened with a bit of whipped cream. An odd choice perhaps for eggplant, but then Sauce Piquante is more for pork or boiled beef (pot-au-feu) than lamb.

:I've never seen a dog eat eggplant, but it sounds like something one wouldn't want to miss. Only thing is, it has to be somebody else's dog.

'''Pouilly-Fuissé''' 
A white Burgundy made from the Chardonnay grape.

'''Graves''' 
A white wine from the Graves district of France.

'''Miles...extra-temporal excursions''' 
Miles is like a Trespasser.

==Page 444==

'''Oasi''' 
''Oases'' is the plural of ''oasis''. Here, ''Oasi'' is the Italian word for ''oasis''!

'''cataplexy''' 
Sudden loss of muscle power following a strong emotional stimulus.

'''Nobel brothers''' 
Robert and Ludvig Nobel, brothers of Alfred Nobel of dynamite and prize fame, co-founders of Branobel, an important early oil company that controlled a large amount of Russian output. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branobel Wikipedia entry].

'''shaft-alley''' 
Somebody check this: the channel, running fore-and-aft deep in the ship's hull, where the propeller shafts are located.

'''the balloon is up''' 
British metaphor: The action has started. A phrase also used in ''V.''

'''F.O.''' 
Foreign Office

'''''Daily Mail''''' 
London tabloid, staunch early supporters of Adolf Hitler. Today specialises in stirring up hatred of immigrants and other minorities.

'''Inspector Sands''' 
A code word used in London to alert authorities without causing panic amongst the general public. Generally the alert is raised by the fire alarm. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspector_Sands Wikipedia entry].

'''"Sands of Inner Asia"''' 
Captain, now Inspector Sands, seems to be being compared for his achievements to "Lawrence of Arabia" parodistically.

'''Taklamakan''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taklamakan The Taklamakan] (also Taklimakan) is a desert of Central Asia, in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China. It is known as the largest sand-only desert in the world. Some references fancifully state that Taklamakan means "if you go in, you won't come out"; others state that it means "Desert of Death" or "Place of No Return".

==Page 445==

'''Kashgar to Urumchi''' 
Two cities currently on the far western border of China. Presumably in this context they were two points inside the general area within which the 'Great Powers' competed to try and find Shambhala.

'''fell into the hands of''' 
An analogy with the present-day situation in Central Asia in particular. Throughout the book, there are references to Anarchist/Terrorists, to the spread of dynamite and other kinds of phenomena. These are all technologies that allow, or cause, power to flow into the hands of the powerless to use for their own purposes.

'''World-Island''' 
[[#Page_433|See entry at page 433]]

'''those Powers . . . still competing for it''' 
And to complete the analogy, the countries/peoples who have exercised power for centuries and are now baffled to see it flow into the hands of the powerless.

'''discreet summons''' 
Eg "paging Dr Blue".
It doesn't seem to me to be a phrase that needs a gloss: a discreet summons is simply what it says and made be made in any number of ways.

'''far wicket''' 
A 'wicket' may simply be a gate; but in the context of a novel and the bomber at Headingly cricket ground and Fenners, the Cambridge cricket ground, a 'wicket' is the three stumps at one end of a cricket pitch. ("The Gentleman Bomber of Headingly" - see p.236.)
:That isn't the context here; we are in a government building where supplicants have to pass through gates—wickets—and face bureaucrats through grilles—more wickets.

'''wog''' 
''Chiefly British.'' An ethnic slur used for any dark-skinned peoples. Alleged to stand for "Western Oriental Gentleman", but mainly applied to Indians, Pakistanis, Arabs, and other brown-skinned Asians.
I have heard it comes from 'wily oriental gentleman'; but the Oxford English Dictionary states that the origin is uncertain and defines a 'wog' as someone especially of Arab extraction.
Eric Partridge, in'' A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English'' (8th ed., 1984), suggests that the term derives from "golliwog," the name of a black male doll character with frizzy hair popularized in Bertha Upton's children's story, The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls--and a 'Golliwog' (1895).

'''Vic removal''' 
"removing Vic" defined by Partridge (Dictionary of the Underworld, 1949) as robbing a stamp office. From the image of Queen Victoria on British postal stamps.

'''eating an explosive''' 
Cf Lew's Cyclomite.

==Page 446==

'''St Martin le Grand''' 
A street in the City of London.

'''Angel Street''' 
Another street in the City which meets St Martin le Grand at right-angles.

'''G.P.O. West''' 
G.P.O - General Post Office

'''pneumatic dispatches''' 
An extensive 'pneumatic dispatch' system existed on London during the Victorian era, started in 1851 and carrying on at least into the 1930's. By 1886 London had 94 telegram tubes totaling 34 1/2 miles and around 4.5 million telegraph messages were carried in cylinders at around 20mph. At its height the network extended some 57 miles connecting 67 branch offices via a central sorting office. See [http://www.capsu.org/history/telegram_conveyors.html] and
[http://www.dself.dsl.pipex.com/MUSEUM/COMMS/pneumess/pneumess.htm] (with illustrations).

'''drill suits''' 
Drill is a durable cotton fabric; khaki drill is used for uniforms.

'''chars''' 
Charwomen. Maids, cleaners.

'''Hundreds of telegraphers''' 
The scene described, including the pneumatic dispatches and the ostensible concern about terrorism, is very similar to one in Terry Gilliam's "Brazil."

'''clicks and rests''' 
Presumably the clicks of a telegraphic system and the rests or silences in between. [[Binarisms_Discussion|Another binarism.]]

'''Northern Temple of Connexion''' 
It's in the north of the City; and the phrase suggests the religious intensity of the need to connect or communicate as well as mildly satirising it.

'''marblework''' 
Such buildings would have used quantities of marble; hence the image of a 'temple' above.

'''Bloggins''' 
An archetypal ordinary man; an everyman figure.

'''allegro vivatchy''' 
phonetic of 'allegro vivace' - a musical term for a quick tempo. If the policeman had been manhandling an English suspect, he would have said "All right then, quick march." An early instance of cultural sensitivity. . . .

==Page 447==

'''grease-paint''' 
'Grease-paint' refers to old-fashioned stage make-up.

'''cylinder of gutta-percha''' 
Pneumatic dispatches were carried in cylinders of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutta-percha Gutta-Percha] -- an inelastic latex made from the sap of the Gutta-Percha tree -- covered in felt. See [http://www.capsu.org/history/telegram_conveyors.html]. Gutta-percha crops up a number of times in ATD, possibly enough to suggest some sort of motif or connection?

Gutta percha per se is a Victorian equivalent to rubber, or rather hard rubber (they knew to use soft latex for erasers, "gum boots" and such). Discovery of the vulcanization process led to replacement of gutta-percha in many applications.

'''its "D" box''' 
The receiving mechanism on the end of pneumatic dispatch pipe.

"The somewhat complicated pattern of double sluice valve originally used at the central stations has been superseded by a simpler form, known as the D box, so named Despatching from the shape of its cross section. This box is of and cast iron, and is provided with a close-fitting, Receiving brass-framed, sliding lid with a glass panel. This Apparatus, lid fits air-tight, and closes the box after a carrier has been inserted into the mouth of the tube; the latter enters at one end of the box and is there bell-mouthed. A supply pipe, to which is connected a 3-way cock, is joined on to the box and allows communication at will with either the pressure or vacuum mains, so that the apparatus becomes available for either sending (by pressure) or receiving (by vacuum) a carrier. Automatic working, by which the air supply is automatically turned on on the introduction of the carrier into a tube and on closing of the D box, and is cut off when the carrier arrives, was introduced in 1909." From the 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica entry on Pneumatic Dispatch, cited at [http://www.dself.dsl.pipex.com/MUSEUM/COMMS/pneumess/pneumess.htm]

'''Holborn''' 
Holborn is between the Strand (at the northern end of Waterloo Bridge) and Bloomsbury.

'''Saffron Hill''' 
is in the City, an area named Farringdon, east of Holborn.

'''''tantum dic verbo'' isn't it''' 
Might be derived from that part of the Mass where it's said: "Domine, non sum dignus, ut intres sub tectum meum: sed '''tantum dic verbo''' et sanabitur anima mea" ("Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof: but '''speak the word''' only, and my soul shall be healed")

Sands seems to be telling Gaspereaux to "just say the word".

'''''intact''''' 
(Did I miss this?)

==Page 448==

'''because I'm mad''' 
Gaspereaux brings news, in overheard fragments, of Shambala intact, able to hold sand away from itself.....which "deranged utterance" [Sands] ....succumbs to a dim local until he, Gaspereaux, can no longer
imagine anything clearly beyond Dover. 
A 'mad' vision becomes local and quotidian.

'''half-sovereign case''' 
A sovereign is old English money for one pound, i.e 20 shillings. A half-sovereign is ten shillings old money.

'''Mr. Campbell-Bannerman''' 
Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (1836-1908) was a Liberal MP and then Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1905 to 1908. I'm not sure when he was knighted; but he's not the only character in the novel connected with Trinity College, Cambridge.

==Page 449==

'''Clarabella''' 
Clarabelle=name of the clown on The Howdy Doody Show [TV] in the fifties.

'''Audacity, Iowa''' 
Seemingly a joking oxymoron?

==Page 450==

'''DREAMTIME MOVY''' 
Misspelling is dreamlike? Or, more possibly, the spelling hadn't yet been standardized.
:The ''OED'' an cites an occurance of this spelling as late as 1919.

'''log... waterfall''' 
This passage anticipates a scene in D. W. Griffith's 1920 film [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Way_Down_East Way Down East] in which Lillian Gish, stranded on an ice-floe, rushes toward a potential demise over the edge of the falls. More specifically, Pynchon is here positing this (fictional) collision between the film (i.e., the diegetic world of the film) and the breaking projector (the non-diegetic world of the film!) as the origin of the... (wait for it) -- CLIFFHANGER.
:What does ''diegetic'' mean, please?
::[http://www.thefreedictionary.com/diegetic Here.]

'''lens-brother''' 
(Like masonic sign?)(Also reminiscent of the lens (the K/kid/d) carries in Delaney's ''Dhalgren'')

'''Powers movement''' 
Around 1897, Nicholas Power improved the "Maltese Cross" used in the Geneva movement; his company sold [http://www.victorian-cinema.net/power.htm projectors] including the "Peerless" and the popular No. 5. The Power or Power[']s movement could not be adapted to sound projection.

'''Geneva''' 
A watch movement also used in film projection. "The Geneva movement is so called because of its use in Geneva watches as a stop wind. The projection on the driving disk acts as the pawl drive, and the concave projections on the lower disc act as stop pawls. This is used at the present time in motion picture machines for moving the film in front of the lens and is known as the intermittent movement."

'''Wilt Flambo''' 
Flambeau = torch (French).

'''acetylene''' 
When the flammable gas was used for illumination, it was often generated on the spot by dripping water onto lumps of calcium carbide.

==Page 451==

'''nitro in the film''' 
Cellulose nitrate was the predecessor to modern photographic films. The nitrate material might be coated with collodion, which served as the substrate to the chemistry that made the image. Nitrate film was/is notoriously flammable.

'''the tip''' 
The audience. Pynchon uses the word many times in ''AtD.''

'''strange relation''' 
Cf GR on calculus.

'''dark perplexity''' 
Cf Gen X?

'''dilapidated portals''' 
See p.406: the West Gate's "two flanking towers of rusticated stone and Gothical aspect... an aspect of terrible antiquity..."

'''queen-of-the-prairie''' 
[http://davesgarden.com/pf/go/68/index.html Meadowsweet,] ''Filipendula rubra,'' wild flower with clusters of pink blooms in midsummer.

'''Geneva''' 
[[#Page_450|See annotation to p. 450.]]

==Page 452==

'''Sempitern''' 
An archaic term meaning 'eternal', a poetic but appropriate name for a river? Echoing "Serpentine," the lake in London's Hyde Park.

'''Sicilians with equal apprehensions for the principle of the vendetta''' 
If the vendetta began when A killed B, couldn't B's son short-circuit the whole thing by going back in time and killing A first? And then who would be responsible for killing the son? Possible application to the Traverse/Vibe/Deuce relationship, too.

'''siegecraft of Time''' 
Cf Paris Commune siege, p.19.

'''to see in its vortex the fundamental structure of everything''' 
A reference to the Yeatsian conception of the gyre as the primary or fundamental form. "'The mind, whether expressed in history or in the individual life, has a precise movement, which can be quickened or slackened but cannot be fundamentally altered, and this movement can be expressed by a mathematical form’ and this form is the gyre." [http://www.yeatsvision.com/Geometry.html] 

More from wikipedia: "The theory of history articulated in A Vision centers on a diagram composed of two conical spirals, one situated inside the other, so that the widest part of one cone occupies the same plane as the tip of the other cone, and vice versa. Around these cones he imagined a set of spirals. Yeats claimed that this image (he called the spirals "gyres") captured contrary motions inherent within the process of history, and he divided each gyre into different regions that represented particular kinds of historical periods (and could also represent the psychological phases of an individual's development). Yeats believed that in 1921 the world was on the threshold of an apocalyptic moment, as history reached the end of the outer gyre (to speak roughly) and began moving along the inner gyre." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Coming_(poem)] 
Cf. the remark, "history is a step-function" in ''V.''. Is the above an
evolution of that remark/vision? http://v.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Chapter_11

'''between Cleveland and Denver''' 
Merle's idiosyncratic choice of endpoints? This helps define where Candlebrow is, though.

'''automorphic functions''' 
Auto= self; same as in autogamy. American Heritage Dict. -morph = Form, structure, function. Self-forming, self-structuring-- or self-organizing as Pynchon says elsewhere in ADT.

The phrase has a specific meaning in mathematics, referring to a generalization of periodic functions.

==Page 453==
'''We thus enter the whirlwind''' 
God is sometimes referred to this way. Often Capitalized, but here the speaker is using it literally, but Pynchon maybe metaphorically?

'''Lobatchevskian''' 
of Nikolai Lobachevsky (1793-1856), a Russian Mathematician, co-founder, with Hungarian mathematician János Bolyai, of non-Euclidean geometry. Born at Nizhny Novgorod and a professor at Kazan University from 1814. In 1829 he published his non-Euclidean geometry paper, the first account of that subject in print.

''Abbreviated Lob''
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lob_bowling Lob bowling]: not related but as it is a cricket thing...

'''Automorphic Dispensation''' 
Self-forming, self-organizing, recurring or periodic dispensation. 
On the meaning of "dispensation" see [[ATD_119-148#Page_128|annotations to p. 128.]]

'''distressing regularity''' 
Explains dilapidation?

'''Thorvald''' 
Scandinavian name from the Old Norse name ''Þórvaldr''. It combines the name "Thor" (thunder) and scandinavian word "valdr" (ruler), to create the meaning "thunder ruler" or "ruler of the thunder". Either would be apt, in this case.

The persisting storm also occurs in ''Mason & Dixon'', in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novel ''Wyrd Sisters'' and in Walter Moers‘ [http://www.amazon.com/13-2-Lives-Captain-Bluebear/dp/1585678449/sr=1-1/qid=1170090170/ref=sr_1_1/002-4941751-7235229?ie=UTF8&s=books "13 1/2 lives of Captain Bluebear"].

'''''thresher dinners''''' 
Hearty communal midday meals for men taking part in harvest. Here a sacrifice to Thorvald.

==Page 454==

'''"gaff"''' 
A deceptive feature like the rabbit-concealing false bottom in a magician's top hat.

'''Giant Airships of 1896 and '7''' 
An early UFO sensation. From November 1896 to the summer of '97, newspapers reported numerous sightings of [http://www.balloonlife.com/publications/balloon_life/9607/airship.htm a large cigar-shaped airship]. The first reports came from Sacramento; the "ship" (or ships) moved from west to east, with [http://www.reall.org/newsletter/v06/n03/illinois-ufo-mania-of-1897.html a big concentration in Illinois.] "Contacts" with the people on board the craft all proved to be hoaxes, and the speed of the ship's travel was a pretty good match for the speed of propagation of phony newspaper stories from town to town.

In the context of ''AtD'' we have to ask: In a world where airships were common by 1893, operated by a sizable community of aeronautics clubs like the Chums of Chance, why would another airship create a sensation in 1896? Who would consider it mysterious?

And ''were'' airships common by 1893? [http://inventors.about.com/od/astartinventions/ss/airship_5.htm This brief account] of the technology in our historical context says that trials date back to mid-century, but practical airships appeared only in 1898.

[http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Image:Mysterious-airship.jpg This artist's conception] is no less imaginative than sketches that appeared in the media in 1896-97. 

I'm guessing airships weren't as common as ''balloons''...

'''Chick''' 
First Chum to appear in non-Chums chapter? Chick is the Chum we know, besides Pugnax if we count him, to have come aboard The Inconvenience from the real world. Another meaning to Counterfly? More earthbound?

==Page 455==

'''Cleveland... trial... Bounce v. Vibe''' 
See p67 & 426

'''Somble, Strool, and Fleshway''' 
[[ATD_26-56#Page_34|See annotations to page 34.]]

''''paranoia querulans'... P.Q.''' 
[[Paranoia_Querulans|Described in the page so titled.]]

'''Hercules''' 
Allusion to Hercules Powder Company, major manufacturer of black powder and other explosives.

'''blasting agent''' 
Just a casual reference to the Hercules product. In a more technical context "blasting agents" are distinguished from "shattering explosives." A blasting agent releases its energy more slowly and produces a heaving action.

'''detonans''' 
That which is detonated - cod latin. Detonans is a present participle, roughly meaning "that detonates" or "detonating".

'''"I'm just another nutty inventor"''' 
Roswell has been discussing his plans to dynamite the Vibe Corp. which has used its power to harrass him. Throughout his work, esp. ''Gravity's Rainbow'', Pynchon has dealt with themes involving the split between elect and preterite, or to use a more simplified phrase, winners and losers. Dynamite offers the small and powerless, the "long-shot opponents of the mills of Capital" referred to earlier in the page, an expression of power of their own. In this way it is like the AK-47 today which has made it far more difficult for powers (e.g. the United States in Iraq) to exert control over populations.

==Page 456==

'''aigrette''' 
Literally an egret or aigrette (or Lesser White Heron); hence a tuft of feathers such as an egret has and hence a spray of gems worn on the head and finally luminous rays seen emerging from the moon in solar eclipses or, to quote the OED, "at the ends of electrified bodies" [[ATD_397-428#Page_405|(see annotation to p. 405.)]]

'''Pencil''' 
To mathematicians, a pencil is a family of geometric objects sharing a common property, such as a collection of lines that pass through a common point. (Of course, constipated mathematicians also find pencils useful for working out logs).

In Romance languages, a mathematic "pencil" is a "bundle" (ESP haz, CAT feix, IT fascio) and a "pencilist" a "feixista" (CAT) or "fascista" (ESP/IT). Merle is playing with something which reminds of Falange Española symbol. A intralinguistic pun or is Merle an underground fascist?

'''equivalent of a shrug''' 
Nice anthropomorphism.

'''I want to know light...take some in my hands...and bring it back''' 
More light-infatuation, but this sounds particularly Promethean to me. Everybody knows Prometheus is famous for stealing fire from the Gods and bringing it to man in his unburnable fennel, but for Pynchoniacs, Zeus' reaction to this is quite interesting. Imaginably, Zeus is pretty pissed, so "to punish Prometheus for this hubris (and all of mankind in the process), Zeus devised 'such evil for them that they shall desire death rather than life'". [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus Wiki] Then he sends Prometheus "to Mount Caucasus, where an eagle (often shown as a vulture) by the name of Ethon (offspring of the monsters Typhon and Echidna) would pick at his liver; it would grow back each day and the eagle would eat it again." Talk about Eternal Return.

Finally "[t]o punish man for the offenses of Prometheus, Zeus told Hephaestus to "mingle together all things loveliest, sweetest, and best, but look that you also mingle therewith the opposites of each." So Hephaestus took gold and dross, wax and flint, pure snow and mud of the highways, honey and gall; he took the bloom of the rose and the toad's venom, the voice of laughing water and the peacocks squall; he took the sea's beauty and its treachery, the dog's fidelity and the wind's inconstancy, and the mother bird's heart of love and the cruelty of the tiger. All these, and other contraries past number, he blended cunningly into one substance and this he molded into the shape that Zeus had described to him. She was as beautiful as a goddess and Zeus named her Pandora which meant "all gifted"." And a little later on Pandora opens her eponymic box and "all suffering and despair" is unleashed upon mankind.

Some judicious readers may remember we've already been to the Pandora Works back on p.297, and we all know what those light-worshiping Alchemists will do with the metals they remove from mines just like it.

'''machinery . . . more complicated than it needs to be''' 
Merle and Roswell, as alchemists, suspect the problem of "moving pictures" may have a solution with fewer moving parts.

'''lost mines''' 
(Factual?) One of the classic "crazy old galoot" figures in Westerns is the deranged sourdough who can't stop talking about the incredibly rich lode he and his partner found and then lost.

==Page 457==

'''tourbillon''' 
A tourbillon is a type of mechanical clock or watch escapement invented in 1795 by Abraham-Louis Breguet that is designed to counter the effects of gravity and other perturbing forces that can affect the accuracy of a chronometer. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourbillon Wikipedia]

Tourbillon is French for "whirlwind" - Thorvald‘s tiny chronometer-cousin.

'''make time impervious to gravity''' 
Thematic to this book and GR?

'''patent pencils''' 
Mechanical or (British) propelling pencils. "Patent" as in patent medicine, patent leather: innovative, gimmicky, making claims of uniqueness. (But the mechanical pencil was invented by a Japanese, HAYAKAWA Tokuji, in 1915, so that these "patent pencils" cannot be mechanical pencils, or this is an anachronism.)

Ebenezer Wood "constructed the first hexagon- and octagon-shaped pencil cases that we have today. Ebenezer did not patent his invention and shared his techniques with whoever asked." from Wikipedia.

'''zephyr gingham''' 
From [http://vintagesewing.info/1920s/26-fcm/fcm-16a.html this site]: gingham: A cotton fabric in checks or stripes nearly alike on both sides. zephyr: Anything light and airy. We have zephyr yarns, zephyr gingham, zephyr tissues.

'''lawn''' 
a thin or sheer linen or cotton fabric, either plain or printed.

'''pongee''' 
silk of a slightly uneven weave made from filaments of wild silk woven in natural tan color or its cotton imitation.

==Page 458==

'''professors... engineers''' 
Theory vs practice.

'''Latinate token of prestige''' 
PhD (''Philosophiae Doctor''), summa cum laude, etc.

'''suspicious of night horizons''' 
(sunsets?)Absence of light horizons? You can't see the horizon at night unless ''something'' is flashing and flaring over beyond it. Townsfolk are traditionally suspicious of strange flickerings in the sky. Fireworks specialists give you a way out: "Oh, Luigi was just trying out a new star shell."

'''current... purity''' 
Free of noise?

'''Minkowski''' 
Hermann Minkowski was a German mathematician who made useful contributions in the development of relativity, amongst other things. Cf [[ATD_318-335#Page 324|page 324]] and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Minkowski] 
Developed the 4 dimensional non Euclidean geometry [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minkowski_space] used in special relativity. In a very crude simplification it says that time and space are the same thing. It all depends on the velocity of the observer, how space and time are mixed. This influenced most of later science fiction on time travels!!! (Like in "Back to the future", where the DeLorean has to reach a certain speed to jump in time.)

'''Three times ten... minus one seconds''' 
Three times ten to the fifth refers to the speed of light. The square root of minus 1 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_unit Wikipedia] is also known as the Imaginary Unit or i. i is sometimes also expressed as the square root of -1, as here. Complex numbers [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_number Wikipedia] can be expressed as a + bi where a is the real part of the complex number and b is the imaginary part. Complex numbers were an important element of the work of both Minkowski and Einstein. Also, for imaginary number Cf [[ATD_119-148#Page 133|page 133]] and complex number Cf [[ATD_119-148#Page 132|page 132]].
 
The use of complex numbers to describe the relativistic space-time metric is somewhat out of fashion in modern physics, it is merely used to make the metric tensor (i.e. "that other expression") symmetrical in all 4 dimensions. So in a way one might see time as an imaginary space axis, but the modern aproach uses an symmetrical metric tensor, which makes the non-Euclidean nature of our space-time more clear.
 
''Against the Day'' takes place at the time when Newtonian physics were being supplanted, at least in theory, by physics based on Relativity. This equation touches on that. But also, the use of a real and an imaginary number returns to the theme of duality that arises throughout the book. The spacetime measured by imaginary or complex numbers would seem to be something different though co-existent with 'our' spacetime.
 
:Minkowski's lecture at Candlebrow is clearly a version of the lecture in which he first set out his interpretation of Special Relativity in terms of four-dimensional geometry, given in Cologne on 21st September, 1908. Pynchon has taken this equation, and Minkowski's description of it as 'pregnant' and 'mystic', directly from the published text of the lecture. The transcription also makes it clear that Minkowksi did indeed use blackboard and chalk. It's in a volume called ''The Principle of Relativity'' by Einstein, Lorentz, Weyl and Minkowski.[[User:SdeB|SdeB]]

'''other expression''' 
Contextually, Roswell seems to be refering to the other side of the above equation...'that other expression 'over there'...they are at a slate "blackboard."

'''he called the equation "pregnant"''' 
Minkowski used the German word ''prägnant,'' which doesn't mean "pregnant." It means concise, precise, penetrating, important.

'''astronomical distance''' 
Small-scale astronomy then: 3x105 km is about two-thirds of the distance from the Earth to the Moon.

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