Thomas Pynchon Wiki - User contributions [en]

ATD 792-820

2008-12-01T06:42:17Z

Martin1: /* Page 793 */

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

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'''Sample entry''' 
Please format like this.

==Page 792==

'''''rishta''-doctors . . . guinea-worms''' 
From the context, ''rishta''-doctors means Guinea worm disease doctors. 
During 12th to 13th centuries the word in Arabic-speaking countries for macaroni was ''rishta'', but the context clearly indicates that it means ''worm'', or specifically, ''Guinea worm''. 
The Guinea worm is a threadlike parasitic worm that grows and matures inside the human body growing as long as 3 feet long. After a year, the worm emerges through a painful blister in the skin causing long-term suffering and sometimes crippling after-effects. People get infected when they drink standing water containing a tiny water flea that is infected with the even tinier larvae of the Guinea worm. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracunculiasis The disease] occurs mainly in Africa. 
Pynchon uses the word "Dracunculiasis" in ''Gravity's Rainbow'' http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=D a-And this use is an OED citation for the word. OED: 1942 D. L. Belding Clin. Parasitol. xxii. 375 Dracunculus medinensis+. Disease.—Dracontiasis, dracunculosis, dracunculiasis. 1967 Amer. Jrnl. Trop. Med. & Hygiene XVI. 23/1 Dracunculiasis occurs commonly in and around Kurnool. 1973 T. Pynchon ''Gravity's Rainbow'' (1975) i. 13 "Dracunculiasis and Oriental sore rampant among the troops, no beer for a month." 1990 Lancet 8 Sept. 630/1 Several studies have reported on the prevalence of permanent disability resulting from poliomyelitis but dracunculiasis (guineaworm disease), another preventable cause of permanent disease, has not received the same attention.

'''drumfire''' 
Intense, continuous artillery fire, characteristic of the bombardments that preceded the attempted advances on the Western Front in World War I. The word is a calque of German ''Trommelfeuer.''

'''to get in out of it''' 
A typo? Should be "to get out of it"?? Not really: this is actually common English usage; for example, "to get in out of the rain."

==Page 793==

'''Tierra del Fuego''' 
Not exactly the other side of the world, but the closest land to that point. Tierra del Fuego translates as "Land of the Fire."

:This may not be suitable as a permanent feature of the wiki, but there is a strange web site where you can click on a location and see what's exactly on the opposite side of the world: http://www.antipodemap.com/

==Page 794==

'''communicate with the explorer Peary, then in the Arctic''' 
Robert Peary did not even leave New York City at the start of his polar expedition until July 6, 1908, 6 days '''after''' the Tunguska Event of 6-30-08, and did not reach Ellesmere Island until the summer of 1909(see[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_Event] section on Wardenclyffe Tower).
: But this was one of the 'theories' around the time and long after attempting to explain the Tunguska Event. See [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event Tunguska event in Wikipedia].

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Peary Robert Peary] (1856-1920) was an American explorer who claimed to have been the first person to reach the geographic North Pole on April 6, 1909. He made several attempts to reach the North Pole between 1898 and 1905. His final assault set off from New York City on july 6, 1908 and wintered near
Cape Sheridan on Ellesmere Island and from there departed for the pole on March 1, 1909. He established Camp Jesup near the Pole on April 6. In his diary for April 7, Peary wrote "The Pole at alst !!! The prize of 3 centuries, ... ''Mine'' at last ..."

'''Tesla . . . his tower at Wardenclyffe''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardenclyffe_Tower Nikola Tesla's Wardenclyffe Tower] (1901-1917) was an early wireless telecommunications aerial tower intended for commercial wireless trans-Atlantic telephony, broadcasting and to demonstrate the transmission of power without interconnecting wire. The tower was named after James Warden, a lawyer and banker, who had purchased the land in Shoreham, Long Island, about 60 miles from Manhattan. The Tesla Tower was never fully operational and was not completed due to economic problems. The property is now owned by [[Q-weapon_and_Photography#gevaert|Agfa-Gevaert]].

Paramorphic Alert: Thursday, June 7, 2007, an [http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-06/miot-mdw060107.php MIT research group headed by Marin Soljacic] is making wireless power transfer happen in their lab. Tesla redux.

'''Ellsmere Island''' 
Commonly spelled [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellesmere_Island Ellesmere Island]. Lying within the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and with Cape Columbia, Ellesmere Island is the most northerly point of land in Canada. With an area of over 75,000 square miles, it is the world's 10th largest island and Canada's third largest.

'''Brother Tom Swift. He spends more time these days in court than in the laboratory.''' 
Tom Swift is the young protagonist in several series of juvenile adventure novels starting in the early twentieth century and continuing to the present. More exactly, each such series stars a young protagonist named Tom Swift who is a genius inventor and whose breakthroughs in technology (especially transport technology) drive the plots of the novels. Besides the similarity (or "brotherhood") between the adventuring youths, the Chums' stories have titles similar to the Tom Swift novels, eg ''Tom Swift and His Motor Boat; or, The Rivals of Lake Carlopa''; ''Tom Swift and His Airship; or, The Stirring Cruise of the Red Cloud''; &c &c.

Although the Tom Swift novels weren't published until 1910 an ''apparent'' anachronism we should remember that Tom Swift, in this context, is as "real" as the Chums of Chance, and thus the events in the first novel, ''Tom Swift and His Motor Cycle; or, Fun and Adventure on the Road'' -- which included patent disputes and lawsuits -- would have "happened" prior to the novel being published.

'''Semipalatinsk''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semey Semipalatinsk] is a city on the Irtysh River, a ''long'' way southwest of Vanavara. Soviet nuclear tests were administered from here.

'''Irbit''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irbit Irbit] is a town in Sverdlovsk Oblast, Russia on the right bank of the Nitsa River. It is located about 120 miles east of Yekaterinburg.

'''''obstanovka''''' 
Russian: situation.

==Page 795==

'''''Zdorovo!''''' 
Russian: If the stress falls on the first syllable it means ''great!''

If the stress falls on the second syllable it means ''hello!''

'''Neutral Moresnet''' 
Tiny "country" between Belgium and Germany; existed 1816-1919; see, oh ''do'' see, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutral_Moresnet Wikipedia entry.] 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Official_use Another Wikipedia article] refers to a plan, early in the 20th century, to declare Esperanto the official language of the country.

'''''tchudak''''' 
Now transliterated ''chudak.'' Russian: crank.

'''Kiakhta''' 
Or [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyakhta ''Kyakhta''], only two syllables. Town on Russian (Buriat)-Mongolian border south of Lake Baikal, a center of Russian trade with China.

'''Not even Russian army does that!''' 
And it cost them dearly in 1914 when intercepted "clear" radio traffic helped the Germans crush them at the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1914_Battle_of_Tannenberg Battle of Tannenberg.]

==Page 796==

'''By dusk . . . running-lights''' 
An enigma. The ordinary way of analyzing it: Make a model, say a flashlight, an orange and a toothpick mooring line with a raisin balloon at the top. As the orange rotates toward the east and the flashlight appears to set in the west, what gets dark first? The base of the toothpick, the shadow progressing upward. But the text says the raisin does, the shadow arc moving downward.

It's very curious that immediately following this apparently topsy-turvy paragraph Miles says "As above, so below." Significant?

:I hope nobody minds having most of this quite good conversation moved to [[Talk:ATD_792-820|the Discussion tab]] (and a spoiler added there).

'''Slowly as God's justice''' 
Must be noted given title and everything religious in ATD.

==Page 797==

'''upriver from Vanavara''' 
"Ground zero" of the Event was 40 miles north of Vanavara. Cf [[ATD_768-791#Page_779|page 779: A heavenwide blast of light.]]

'''"simultaneity" . . . Special Relativity''' 
Einstein's special theory of relativity (1905) refutes the idea that two observers seeing two events can ever agree on whether the events were simultaneous. Adopters of the theory (and in 1908 they were all ''early'' adopters) would be asking one another if it applied to this phenomenon.

'''the error of the seismograph recordings . . . singularity''' 
"Error" doesn't mean mistake or wrongness. It measures the variability within each instrument; every measurement comes with a plus-or-minus figure. If the Event happened instantaneously, each of the charts would record it as a more or less spread-out peak. The energy released in a process is calculated from the area under the curve of intensity versus time; to get the power (rate of energy release), divide the energy by the duration of the process. Even though he states the math wrongly, Vanderjuice suspects the seismographs of the world have responded to a titanic release of energy that took place in essentially no time at all, so that power = energy divided by zero. When physicists see a ''real'' process apparently demanding division by zero, they call it a singularity and go looking for an explanation.

'''the equations of history''' 
Perhaps an allusion to Isaac Asimov's ''Foundation Trilogy'', in which the Psychohistorian Harry Selden calculates equations of history. His equations are (seemingly) thrown off by the advent of a mutant with unusual powers that his predictive equations do not take into account--not unlike the advent of the Tunguska Event.

'''Tchernobyl, the star of Revelation''' 
Tchernobyl is the Ukraine translation (perhaps mistranslation) for Wormwood "the destroying star in the book of Revelation" (page 784). And, as we all know, in 1986 there was a a nuclear meltdown of the Ukranian city Chernobyl.

'''something that had not quite happened yet''' 
In short, an Omen. The Tunguska Event could be seen as an omen of the destructive forces unleashed over the entire course of the 20th Century.

'''Circassian slave''' 
Common figure in European literature about the "Lustful Turk." Circassia is a region in the Caucasus. 

In the early 1860s, after Russian conquest of their region of the Caucasus, nearly half a million Circassians migrated to Turkey. Many Circassian women, prized for their beauty, were sold into slavery.

'''teppisti''' 
Italian: hooligans, hoodlums, thugs

==Page 798==

'''Krakatoa''' 
Cf [[ATD_489-524#Page_506|page 506: Krakatoa]].

'''''mala vita''''' 
Italian: evil life. With more specific reference to Mafia style criminal organizations like the Malavita del Brenta of Venice. There is also a genre of songs glorifying Mafia life called canto di Malavita.

'''brides picotees''' 
A Venetian lace with a hexagonal pattern. French: tickle straps

==Page 799==

'''"Bevis Moistleigh"''' 
Bevis Mostly? Bevis Wetly?
Cf. Sir Bevis from Lang's Red Romance Book around this time. Or a Twilight Zone story, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twilight_Zone/Mr._Bevis Mr. Bevis 1960]. 
Or, see later in ''AtD'', Bevis is an allusion to Beavis & Butthead. ([[Idiots and Idiocy in Against the Day|Idiot]])

Possibly, given what follows, an allusion to the Bevis Marks Synagogue in London, oldest extant Jewish house of worship in Britain [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bevis_Marks_Synagogue], but more likely a reference to (p.800)''Bevis,the Story of a Boy.''

'''''macchinette''''' 
Italian for small devices.

'''Glagolitic alphabet''' 
See excellent annotation to [[ATD_243-272#Page_252|page 252]] and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_alphabet this].

'''gematria''' 
As described in the text, each letter of the Hebrew alphabet is also a number. In the simplest form of Gematria, words, phrases and sentences with eqivalent numerical value are somehow linked, in a way promoting exegesis of Torah and Midrash (Torah commentary). More complex, mystical gematria systems are described in [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gematria].
Not strictly gematria, but, there is also the so-called "Bible Code" based on another sort of numerical reading of Torah.

==Page 800==

'''''fatkeqëse''''' 
Albanian: translated in the text as "disaster." Is this correct?

'''gongs''' 
Medals.

'''Irredentism''' 
A policy appealing to the idea that "our" lands are unredeemed, i.e., ruled by some outsider, and must be brought into our domain. See annotation to "Eurasia Irredenta" ([[ATD_748-767#Page_761|page 761).]]

'''''Bevis . . . the Story of a Boy''''' 
Theign taunts Bevis with the title of a popular novel, ''Bevis, the Story of a Boy'' (1882), by Richard Jefferies.

This contributor, with a keen sense of sacrifice for the greater good, actually ''read'' the three-volume novel. Jefferies writes in a good plain style but seems not to have thought of putting a plot in his book. Bevis, of what would later be recognized as Boy Scout age, spends several hundred pages of a southern English summer exploring and naming the world within a dozen miles of his home (Africa, Ceylon, the East Indies, South America are all there). He is rich and has, sadly, what we must call criminally negligent parents who don't even look for him when he vanishes into the South Seas for a week at a time. Most of the highlights of the book concern Bevis' killing some creature (to eat it, more often than not) or kicking his faithful dog Pan. Bevis doesn't know the meaning of fear, and my guess is that he went into the Army and got his self-reliant head blown off in South Africa. If ''Bevis'' shares any thematic point with ''AtD'' it is pretty well limited to geographic exhaustiveness; his journeys of exploration are set forth in as much detail as any of the Traverses'.

Bevis takes his name from a hero of [http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Romance medieval romance,] [http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/cinder/images/LANG12.htm Sir Bevis of Hampton.]

==Page 801==

'''unprovided for in the future tense of any language''' 
I.e., we have no simple way to describe future events in a chaotic system. You can't say that Chinese butterfly '''will''' cause a windstorm in Brazil.

'''High susceptibility to primordial variables''' 
Chaos theorists talk about "extreme sensitivity to initial conditions."

'''"an emigration of reason itself".......Crusade"''' 
Notice war talk and natural destruction around the Event. 
As well, the Crusades were a series of western European Christian attacks on Islam, the Mideast (with the establishment of Crusader Kingdoms), and even Christian Byzantium/Constantinople, linking the text to 19th and 20th century Imperialist ventures. For a map of the medieval kingdoms, see [http://www.medievaltymes.com/courtyard/images/crusades/first/crusader_states.jpg]

'''Railway Brain''' 
A recognized disorder at one time, explained in the text following in AtD.

==Page 802==

'''croakers''' 
Slang: [http://www.classiccrimefiction.com/hardboiled-slang.htm doctors, especially quacks.]

Also: One who croaks, murmurs, grumbles, or complains
unreasonably; one who habitually forebodes evil.

The doctors (performing ''curative activities'' to earn their fees but not really curing anything) feel they are putting one over on everybody else.

'''radioactive mud-bath slime''' 
Treatment with naturally radioactive waters from hot springs was thought to cure many ailments. An example of a radioactive hot spring resort in Austria is Badgastein.

'''Mentone''' 
Mentone, Italy or across the border, Menton (Italian name ''Mentone''), France, in the Riviera. In fact there was no Menton, France, for a long time until 1860 the former Grimaldi town of Mentone, Italy, was bought by France. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menton Menton] is much better known than Mentone; this small town on the Franco-Italian border, about 45 miles northeast of Nice, is the most beautiful town on the French Riviera—''La perle de la France'' (The Pearl of France). It's warm climate makes it a favorite tourist destination. Menton is also a city of gardens; it won the competition for the best city of flowers in France five different times.

'''...an evening sky which had refused the dusk...''' 
Inverse of Against the Day?

'''the boulevard Carnolès''' 
There is a ''Palais Carnolès'' at 3 Avenue de la Madone, Menton (or ''Mentone''). But couldn't locate the Boulevard Carnolès. 
-Carnolès is a village that's just outside Menton, and though there is no boulevard Carnolès, it might refer to the street leading to Carnolès.

'''Mariahilf''' 
The Sixth District of Vienna, known as a shopping district.

==Page 803==

'''midinettes''' 
salesgirls (of Paris).

'''Facharbeiter''' 
German: technician, specialist, skilled worker.

'''Gabika''' 
"Cute" double diminutive for the Hungarian male name Gábor (Gabriel) and also, more commonly, for the female name Gabriella. The ambiguity (also his looks) fits finely the subversion of gender roles in his relationship to Noellyn Fanshawe.
*Wouldn't it be his relationship to Yashmeen? [[User:Jpicco|Jpicco]] 13:16, 11 April 2007 (PDT)

==Page 804==

'''Maida Vale''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maida_Vale Maida Vale] is a street in north-west London. The area, also known as Little Venice, is mostly residential and often extremely affluent.

'''eleven''' 
Vienna is 86 degrees west of the Event, more or less. Converting longitude to time at 15 degrees = 1 hour, we get a time difference of 5 hours 44 minutes. At 7:17 a.m. Event time, it was 1:33 a.m. in Vienna. Now, at 11:00 p.m. the same day, Vienna time, it is 21 hours and 27 minutes after the event. The atmospheric effect has propagated west (possibly against the high-level winds?) from Siberia to Central Europe in quite a short time. All these numbers are rough!

==Page 805==

'''prepare them against the day''' 
Here the phrase means "in anticipation of" or "to be ready for." 
And more. Thematic.
Given what has been said about the Tunguska Event, colored by accounts of the atmospheric effects of the Krakatoa eruption, highly suggestive of Judgment Day.

I shoulda been keepin' notes, dammit! I am sure that regularly through the book I have been spotting deliberate sentences ending with "... ''something'' the day"...but not, until now, with "''against'' the day". And a few score pages ago I'm sure there was a sentence what ended w' "...against the night...", then Tunguska happens, and we now need to be wary o'the day..?

I didn't catch occurrences of "the day" but I did catch a lot of "against the..." Of course I noticed it about halfway through. I would like to read it again and make note of all of the things against some other thing. Also, I believe this is the only place in the book where the title occurs. But then, I do have 6 pages left.

:I wouldn't get too hung up on that. You can find 'em all, but then what? Pynchon loves red herrings. More interesting to track more oblique references to the title, some of which are on the [[Against the Day Title#Title References Oblique and Otherwise|Title Speculations page]]

==Page 806==

'''Toward the end of October all Hell broke loose . . . annex Bosnia''' 
The Bosnian Crisis began with the fear on the part of Austria-Hungary of possible reverses of Turkish concessions since the Russo-Turkish War of 1878 by the newly-resurgent Young Turk movement. The answer to this was annexation of Bosnia, which it had ruled as a colony since 1878. Knowing such a move would be opposed by Serbia, in turn supported by Russia, the Austrians offered to support the right of Russia to move warships through the Bosporus, and to support a declaration of independence from Turkey by Bulgaria. This provoked a general crisis [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_Crisis] from which Serbia had to back down, lacking Russian support. All had been settled in secret meetings in the months before; the Bulgarian (Glagolitic) traffic intercepted by Bevis Moistleigh, above, is thus explained. So is the sense of Grand Conspiracy; all the Great Powers were eventuallly involved. 
See [http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/boshtml/bos127.htm The Annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1908.]

Brigitte Hamann in her book ''Hitler's Vienna'' writes:
"Diplomatic observers explained [the annexation] as an attempt 'to help the country get over its internal calamity'....To be sure, the real reason was indeed a patriotic one: annexing Bosnia and Herzegovina was meant to be an anniversary present to the old emperor [1908 marked the 60th annivesary of FJ's reign]. After all, in wars that had brought much loss, the empire had become smaller and smaller during Franz Josef's reign...Now the empire finally was supposed to become larger again for a change, in a way that was erroneously deemed simple. The consequences of such a step on European politics were vastly underestimated, and preparation for the annexation was flawed on an interntational level." ''Hitler's Vienna'', p. 104. [[User:Sideming|Sideming]]

'''coconut-shy''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coconut_shy A coconut shy] (or coconut shie) is a traditional game frequently found as a sidestall at funfairs and fêtes. The game consists of throwing wooden balls at a row of coconuts balanced on posts. Typically a player buys three balls and wins each coconut successfully dislodged. In some cases other prizes may be won instead of the coconuts.
The origins of the game are unclear, although the term is first listed in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1903.
The word 'shy' in this context is a colloquial English term, meaning 'to throw' or toss.

'''šljivovica''' 
One of the spellings of this word for plum brandy (also slivovica, slivovitz, etc.). Serbian culture (perhaps others) seems to attribute almost nationalist cultural significance to the drink (the contributor is Serbian-American).

'''one to fifty million . . . mile-to-the-inch sheets''' 
Two extremes of mapmaking. A 1:50,000,000 map of the United States would fit comfortably on a page of ''AtD'' with most of Mexico and several Canadian provinces. Austria-Hungary at that scale would be about as big as your two thumbprints side by side.

The British Ordnance Survey produced a famous series of inch-to-the-mile sheets (1:63,360); the detail is about fine enough to show the left-turn lane of a city street. At this scale it would take some 200 unhandily large sheets to cover Austria-Hungary.

'''F.O.''' 
Foreign Office: the British equivalent of the US State Department.
Also found in ''V.''

'''Decisions of the utmost gravity''' 
that lead to Gravity's rainbows'''

==Page 807==

'''Major B. F. Vumb''' 
Major Bum Fuck Vumb, as in Dumb? Another Pynchonian V-name
with the usual associations.

'''''Judensau''''' 
German: Jewish pig.

'''the Vienna Woods''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wienerwald The Vienna Woods] is a low, wooded section of the Alps in eastern Lower Austria and far into the city of Vienna, covering over nearly 390 square miles and including the northermost parts of the entire Alpine chain. It is a favourite outdoor destination for people living around Vienna.

'''Christian Socialists . . . Dr. Karl Lueger''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Lueger Karl Lueger] (pronounced in three syllables, LOO eh ger) (1844-1910) was a Viennese politician, Burgomeister (mayor) of Vienna, and founder of the anti-Semitic Christian Social Party. He was a role model for Adolf Hitler.

'''Burgomeister''' 
This is the English form of the German Burgermeister -- mayor.

'''Reichsrath''' 
Austrian parliament.

'''''Wer Jude ist, bestimme ich''''' 
German: as translated in text.
Lueger used anti-Semitism as the rocket fuel to launch and maintain his political career, yet he himself had Jewish friends and backers. When confronted on this point his retort was this line -- essentially meaning the opposite of how it is used in the text. Instead of non-Jews being labelled Jews indiscriminately, Lueger meant it in the sense that his Jewish friends were ''not'' Jews -- and therefore exempt from persecution. His anti-Semitism was based on religion, not race -- which Hitler later faulted as leading to a situation where Jews would convert in name only.

'''''der schöne'' Karl''' 
German: the handsome, or the nice, Karl. Deeply sarcastic.

==Page 808==

'''"Well actually . . ."''' 
Shanghai, which because of its international status did not require a passport or visa for entry, would become a refuge for Jews made stateless by Nazi Germany or were otherwise refugees in the 1930s. Many tens of thousands were able to reach it, and survived the war and the Holocaust under Japanese occupation. Large numbers reached it using so-called Sugihara Passports, letters of transit issued by the Japanese vice-consul to Lithuania in 1940, with the connivance of Dutch diplomats[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugihara]. Obviously an anachronism, but actually...this is about portents and other bends in Time, perhaps things that echo up and down the Timelines (ours and alternates).

'''Graz''' 
Cf [[ATD_489-524#Page_519|page 519: Graz]].

'''Elefant Hotel''' 
The only listed Elefant Hotel in Austria, a building described as "ancient", is in Salzburg, not Graz; it is currently a Best Western. There is also a Hotel Elefant in Prague, once part ot the Empire; perhaps there was a chain?

'''. . . common Anglo-Habsburg interests...''' 
All the Great Powers found ways to benefit from the Bosnian Crisis, perhaps explaining Theign providing Italian naval decodes to the Austrians. Or, as Latewood accuses below, he is a double agent; McHugh is at least suspicious here. Either way, sending Latewood and Moistleigh on a suicide mission to Bosnia is one way to cover his tracks.

'''Murgasse''' 
Street in Graz. The Murgasse was first mentioned in a document from 1346. The part of town to the south was occupied by the farmers.
Murgasse
8490 Bad Radkersburg, Austria

==Page 809==

'''the Treaty of Berlin''' 
Cf [[ATD_489-524#Page_495|page 495: the Treaty of Berlin]].

'''Novi Pazar''' 
Novi Pazar also figures briefly in ''GR'' (P.14-15, Viking eds.): "...on this obscure sanjak had once hinged the entire fate of Europe" The Novi Pazar desk is manned by Lord Blatherard Osmo. The crisis passed, but Lord Osmo has an adenoid, and this mucoid "lymphatic monster", now independently alive in 1939, is confronted by an agent of The Firm (an outfit very like its temporal predecessor the T.W.I.T. in its interests in the paranormal) , one "Pirate" Prentice; it is "now as big as St Paul's and growing by the hour" threatening all London, but confined successfully--leading to Lord Osmo's neglect of Novi Pazar...A bizarre satiric experience of Crisis Management by Great Power foreign ministries, and the literally sticky mess they created. Currently, some obscure ex-Ottoman sanjaks, cobbled together as Iraq in 1919, are something of a hinge of history; another paramorphic mirroring of 1900/2000.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novi_Pazar Novi Pazar] is now a city of Serbia, about 110 miles directly south of Belgrade. Its name means "a new bazaar" in the local language. It was administered by Austria-Hungary from 1878 to 1908, and by Turkey (Ottoman Empire) from 1908 to 1912, and by Serbia 1912 to now.

'''Constantinople''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantinople Constantinople] was the capital of the Roman Empire (330-395), the Byzantine Empire (395-1204 and 1261-1453), the Latin Empire (1204-1261) and the Ottoman Empire (1453-1922). It is strategically located between the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara on the Bosphorous Strait. It extends both on the European (Thrace) and on the Asian (Anatolia) side of the Bosphorus, and is thereby the only metropolis in the world which is situated on two continents. It was officially renamed to Istanbul in 1930.

'''the Young Turks with their revolution''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Turks The Young Turks] was a coalition of various reform groups in favor of reforming the administration of Ottoman Empire. Their movement brought about the second constitutional era through a revolution against the monarchy. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Turk_Revolution The Young Turk Revolution] of 1908 restored the suspended parliament and was a landmark in the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. The Revolution arose from the Ottoman peoples' near-universal opposition to the tyranny and corruption of the Sultan, which forged an unlikely union of reform-minded pluralists, Turkish nationalists, and Western-oriented secularists.

'''the vile Aerenthal''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alois_Lexa_von_Aehrenthal Aloys (or Alois) von Aerenthal] (1854-1912), Austrian foreign minister (1906-1912) who engineered the annexation of Bosnia in 1908.

'''in three-quarter time''' 
Waltzes are in 3/4 time and so the national powers are waltzing into a European war. Note the chain-like sliding/closing/turning step sequence in Viennese Waltz, and also the rhythm itself represented by the repeated dactyl "and so on, and so on".

Two plausible references: events driven by Vienna, the world's waltz capital, and a dark comic song recorded by the Kingston Trio in the 1960s: "Merry Minuet." In 3/4 time, it includes lyrics commenting on ethnic hatred, irredentism and inevitable nuclear catastrophe.

In fact, the sequence of events described here as a possibility in 1908 were realized in 1914, when Russia, in the crisis provoked by a Serbian youth group's assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, this time backed Serbia, resulting in the cascade of troop mobilizations that became World War I.

'''Mitrovitsa''' 
A Serbian town near the Turkish-Serbian border (now in Kosovo), about 25 miles southeast of Novi Pazar and 140 miles southeast of Sarajevo. The full Serbian name now is Kosovska Mitrovica, the Albanian name is Mitrovicë, and the population is mostly Albanian nowadays. (Some precognition about Novi Pazar.)

'''a railroad link from Sarajebo to Mitrovitsa, and thus to the Ægean Sea''' 
A railroad of 210 miles long linking Mitrovitsa (Turkish-Serbian border) throuhg Skopje (Macedonia) to Salonica (Greece) by the Ægean Sea alredy existed since December 1874.

'''Isvolsky''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Izvolski Alexander Petrovich Izvolsky] (Izvolski, Izvolskii) (1856-1919), Russian foreign minister (1906-1910), a major architect of the Anglo-Russian Entente, who on September 15, 1908, traded Bosnia-Herzegovina to Austria in exchange for Austria's help in opening the Bosporus and Dardanelles to Russian ships. Pynchon's spelling may well be from a contemporary source; consistent transliteration is a more recent fetish.

'''Grey''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Grey,_1st_Viscount_Grey_of_Fallodon Sir Edward Grey] (1862-1933), British Foreign Secretary 1905-16. He was the other major architect of the Anglo-Russian Entente (1907).

'''The Dardanelles''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dardanelles The Dardanelles], an international waterway, is a narrow strait in northwestern Turkey connecting the Aegean Sea to the Sea of Marmara. It separates Europe (Gallipoli peninsula) and the mainland of Asia. With the Bosporus, Dardanelles connects the Black Sea to the Mediterranean Sea.
Talk about a hinge of history! The Dardanelles were the site of the Trojan War; Troy being located on the western, Asian side of the strait.
Xerxes and Alexander marched through. It has figured in the Napoleonic Wars, the Crimean War and is the site of the Battle of Gallipoli in WWI.

==Page 810==

'''It's like having the lights brought up for a bit...''' 
As the crisis wound down to war in 1914, Sir Edward Grey (still Foreign Minister) is famously quoted as having said, "The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime."[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Grey,_1st_Viscount_Grey_of_Fallodon]

'''Vlado Clissan''' 
His name comes from his hometown of Clissa, but this is the Italian name of the place. In Serbo-Croatian it is ''Klis.'' A pseudonym?

'''Blutwurst Special''' 
German: blood sausage.

'''toad-in-the-hole''' 
a traditional British dish. It consists of sausages in Yorkshire pudding batter, usually served with vegetables and gravy.

==Page 811==

'''"iron convergences and receding signal-lamps"''' 
our 'free choices' in . . . life; so ironic at this point.

Kurt Vonnegut, in ''Slaughterhouse Five'', described the human point of view as from consciousness strapped to a railroad car, forever facing only backward; from this vantage, history looks single and inevitable, whereas in reality the train of history is moving over unknown numbers of (from this perspective unseen) switch points, the settings of which are in fact changeable (the more complex view being taken by an extraterrestrial species, the Tralfamadorians, who can see forward to the many possibilities), alternate histories possible at every switch. The character Pointsman in ''GR'' in some ways embodies these possibilities.

'''The Semmering tunnel''' 
It refers to the Semmering mountain-peak tunnel of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmering_Railway the Semmering Railway]. The tunnel, with a length of 4,700 ft, was opened on May 15, 1854. (A new Semmering tunnel, through the mountain base, was built in 1952). The Semmering Railway, having a total of 15 tunnels, is a part of the Austrian Souther Railway (Südbahn) connecting Vienna to Trieste. The world's first mountain railway with a standard gauge, it was built between 1848 and 1854 and is now a UNESCO World Heritage site.

'''the Mur Valley''' 
The valley of the Mur River which, about 300 miles long, runs through the south-central Austria, northeast Slovenia and northern Croatia, where it flows into the Drava River. The biggest city in the Mur Valley is Graz, Austria.

'''Slavonian''' 
Today the name applies to the eastern part of Croatia, but a map will confirm that the route passes through the Slovenian plain. Writers before the World War must have had difficulty keeping Slovenia, Slovakia and Slavonia straight, especially since all were inhabited by Slavonic peoples.

'''the Slavonian plain''' 
The Slavonian plain (actually the historical region called Srem/Srijem/Sirmium minus the Fruška Hills) is an agricultural lowland in eastern Croatia and beyond. It is part of the larger Pannonia plain. It is bounded by the Papuk Mountains in the west, the river Drava in the north, the Sava in the south, and the Danube in the east. It was part of Croatia-Slavonia until 1918; the eastern section now belongs to Serbia.

'''Ljubljana''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ljubljana Ljubljana] is the capital of Slovenia. It is also the cultural and economical center of the country. It is located in central Slovenia.

'''the Karst''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kras The Karst] is a limestone borderline plateau region of southwestern Slovenia and northeastern Italy. It rises quite steeply above the neighboring landscape and is famous for its caves including Vilenica in Slovenia, the oldest tourist cave in the world. In addition to caves, erosion has produced in the Karst fissures, sinkholes and underground streams.

'''Općina''' 
A village about 4 miles northeast of Trieste.

'''the Piazza Grande''' 
Trieste's central square, a great rectangle lined on three sides by stately imperial buildings, its fourth, short side, revealing the Adriatic sea.

'''the Piazza Cavana''' 
Trieste's "Nighttown" before World War I.

'''Austrian double''' 
Latewood, in light of Theign's treatment of Yashmeen, and the apparent passing of Italian naval decrypts to Austria, accuses Theign of being an Austrain double agent.

==Page 812==

'''a Fortuny gown''' 
[http://www.chick.net/proust/fortuny.html Mariano Fortuny] (1871-1949), a Spanish fashion designer worked mostly in Venice, created some of the most remarkable fabrics and dresses of 20th century. His pleated silk gowns and velvet cloaks are regarded by collectors and museums around the world as the unique expression and embodiment of a craft at its best. He was one of the source of inspiration to Marcel Proust.

'''Mestre Bridge''' 
Mestre is a town in Veneto, northern Italy, a frazione of the comune of Venice. Located on the mainland,the city is connected to Venice by a large rail and road bridge, called Ponte della Libertà (Freedom Bridge). Cf [[ATD_695-723#Page_706|Page 706: Mestre bridge]].

'''Cloisters Court''' 
Cf [[ATD_489-524#Page_490|page 490: Cloisters Court]].

'''King's''' 
Cf [[ATD_489-524#Page_497|page 497: King's]]

==Page 813==

''''And England's far, and honour a name'''' 
Cyprian quoting from the 1897 poem [[Vitai Lampada|"Vitaï Lampada"]] ("They Pass the Torch of Life") by Sir Henry Newbolt (1862-1938), previously quoted on page 236 [[ATD_219-242#Page_236|(also see annotation)]]. (Discussed in this wiki's article by Peter Vernon, [[Cricket in Against the Day|It Just Isn't Cricket: Cricket As Metaphor in ''Against the Day'']])

Cf. "Cricket is 'chess made flesh'"--John Fowles

'''"honour"''' 
Cf. Falstaff on.

'''the Caffè degli Specchi''' 
Trieste was one of the first European cities took to coffee in a big way.
It is the leading coffee port on the Mediterranean and is renowned for its cafes and coffee. The first coffe houses in Trieste opened at the beginning of the 18th century. They become very popular with artists and intellecturals. Several of the original coffe houses are still going strong; the Caffè degli Specchi, located in the Piazza Unità d'Italia and opened since 1839, is one of them.

==Page 814==

'''Lateeners''' 
A lateener is a boat with a lateen sail: a triangular sail with one edge tied to a long spar, which is supported in the middle on a mast.

'''''Strichmädchen''''' 
German: streetwalker, hooker, prostitute.

'''LLoyd Austriaco''' 
A ship line. Lloyd Triestino was formed in 1919 as the successor to Lloyd Austriaco following the incorporation of Trieste into the Kingdom of Italy on January 3rd 1919.

'''Molo San Carlo''' 
A pier (''molo'') in Trieste. See [http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Molo_San_Carlo.jpg Molo San Carlo']picture around 1900.

==Page 815==

'''"Nimrod" . . . from Elgar's ''Enigma Variations''''' 
"Nimrod" is the ninth section of this major 1899 work by English composer Edward Elgar (1857-1934). Like the other 13 sections, it characterizes a family friend; this one is A. J. Jaeger (whose name means "hunter" in German, hence "Nimrod," the name of a hunter mentioned in the Bible). [http://www.elgar.org/3enigma.htm Here is a very good description of the work and "Nimrod" in particular.]

The "Nimrod" variation is perhaps the most poignant of the piece; it rises to a cresendo and slowly, sadly, fades; an anthem for the fading of the 19th century.

'''"La Gazza Ladra"''' 
Overture by Rossini to an opera whose title means "The Thieving Magpie." It is as bright and impersonal as "Nimrod" is serious and sentimental.

''Gazza'' (Italian) specifically identifies the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Magpie European Magpie] (''Pica pica''), while ''magpie'' designates any of a dozen species.

'''"The Volga Boatmen" . . . "Auld Lang Syne"''' 
The puzzle in the "Enigma" Variations is this: Variations are based on a theme, but Elgar never states the theme; what is the melody? These are two of the popular guesses.

'''Gonzalo''' 
Gonzalo who?

Probably not the elderly adviser shipwrecked in ''The Tempest,'' by Shakespeare, considering the in-joke connection to Millicent.

It's a stretch, but some searching turns up a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millicent_Silver Millicent Silver] and a [http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzalo_Soriano Gonzalo Soriano], two among many musicians on a series of recordings by Victoria De Los Angeles of songs of Spain. Otherwise no connection between them.

'''Millicent''' 
? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millicent_Fawcett Millicent Fawcett] (1847-1929), a British suffragist and an early feminist. Is this the right person?

'''Δt''' 
Mathematical symbol used to represent a short length of time.

In addition, Pynchon is very concerned with dt,(little delta-t) the time differential, an infinitesimal change in time; to quote Pynchon from ''Lot 49'' (Lippincott, 1965 p.129): "a vanishingly small instant in which change had to be confronted at last for what it was, where it could no longer disguise itself as something innocuous like an average rate; where the velocity dwelled in the projectile though the projectile be frozen in midflight, where death dwelled in the cell though the cell be looked in on at its most quick." But, the paragraph goes on, "dt" also suggests DTs, Delirium Tremens (alcohol withdrawal) a state giving access to hallucinatory experiences, "spectra beyond the known Sun, music made purely of Antarctic loneliness and fright." Which is the general mood in the wake of the Tunguska Event and the Bosnian Crisis, or should be, if the characters were not so dutifully repressing it. (In ''Lot 49'' the realization of the dt/DTs connection has to do with Oedipa Maas' realization of the finality of death, and what inaccessible realms of experience are lost with each individual's death).

:Are you confusing Δ''t'', symbolizing a finite duration, with ''dt,'' a duration shrunk to an infinitesimal? 
(Possibly--my physics/calculus may be rusting. The connection may still hold; note emendation above--thanks. Edit further if necessary!).

'''Davos''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davos Davos] is a municipality in the eastern part of Switzerland. A popular destination for the rich and ailing because its high valley climate has long been considered excellent by doctors for curing lung desease. It is the setting of Thomas Mann's ''The Magic Mountain''. Davos is famous as the host of the World Economic Forum, an annual meeting of global political and business elites.

'''Föhn''' 
German. [http://www.bom.gov.au/lam/glossary/fpagegl.shtml#fo Wind] warmed and dried by descent on the lee side of a mountain. Germans even today acknowledge that its presence (say, in Munich) affects mood and emotions.

'''co-conscious with the everyday''' 
again. Linked to creativity here.

'''Ramanujan's Formula''' 
an elegant hyperbolic summation, Ramanujan's formula for the Riemann zeta function evaluated at the odd positive integers. Cf [[ATD_489-524#Page_498|page 498: Rumanujan]] didn't come to the attention of Western mathematicians until he wrote to Hardy in late 1912 - early 1913 and travelled to Cambridge in 1914. Is Yashmeen prescient?

==Page 816==

'''''dolce far niente''''' 
Italian: sweet idleness (literally, sweet to do nothing).

'''divided second''' 
A dt.

'''of his entry''' 
Vlado the Impaler?

'''the Karst''' 
Cf [[ATD_792-820#Page_811|page 811: the Karst]]. 
Generic "karst topography" takes its name from this area of Slovenia and Italy (locally called ''kras'' and ''carso''). The terrain features limestone with fissures and cavities eroded by water. Caves as well as underground streams and lakes are common.

'''''osmizza''''' 
These are informal eating places out in rural areas, where farmers sell their meats, cheeses, olives and wines.

'''Illyria''' 
The Roman province in which modern Trieste is located.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illyria Illyria] was in Clssical antiquity a region in the western part of today's Balkan Peninsula, found by the tribes and clans of Illyrian, an ancient people who spoke the Illyrian languages. Illyria was a formidable local power in the 4th century BC, only after the Roman conquest in 168 BC did Illyria become one of the Roman provinces, Illyricum. In the context "ancient before Illyria" referrs to the period before the Roman conquest.

==Page 817==

'''quiet spaces between trams, unpredictable, even, she imagined, mathematically so''' 
An observation that might have seemed "foreign" to mathematics at the time she made it. A [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_distribution Poisson distribution] expresses the probability that a specific number of trams arrive during a given time interval but cannot determine the exact arrival time of the next tram. The length of the "quiet space" varies in a ''chaotic'' way—which doesn't at all mean that the transit system is random.

The appearance of "chaos theory" in the second half of the 20th century provided a vehicle for interpreting the process, and observations like that of the trams were incorporated into mathematics. Two familiar "rhythms" have this quality of chaotic intervals: the beating of the human heart and the sound of water dripping from a faucet. The second part of the phrase is subtle: the time of the next tram/thud/drip can't be mathematically predicted (to arbitrary accuracy), but it is possible to describe in mathematical terms the ''way'' in which it's unpredictable. James Gleick's [http://www.around.com/chaos.html ''Chaos, Making a New Science,''] is just one of the good sources on this new theory.

'''never farther than half a block from the counter-soporific fluid''' 
Perhaps an allusion or parallel to the 21st century ubiquity of Starbucks.

:Cf [[ATD_792-820#Page_813|page 813: the Caffe degli Specchi]].

'''''Svr šavam!''''' 
Croatian/Serbian: I'm finishing. Here it means ''I'm coming''. Should be: ''Svršavam.''

'''Velebit''' 
Cf [[ATD_318-335#Page_326|page 326: Velebit]].
A ridge that runs parallel to the Croatian Adriatic coast a few tens of miles south of Trieste. Lying a short distance inland, it is made up of limestone karst.

==Page 818==

'''Zengg''' 
Cf [[ATD_695-723#Page_697|page 697: Zengg]].

'''Veglia''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krk_(island) Veglia], the second largest Adriatic island, is a Croatian island (''Krk'') in the northern Adriatic Sea, located near Fiume.

'''persisted from day to day''' 
The image again of the storm that retains its identity over a long time.

'''Stationary waves''' 
Crests and troughs that don't move. Seen more often where water is flowing (up/downstream of rocks in rapids), but also where waves coming onshore interact with those reflected from the shore.

'''Novlian''' 
A family from [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novi_Vinodolski Novi], a town on the Adriatic coast in Croatia about 10 miles north of Zengg (''Senj'') and 22 miles southeast of Fiume (''Rijeka'').

'''Uskok''' 
Cf [[ATD_695-723#Page_697|page 697: Uskok]]. 
Serbian/Croatian: fugitive. Writers even in antiquity noted that piracy was a main economic activity along this coast.

In all, Vlado seems very like the Traverse brothers, set against the modern world, or anyway modern power arrangements, a bit of an anarchist in his own way. But his grievances have historic depth and resonance, more of what Pynchon in ''V.'' called "Temporal Bandwidth".

Uskok is also a place's name.

'''the Argonauts''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argonauts The Argonauts], in Greek mythology, were a band of heroes who, in the years before the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_war Trojan War], accompanied Jason to Colchis in his quest to find the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_fleece Golden Fleece]. Their name comes from their ship ''Argo'' which in turn was named after its builder Argus.

'''Split''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split Split], situated on a small peninsula on the eastern shores of the Adriatic Sea about 150 miles southeast of Zengg, is the largest and most important city in Dalmatia, Croatia.

'''Clissa''' 
Town from which Vlado Clissan takes his ''nom de guerre.'' Locally called [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klis Klis] which is located inland just 5 miles northeast of Split near the eponymous mountain pass. Because of its geographical position, Clissa is susceptible to a rather strong bora wind.

==Page 819==

'''You know the play by Shakespeare, ''The Merchant of Venice''? [...] We keep hoping till the end for Antonio to come to grief.''' 
In ''The Merchant of Venice'', Antonio, the protagonist, is a wealthy merchant in Venice, his wealth coming from the ships he owns, which could easily be at peril from pirates. So, natch, Vlado and his comrades who attack Venetian ships are pulling for the pirates.

'''''mala vita''''' 
bad life

'''palačinka''' 
Serbo-Croatian for crepe or thin pancake.

==Page 820==

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

ATD 768-791

2008-11-27T19:50:34Z

Martin1: /* Page 782 */

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

==Page 768==

'''fourteeners''' 
Affectionate name applied by Coloradans to mountain peaks 14,000 feet (approx. 4200 m) high.

'''Lake Baikal''' 

Another bi-location: one world out here, another reflected one in the lake. Oh, and the first syllable of the name is pronounced BY. 

Incidentally, "bai" is the Chinese word for "white" and is written 白. Could "bi-location" imply a "white" location?
Cf. [http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_946-975 Byal Sredets] p. 956.

Photos of Lake Baikal: [http://angara.net/photo/album/122] & [http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/lakebaikal/]

An Article on the Oddities of Lake Baikal: [http://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF9/986.html] 

Wikipedia Entry: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Baikal]

==Page 769==

'''Mount Kailash''' 
Cf [[ATD_429-459#Page_437|page 437: Mount Kailash]].

'''Tengri Khan''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_Tengri Tengri Khan] is a mountain, the second-highest peak (23,000 ft) of the Tian Shan mountain range.

'''Hassan was of course no longer there.''' 
OK, I have no idea what happened here. Since this is the non-spoiler section, maybe we can talk about it here: [[Hassan's Dissappearance Discussion|DISCUSSION]]

'''a maze of slot canyons''' 
The ground is crumpled rather like Kovalevskaia's handkerchief on page 634.

==Page 770==

'''stand before the Gate . . . Kit looked up . . .''' 
See the picture here: Cf [[ATD_748-767#Page_764|page 764: Tushuk Tash]].

'''followed by the whizzing sound''' 
As the impact of the V-2 was in ''Gravity's Rainbow.''

==Page 771==

'''You are released''' 
Echoes ''Ite, missa est'' on page 668.

'''samovars . . . gasping and puffing''' 
Samovar: a double urn containing a large amount of hot water and a small amount of super-strong tea. Passengers mixed their own to taste. The hot-water urn (the samovar proper) was in fact a small charcoal boiler; there ''was'' much steam. Many Russian railroad cars had samovars.

'''Ak-su''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aksu_City Ak-su] (White Water) is a city in Xinjiang, China. It is located in the Southern foothills of Tian Shan. The economy of Ak-su is mostly agricultural, with cotton, in particular the long-staple cotton, as the main product.

'''Kucha''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kucha Kucha] is a city in Xinjiang. It was an ancient Buddhist kingdom located on the branch of the Silk Road that ran along the northern edge of the Takalmakan desert in the Tarim Basin.

'''Korla''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korla Korla], also spelled as Kurla, is a city south of Karashahr. The Iron Gate Pass, 4 miles north of the city, played an important part in protecting the ancient Silk Road from rading nomads from the north.

'''Karasahr''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karasahr Karasahr] (Black City) is located on the branch of the Silk Road that ran along the northern edge of the Taklamakan desert.

'''nephrite''' 
Fibrous silicate mineral, one of the constituents of jade.

'''Turfan''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turfan Turfan] is an oasis city located about 90 miles southeast of Ürümqi, the capital of Xinjiang, China, in a mountain basin on the northern side of the Turfan Depression. Even though it has only 0.9 inch rainfall per year, Turfan has long been the center of a fertile oasis, producing great quatities of high-quality fruits, and an imprtant trade center.

'''Flaming Mountains''' 
[http://www.chinaetravel.com/attraction/att27c.html Flaming Mountains] are red sandstone hills on the northern edge of the Turfan Basin. The red of the hills has been likened to burning flames, and temperatures often reach a sweltering 130° F. The Mountains were made famous by the 16th-century Chinese classic novel ''Journey to the West''.

'''the Sangre de Cristos''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sangre_de_Cristo_Mountains The Sangre de Cristos] (Blood of Christ) are the southermost subrange of the Rocky Mountains located in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado.

==Page 772==
'''the ancient kingdom of Khocho . . . to be the historical Shambhala''' 
Dr Edwin Bernbaum, a Research Associate of the University of California, Berkeley, claimed, in his book [http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FWay-Shambhala-Mythical-Kingdom-Himalayas%2Fdp%2F1570628742%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1180372355%26sr%3D1-1&tag=hyperartspynchon&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325 ''The Way to Shambhala: A Search for the Mythical Kingdom Beyond the Himalayas''] (1980, 2001), that Shambhala is not in the Himalayas, but far to the north, in the Turfan Depression, "Established by the Uighurs, a Turkish perople, around 850, the kingdom of Khocho flourished for four hundred years as a remarkable oasis of culture and learning. A predominantly Buddhist country, with numerous monasteries, it also had active centers of Manicheanism and Nestorian Christianity . . . At the time the ''Kalackra'' appreared in India, the kingdom of Khocho probably possessed the most advanced civilization of any country in Central Asia. Well-irrigated fields and orchards produced enough surplus food to allow the Uighurs to run welfare programs for the poor. Living together in peaceful harmony, people of different races, relgions and languages stimulated each other's thought and culture. Paintings found in the ruins of Turfan show houses built in the Chinese style, men and women dressed in embroidered silk, and a chamber ensemble complete with harps, guitar, and flutes. Even the Chinese, the most fastidious connoisseurs of culture, were impressed by the grace of Uihur society." (pp.42-43)

Bernbaum's [http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FWay-Shambhala-Mythical-Kingdom-Himalayas%2Fdp%2F1570628742%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1180372355%26sr%3D1-1&tag=hyperartspynchon&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325 ''The Way to Shambhala: A Search for the Mythical Kingdom Beyond the Himalayas''] is an excellent resource and a likely backgrounder for Pynchon when writing about Shambhala in ''Against the Day''.

Interesting connection between Shambala and bi-location: According to the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalachakra Kalachakra Tantra], the King of Shambhala requested teaching from the Buddha that would allow him to practice the dharma without renouncing his worldly enjoyments and responsibilities. In response to his request, the Buddha appeared in two places at once to teach the first Kālachakra tantra. (Wikipedia)

'''Urumchi''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cr%C3%BCmqi Urumchi] or Ürümqi, is the capital of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, China. With a population of 2.1 million (75% are Han Chinese) and located in the northwest of the country, it is the largest city in the western half of China. Ürümqi is the most remote city from any sea in the world at a distance of about 1,400 miles from the nearest coastline.

'''lowlands of Dzungaria''' 
A region of 300,000 sq mi in Xinjiang, NW China. It is a largely steppe and semidesert basin surrounded by high mountains: the Tian Shan in the south and the Altai in the north. Urumchi and Yining are the main cities with other smaller oasis towns dot the piedmont areas. The region passed to the Chinese only in the mid-18th century.

==Page 773==

'''Lake Zaisan''' 
Lake Zaisan, in Russian Central Asia near the Chinese border, is located in an open valley between the Altai range on the northeast and the Tarbagatai on the south at an altitude of 1,355 ft.

'''The Irtysh . . . the Ob''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irtysh_River The Irtysh] is the chief tributary of the Ob which is a major river in western Siberia. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ob_river The Ob] is Russia's fourth longest river. The Ob-Irtysh form a major basin in Asia, encompassing most of western Siberia and the Altai Mountains.

'''Novosibirsk''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novosibirsk Novosibirsk] lies along the Ob river in the West Siberian Plain. It is Russia's 3rd largest city, after Moscow and St.Petersburg. It was founded in 1893 as the future site of the Trans-Siberian Railway bridge crossing the Ob. In early 20th century the Turkestan-Siberia Railway, connecting Novosibirsk to Central Asia and the Caspian Sea, was completed.

'''The Paris of Siberia''' 
By 1900 Irkutsk (Cf [[ATD_748-767#Page_764|page 763: Irkutsk]]) had been nicknamed as such.

'''''kupechestvo''''' 
Russian: the merchant community.

'''Glaskovsk''' 
A suburb in Irkutsk across the Irkut river.

==Page 774==

'''Club Golomyanka''' 
A golomyanka is a viviparous fish of the perch family, unique to Lake Baikal.

'''NAUSHNIKI''' 
As translated in the text.

'''1895 model Nagant revolver''' 
[http://world.guns.ru/handguns/hg102-e.htm Nagant revolver] was designed in Belgium by Nagant brothers in the late 1880s and was adopted by numerous countries. The major user and manufacturer was Russia which adopted it in 1895.

'''British gold sovereigns''' 
The world's most popular gold coins, [http://www.goldsovereigns.co.uk/firstsovereign.html British gold sovereign] first came to existence in 1489 under Henry VII. There was a major change in 1816 for the so-called Modern Soverign which are continure to the present day. It has a value of one pound sterling (but with a much higher trading market value) and is made of 15.55 grams of standard gold coinage alloy of 23 carat, equal to 95.83% pure gold. (Another source [http://www.onlygold.com/Coins/BritishSovereignsFullScreen.asp British gold sovereigns2] said they have a 91.7% gold.)

==Page 775==

'''Tower Hill''' 
[http://www.royalmint.com/RoyalMint/web/site/Corporate/AboutUs/History/TowerHill.asp The Royal Mint at Tower Hill], London, between 1812-1968. Now the Royal mint is at Liantrisant (10 miles west of Cardiff), Wales.

'''Young Vic''' 
Image of young Queen Victoria on the British sovereign (1 pound) piece. The first portrait for Queen Victoria was the "Youg Head", which was used on sovereigns from 1838 to 1887 inclusive. For a picture for this coin see [http://www.goldsovereigns.co.uk/heads.html Victoria Young Head]. 
Contrast with [http://www.rvhf.org/history.html Old Vic,] the theater, originally the Royal Coburg, renamed Royal Victoria in 1833—when Vic was Young. The name Old Vic "eventually" became customary and is now official. This is the house that Kevin Spacey runs.

'''Upper Tunguska, Stony Tunguska, Lower Tunguska''' 
They are the three eastern tributaries of the Yenisei River in Siberia. They cut across the swampy forests of east-central Siberia, draining the Tunguska Basin. Furthest north is the Lower Tunguska (1,590 mile long). The Stony Tunguska (980 mile long) rises west of the headwaters of the Lower Tunguska. The Upper Tunguska is the name given to the lower course of the Angara and it joins the Yenisei at Strelka. The area of the three rivers is the home of the Tungus. ([http://www.bartelby.com/65/tu/Tunguska.html Tunguska]).

'''the Ilimpiya''' 
Presumably the Ilimpeya River, a left-bank tributary of the Lower Tunguska, is named for them.

:It refers to the Tungus people from the Ilimpiya river.

'''the Shanyagir''' 
A clan of the Tungus people who lives along the Stony Tunguska.

'''Magyakan''' 
Shaman of the Ilimpiya clan, also spelled Magankan. His greatest feat was summoning a huge flock of ''agdi'', the birds made of iron that produce the thunder, for the explosion over the land of the Shanyagir clan. It flattened nearly a thousand square miles of forest and started a fire that burned for weeks, sending ash so high that it circled the Northern Hemisphere, making sunsets bright. See [http://www.answers.com/topic/shaman shaman].

'''''siberyaki''''' 
Standard spelling ''sibiryaki.'' Russian: Siberians.

'''Bratsk''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bratsk Bratsk], located on the Angara River near the vast Bratsk Reservoir, is a city in Irkutsk Oblast, Siberia, Russia.

'''Yeniseisk''' 
[http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Yeniseisk,_Siberia_(Capital) Yeniseisk], on the right bank of the Yenisei, is a Siberian city 170 miles northwest of Krasnoyarsk, capital of the government of the same name.

'''embouchure''' 
French word denoting the conformation of the mouth (in speaking, playing the clarinet, etc.).

==Page 776==

'''Dorzhieff''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agvan_Dorjiev Agvan Dorjiev] (1853/54–1938) was an ethnic Buriat who trained as a Buddhist monk in Tibet.He was one of the tutors of the 13th Dalai Lama and was his representative at the Russian court. He played a great role in the international political life, establishing various relations between Tibet and Russia. The British believed that Dorjiev had created the Shambala Russian myth. Ekai Kawaguchi, a Buddhist monk from Japan who visited Tibet at the turn of the 20th century, claimed to have heard of a pamphlet in which Dorjiev wrote “Shambhala was Russia. The Emperor, moreover, was an incarnation of Tsongkhapa, and would sooner or later subdue the whole world and found a gigantic Buddhist empire”. The religiously-based purpose of Agvan Dorjiev was the foundation of a Lamaist-oriented kingdom of the Tibetans and Mongols as a theocracy under the Dalai Lama ... [and] under the protection of Tsarist Russia ... In addition, among the Lamaists there existed the religiously grounded hope for help from a ‘Messianic Kingdom’ in the North ... called 'Northern Shambhala’. At the center of Dorjiev’s activities in Russia stood the construction of a three-dimensional mandala — the Buddhist temple in St. Petersburg. Regarding the décor, it is perhaps also of interest that there was a swastika motif which the Bolsheviks knocked out during the Second World War. Buddhist temple in St. Petersburg there was sufficient room for several lamas, who looked after the ritual life, to live on the grounds. Dorjiev had originally intended to triple the staffing and to construct not just a temple but also a whole monastery. This was prevented, however, by the intervention of the Russian Orthodox Church . Officially, the buddhist shrine was declared to be a place for the needs of the Buriat, Tuva, mongol ,and Kalmyk minorities in the capital. With regard to its occult functions it was a tantric mandala with which the Kalachakra system was to be transplanted into the West. From the lamas’ traditional point of view, founding a temple is seen as an act of spiritual occupation of a territory. Such sacred buildings as the Kalachakra temple in St. Petersburg are cosmograms which are employed by the lamas as magic seals in order to spiritually subjugate countries and peoples.

'''taiga''' 
Coniferous boreal forest; supports logging, trapping, hunting/gathering.

'''iron creatures of Agdy . . . their eyes flashing . . .''' 
"The Tungus have only one expression for the thunder - ''agdy''-, by which they also describe the old man, the lord of the thunder as well as all the thunderbirds that come down to earth and cause the thunder. The ''Agdy'' birds are as big as black grouses, are made of iron, and their eyes are fiery. The thunder arises from their flight above the earth and their eyes flash like lightning." (from a quotation in [http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/evenkiv.html Tungus eye-witnesses reports of Tunguska Event]).

'''Hindu fire-god Agni''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agni Fire-god Agni] is a Hindu and Vedic deity. The word ''Agni'' is Sanskrit for "fire". Agni is a messenger from and to the other gods. He is ever-young and immortal, because the fire is re-lit every day.

'''Ogdai Khan''' 
Cf [[ATD_748-767#Page_765|page 765: Ogdai]].

==Page 777==

'''The Church of England''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_England The Church of England] is the officially established Christian church in England, and acts as the "mother" and senior branch of the worldwide Anglican Communion, as well as a founding member of the Porvoo Communion.

'''Shamanism''' 
Decentralized religion. The village shaman engaged in spirit travel and communicated with animals, ancestors, etc., for the benefit of the people, often using bizarrely excessive amounts of drugs.

'''The Cherokee''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee The Cherokee] are a people indigenous to North American, who at the time of European contact in the 16th century inhabited what is now the Eastern and Southeastern United States. Most were forcibly moved westward to the Ozark Plateua. They were one of the tribes referred to as the Five Civilized Tribes.

'''the Apache''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache The Apache] is the collective name for several culturally related groups of Native Americans in the US. They formerly lived over eastern Arizona, north-western Mexico, New Mexico, parts of Texas.

'''the massacre of the Sioux Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee''' 
They were the largest and most important Indian tribe north of Mexico, with the exception of Chippewa, who, however, lack the solidarity of the Sioux. [http://www.indians.org/articles/sioux-indians.html The Sioux] actually came to North America from Asia about 30,000 years ago. The name Sioux means "little snake". They were generally nomadic, typically followed the pattern of the buffalo. [http://www.sonofthesouth.net/union-generals/sioux-indians/sioux-indians.htm The Sioux Indians] occupied the vast domain extending from the Arkansas River, in the south, to the western tributary of Lake Winnipeg, in the north, and westward to the eastern slopes of the Rocky. The Sioux battled the white men and fought against the government in orer to keep their land. There was a general uprising in 1862. Later there were many more fierce armed conflicts involved the Sioux. One of the better known was ''The Battle of Little Big Horn'' on June 25, 1876, in which General Custer and all of his immediate command were killed. This was one of the most significant victories, led by [http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/people/a_c/bigfoor.htm Sitting Bull] (1831-1890), of the Indian Nations. 
A new Indian's religion that promised to rid the land of white people and restore the Indians' way of life evolved in 1880s-1890s as a reaction to the Indians being forced to submit to government authority and reservation life. The new religion was called [http://www.bgsu.edu/departments/acs/1890s/woundedknee/WKghost.html the Ghost Dance] by the white because of its ceremonial ritual dance and its precepts of resurrection and reunion with the dead. The Sioux were the most enthusiastic believers. But the Bureau of Indian Affairs banned the Ghost Dance feared that the swelling numbers of Ghost Dancers and believed that the ritual was a precusor to renwered Indian militancy and violent rebellion. The confrontation led to [http://www.bgsu.edu/departments/acs/1890s/woundedknee/WKmscr.html The Wounded Knee Massacre] on December 29, 1890 in which over 350 Ghost Dancers were slained. And this was the last major armed conflict between the Indian Nations and the US Government.

==Page 779==

'''A heavenwide blast of light''' 
It refers to the greatest cosmic impact of the century, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event the Tunguska Event], happened at 7:17 A.M. on June 30, 1908 near the Stony Tunguska River at Tunguska basin in central Siberia, Russia. With no warning, a small comet or meteor about 100 ft in diameter, coming from the direction of Western China and glowing with the heat of 5,000 degrees, hurtling through space about 3-6 miles above the Earth and exploded in the sky 40 miles north of Vanavara settlement by the Stony Tunguska. It was so powerful that the seismograph at Irkutsk, some 550 miles away, registered what looked like an earthquake. The impact had a force of 20 million tons of TNT, equivalent to 1,000 Hiroshima bombs. It is estimated that 60-80 million trees were felled over an area of 830 square miless but left no obvious crater. If the explosion had occurred over St Petersburg hundreds of thousands of people would have been killed. But the Event occurred at such a remote and isolated location that no scientist bothered to investigate the "rumors" of the event for 13 years. (See also [http://www.unmuseum.org/siberia.htm Tunguska Event from UnMuseum].)
:Check your TV schedule for a History Channel special, ''Siberian Apocalypse,'' which presents old movie footage of Soviet explorations (my guess: re-enacted in the 1930s) and analyses by present-day scientists and UFOlogists, along with the usual Slo-Mo Channel animations repeated ad nauseam. The program ran on March 18, 2007. The best current information, according to a team from the University of Bologna, points to a stony asteroid (a "carbonaceous chondrite") that disintegrated some miles above the surface, leaving no fragments to be found but loading the local vegetation with elements not typical of the taiga.
:Two of the stranger hypotheses about the Event have special ''AtD'' connections. (1) The cosmic object was a chunk of antimatter, and the energy it released was due to annihilation when it came into contact with terrestrial matter (air). This would make the object, in a sense, [[ATD_57-80#Page_78|the Anti-Stone (p. 78).]] (2) The Event was the explosion produced by dissipation of a huge [[ATD_57-80#Page_73|ball lightning (p. 73).]] Both these notions are pretty remote, though, and the stony asteroid holds up better.

'''poods''' 
Russian measure of weight. One pood = 16.38 kilograms; 30 poods = 491 kg = 1081 pounds, pretty close to half a ton.

'''''ekipazh''''' 
Russian: crew, team.

'''''Právil'no''''' 
Russian: all ''right!''

'''Russian design philosophy''' 
. . . which is perpetuated in Soviet and Russian space technology.

'''Razvedka''' 
Russian: intelligence (in the military-political sense).

'''pogroms''' 
Terror campaigns, usually against Jews.

==Page 780==

'''Ofitser Nauchny''' 
Russian: science officer.

'''this Event''' 
The Tunguska Event. Cf 779: A heavenside blast of light.

'''''umnik''''' 
Russian: clever man.

'''General Sukhomlinoff''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Sukhomlinov Vladimir Alexandrovich Sukhomlinoff] (1848-1926), Russian cavalry officer, Chief of General Staff 1908-9, Minister of War 1909-15, imprisoned 1917-18 for failure to prepare the Russian Army for World War, emigrated to Finland and then to Germany.

'''''Zi!''''' 
Might be an error. "Wait" in the imperative mode is ''zhdi'' or ''podozhdi'' in Russian.

'''butterfly . . . angel''' 
The description of the damage pattern is accurate; see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event Tunguska Event.]

==Page 781==

'''''zastolye''''' 
Russian: group of regulars.

'''''Khuy''''' 
Impolite Russian: cock!

'''Bezumyoff''' 
The name derives from Russian ''bezumets'': madman.

'''''vseznaǐka''''' 
Russian: as translated in text. In keeping with the sources he must have used—many of them contemporary—Pynchon applies a bewildering assortment of rules in transliterating Russian words.

'''"potentially a hole in the earth"''' 
One of the theories regarding the real Tungaska Event is that a small black hole entered the earth. Flaw in theory: an exit has never been found. See Wikipedia ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event Tunguska Event]).

'''. . . ''at any moment'', directly beneath St Petersburg . . .''' 
"According to the Guinness Book of World Records (1966 edition), if the collision had occurred 4 hours 47 minutes later, it would have wiped out St. Petersburg, the starting point of the Bolshevik revolution." See (Wikipedia article, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event Tunguska Event]).

'''Tsarskoe Selo''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsarskoe_Selo Tsarskoe Selo], ''Tsar's Village'', was the "country" home of the Russian Tsars. It is now part of the town of Pushkin about 15 miles south from the center of St.Petersburg.

==Page 782==

'''''Nichevo''''' 
Russian: nothing.

'''Vanavara''' 
[http://www.evenkya.ru/eng/?id=obsh&sid=admterdel&ssid=41 Vanavara] is the adminstrative center, a settlement with a population of 3,000, of Tungusko-Chunsky region. It is situated on the right bank of the Stony Tunguska river. Vanavara was 40 miles south of the Tunguska Event blast center.

'''Transfinitum''' 
Cantor's mathematical concept of transfinite numbers, indefinitely large but distinct from one another.

==Page 783==

'''...to reaffirm allegiance to its limits, including mortality...''' 
That is, to reaffirm the allegiance of the inhabitants of this world to the "something's" limits, remind Man of mortality and transcendent laws and limits.

'''''dungur''''' 
A ''dungur'' is a shamanic drum.

'''homeopathic echoes to protect from its return''' 
The homeopathic principle is that small doses of what kills will cure or prevent; drumming prevents return of the huge sound.

==Page 784==

'''Raskol'niki''' 
Russian: schismatics, dissenters. Raskol'nikov in ''Crime and Punishment'' derives his name from this word.

'''Tchernobyl . . . Wormwood''' 
Now rendered more commonly as Chernobyl (Russian), Chornobyl (Ukrainian). 

Wormwood, a star that falls onto the Earth poisoning the fresh water sources per Book of Revelation 8:10-11. 

Dostoyevsky explores Tchenobyl/Wormwood, the meaning of the Book of Revelation in ''[[Idiots and Idiocy in Against the Day|The Idiot]]'', where Wormwood is also linked to the newly built net of railroads ([http://www.google.de/books?id=AWMyvJTUoFYC&pg=RA1-PA423&ots=eUY1cTqyvg&dq=idiot+wormwood&sig=9e2YFxWCZU568-eHjz_nHMM345A#PRA1-PA423,M1 Google Books]).

Absinthe, Neville and Nigel's favourite spirit, "comes from the medicinal plant Artemisia absinthium, also called grand wormwood or Absinth wormwood."[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absinthe]

'''Reindeer discovered again their ancient powers of flight, which had lapsed over the centuries since humans had invaded the North. Some were stimulated by the accompanying radiation into an epidermal luminescence at the red end of the spectrum, particularly around the nasal area.''' 
In other words, Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer and his airborne squadron mates. Seriously: magic and the possibility of change is reintroduced into the world.

'''heat . . . tended to flow unpredictably''' 
The Laws of Thermodynamics have taken a brief holiday.

'''Old Slavonic''' 
Or Old Church Slavonic; liturgical language of Russian Orthodox Church, closely related to Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian and Serbian (Tesla's father was a Serbian priest who worked in this language).

'''Aspects of the landscape of Tierra del Fuego . . . sea ernes''' 
Not exactly. The [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-tailed_Eagle White-tailed Eagle] (''Haliaeetus albicilla''), also known as the Erne or the Sea Eagle, is actually a bird of Eurasia.

==Page 785==

'''''izba''''' 
Russian: hut.

'''Ssagan''' 
In Burkhanism, a Russian religious movement that flourished among the indigenous people of Russia's Gorno Altai region between 1904 and the 1930s, Ak-Burkhan ("White Burkhan) is a deity who is depicted as an old man with white hair, a white coat, and white headgear, who rides a white horse, and is possibly analogous to the Mongolian "white old man," Tsagan Ebugen. The Buryat language (or Buriat) is a Mongolic language spoken by the Buryats of Siberia. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burkhanism]

Sacred white reindeer parallels Native American's reverence for white buffalos.

And the white stag as Christ-symbol in Renaissance paintings.

==Page 786==

'''the Sayan''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayan_Mountains The Sayan] is a mountain range in southern Siberia. The eastern Sauan extends 600 miles from the Yenisei to the southwest end of Lake Baikal, and the western Sayan forms the eastern continuation of the Altay Mountains.

'''Tannu-Ola''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tannu-Ola_Mountains The Tannu-Ola] mountain range is in southern Siberia extending east-west direction and curves along the Mongolian border.

'''Tuva''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuva Tuva] is located in extreme southern Siberia bordering with Mongolia. Its eastern part is forested and elevated, and the west is a drier lowland.

'''if a fellow was going to come riding in anywhere on a white reindeer''' 
Suggestive of Jesus riding an ass into Jerusalem

'''an unearthly guttural singing''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overtone_singing Overtone singing], also known as throat singing, overtone chanting, or harmonic singing, is a type of singing in which the singer manipulates the harmonic resonances created as air travels from the lungs... The best-known of the traditional forms comes from Tuva... Ethnomusicologists studying throat singing in these areas mark (it) as an integral part in the ancient pastoral animism that is still practised today. (Wikipedia) 
It is unearthly and fascinating. Tuvan throat singing can be seen and heard in the movie "Genghis Blues," a documentary about American musician Paul Pena's trip to Tuva to compete in a throat singing contest.
:In the early 1970s the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen got some students together and made a one-piece album called ''Stimmung'' (German: tuning up). It's '''choral''' overtone singing. "Unearthly" is right.

'''"borbanngadyr"''' 
The Wikipedia entry linked in the previous annotation mentions, but doesn't describe, a style of overtone singing called ''borbangnadyr.'' Same letters arranged differently. It doesn't follow that there is a typo; transliteration from languages like [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuvan_language Tuvan] without "literary" histories is often controversial.

'''"the heart of Earth" 
'''"all's I see's a bunch of sheep" 
'''"Exactly." 
This is Shambhala. Sheep may safely graze.

==Page 787==

'''the Wheel of Life''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhavacakra The Wheel of Life] is a complex symbolic representation of "continuous movement" in the form of a circle, used primarily in Tibetan Buddhism. "Continuous movement", ''samsāra'', is the continuous cycle of birth, life, and death from which one liberates oneself through enlightenment.

'''"Are you kind deities? or wrathful deities?"''' 
Here the interaction between Prance and the Chums of Chance resembles that between Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, and Dorothy Gale in the 1939 film [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wizard_of_Oz_%281939_film%29 The Wizard of Oz.] After descending from the sky in a pink bubble and encountering Dorothy in Munchkinland, Glinda asks "Are you a good witch or a bad witch?" Dorothy replies that she's not a witch at all, just as Randolph St. Cosmo replies that the Chums "endeavor to be kind." Darby's reference to Bo Peep seems Munchkinlandian too, as Glinda is a sort of shepherd to the Munchkins themselves. --[[User:Jpicco|Jpicco]]

Also a reference to the Buddhist hierarchy of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrathful_deities enlightened beings].
A notable feature of Tibetan Buddhism is the emphasis on wrathful deities, often alternative manifestations of normally peaceful deities. They symbolize the dynamic activity of an enlightened being, brought forth to tame negative or unsettling impulses in the human mind. (Wikipedia)

'''"Bo Peep" 
she who has lost her sheep, as in the rhyme.

'''"Never work,", muttered Darby. "They'll squash you like bugs." 
Darby, now a lawyer, now cynical, presents the archetypal response to
Prance's visiting " deities" as in classic sci-fi books and movies.

'''the Tengyur''' 
Cf [[ATD_748-767#Page_766|page 766: Tengyur]].

==Page 788==

'''band of''' '''''brodyagi''''' 
This entire passage is a reference to ''Don Quixote'', namely the incident with Gines de Pasamonte and the galley slaves. In ''Don Quixote'', Gines acts as a metafictional representation of Cervantes, as well as a symbol of the author/writer. Here, Topor acts as Gines, representing TRP (notice the name similarity). The hallucinogenic mushrooms represent the ''Quixote''--with a two part narrative, the first pleasant and wonderous, the second full of horrors--as well as AtD and novels, generally. The urine-drinking seems to be a crack at literary critics and literature fans who write about books and read what others write--essentially, drinking each other's urine: the after-products of the consumption of books. --[[User:Specklebelly|Specklebelly]]

'''''brodyagi''''' 
Russian: tramps.

'''"Topor"''' 
Russian: The Ax.

'''fusel oils''' 
Cf [[ATD_748-767#Page_756|page 756: fusel oils]]. 
Toxic byproducts of fermentation, sometimes still present in bad liquor.

'''strange mottled red mushrooms''' 
''Amanita muscaria'', an hallucinogenic mushroom. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanita_muscaria Wikipedia entry].

'''drank one another's urine''' 
Shamanistic practice also observed in some "mystery" religions. The person who ingests the drug (e.g., toxic mushroom) partly metabolizes it and excretes it; followers can get a, hrmm, watered-down dose by drinking his urine. Source: [http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/information/biography/abcde/allegro_john.html ''The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross''] by John M. Allegro (1970).

==Page 789==

'''''brodyagi''''' 
See page 788.

'''Christian propaganda mill down south''' 
A college?

'''Pacific Coast League''' 
Minor league (Triple-A) baseball league that at the time was the only professional baseball league west of St. Louis. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Coast_League Wikipedia entry].

Perhaps Colfax Vibe has become Sandy Koufax, pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 1960's.

'''barmaid from Oakland''' 
Oakland has a Pacific Coast Brewing Company with some very sweet barmaids.

==Page 790==

'''the wilderness Creature that feeds on all other creatures . . .''' 
Described by Captain Padzhitnoff on p.124

'''Krasnoyarsk''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krasnoyarsk Krasnoyarsk], the third largest city in Siberia, is on the Yenisei River upstream of Yeniseisk. It is an important junction on the Trans-Siberian Railway.

'''arival''' 
Misspelling of ''arrival.''

'''remittance man''' 
A man living on remittances, i.e. family funds from home, a trust fund, etc. It is also time to note that a Fleetwood is a model of Cadillac.

==Page 791==

'''the Vormance people''' 
The Vormance polar expedition was mentioned on page 130 and elsewhere.

'''taken by the wind''' Included in refrain/hook from popular Fleetwood Mac [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleetwood_Mac]song "Rhiannon"[http://www.lyricsfreak.com/f/fleetwood+mac/rhiannon_20054400.html]Perhaps an alternative to the Fleetwood/Cadillac reference.
[[User:Wagyu|Wagyu]] 15:52, 1 July 2007 (PDT)

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

ATD 768-791

2008-11-27T19:50:14Z

Martin1: /* Page 783 */

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

==Page 768==

'''fourteeners''' 
Affectionate name applied by Coloradans to mountain peaks 14,000 feet (approx. 4200 m) high.

'''Lake Baikal''' 

Another bi-location: one world out here, another reflected one in the lake. Oh, and the first syllable of the name is pronounced BY. 

Incidentally, "bai" is the Chinese word for "white" and is written 白. Could "bi-location" imply a "white" location?
Cf. [http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_946-975 Byal Sredets] p. 956.

Photos of Lake Baikal: [http://angara.net/photo/album/122] & [http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/lakebaikal/]

An Article on the Oddities of Lake Baikal: [http://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF9/986.html] 

Wikipedia Entry: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Baikal]

==Page 769==

'''Mount Kailash''' 
Cf [[ATD_429-459#Page_437|page 437: Mount Kailash]].

'''Tengri Khan''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_Tengri Tengri Khan] is a mountain, the second-highest peak (23,000 ft) of the Tian Shan mountain range.

'''Hassan was of course no longer there.''' 
OK, I have no idea what happened here. Since this is the non-spoiler section, maybe we can talk about it here: [[Hassan's Dissappearance Discussion|DISCUSSION]]

'''a maze of slot canyons''' 
The ground is crumpled rather like Kovalevskaia's handkerchief on page 634.

==Page 770==

'''stand before the Gate . . . Kit looked up . . .''' 
See the picture here: Cf [[ATD_748-767#Page_764|page 764: Tushuk Tash]].

'''followed by the whizzing sound''' 
As the impact of the V-2 was in ''Gravity's Rainbow.''

==Page 771==

'''You are released''' 
Echoes ''Ite, missa est'' on page 668.

'''samovars . . . gasping and puffing''' 
Samovar: a double urn containing a large amount of hot water and a small amount of super-strong tea. Passengers mixed their own to taste. The hot-water urn (the samovar proper) was in fact a small charcoal boiler; there ''was'' much steam. Many Russian railroad cars had samovars.

'''Ak-su''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aksu_City Ak-su] (White Water) is a city in Xinjiang, China. It is located in the Southern foothills of Tian Shan. The economy of Ak-su is mostly agricultural, with cotton, in particular the long-staple cotton, as the main product.

'''Kucha''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kucha Kucha] is a city in Xinjiang. It was an ancient Buddhist kingdom located on the branch of the Silk Road that ran along the northern edge of the Takalmakan desert in the Tarim Basin.

'''Korla''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korla Korla], also spelled as Kurla, is a city south of Karashahr. The Iron Gate Pass, 4 miles north of the city, played an important part in protecting the ancient Silk Road from rading nomads from the north.

'''Karasahr''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karasahr Karasahr] (Black City) is located on the branch of the Silk Road that ran along the northern edge of the Taklamakan desert.

'''nephrite''' 
Fibrous silicate mineral, one of the constituents of jade.

'''Turfan''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turfan Turfan] is an oasis city located about 90 miles southeast of Ürümqi, the capital of Xinjiang, China, in a mountain basin on the northern side of the Turfan Depression. Even though it has only 0.9 inch rainfall per year, Turfan has long been the center of a fertile oasis, producing great quatities of high-quality fruits, and an imprtant trade center.

'''Flaming Mountains''' 
[http://www.chinaetravel.com/attraction/att27c.html Flaming Mountains] are red sandstone hills on the northern edge of the Turfan Basin. The red of the hills has been likened to burning flames, and temperatures often reach a sweltering 130° F. The Mountains were made famous by the 16th-century Chinese classic novel ''Journey to the West''.

'''the Sangre de Cristos''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sangre_de_Cristo_Mountains The Sangre de Cristos] (Blood of Christ) are the southermost subrange of the Rocky Mountains located in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado.

==Page 772==
'''the ancient kingdom of Khocho . . . to be the historical Shambhala''' 
Dr Edwin Bernbaum, a Research Associate of the University of California, Berkeley, claimed, in his book [http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FWay-Shambhala-Mythical-Kingdom-Himalayas%2Fdp%2F1570628742%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1180372355%26sr%3D1-1&tag=hyperartspynchon&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325 ''The Way to Shambhala: A Search for the Mythical Kingdom Beyond the Himalayas''] (1980, 2001), that Shambhala is not in the Himalayas, but far to the north, in the Turfan Depression, "Established by the Uighurs, a Turkish perople, around 850, the kingdom of Khocho flourished for four hundred years as a remarkable oasis of culture and learning. A predominantly Buddhist country, with numerous monasteries, it also had active centers of Manicheanism and Nestorian Christianity . . . At the time the ''Kalackra'' appreared in India, the kingdom of Khocho probably possessed the most advanced civilization of any country in Central Asia. Well-irrigated fields and orchards produced enough surplus food to allow the Uighurs to run welfare programs for the poor. Living together in peaceful harmony, people of different races, relgions and languages stimulated each other's thought and culture. Paintings found in the ruins of Turfan show houses built in the Chinese style, men and women dressed in embroidered silk, and a chamber ensemble complete with harps, guitar, and flutes. Even the Chinese, the most fastidious connoisseurs of culture, were impressed by the grace of Uihur society." (pp.42-43)

Bernbaum's [http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FWay-Shambhala-Mythical-Kingdom-Himalayas%2Fdp%2F1570628742%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1180372355%26sr%3D1-1&tag=hyperartspynchon&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325 ''The Way to Shambhala: A Search for the Mythical Kingdom Beyond the Himalayas''] is an excellent resource and a likely backgrounder for Pynchon when writing about Shambhala in ''Against the Day''.

Interesting connection between Shambala and bi-location: According to the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalachakra Kalachakra Tantra], the King of Shambhala requested teaching from the Buddha that would allow him to practice the dharma without renouncing his worldly enjoyments and responsibilities. In response to his request, the Buddha appeared in two places at once to teach the first Kālachakra tantra. (Wikipedia)

'''Urumchi''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cr%C3%BCmqi Urumchi] or Ürümqi, is the capital of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, China. With a population of 2.1 million (75% are Han Chinese) and located in the northwest of the country, it is the largest city in the western half of China. Ürümqi is the most remote city from any sea in the world at a distance of about 1,400 miles from the nearest coastline.

'''lowlands of Dzungaria''' 
A region of 300,000 sq mi in Xinjiang, NW China. It is a largely steppe and semidesert basin surrounded by high mountains: the Tian Shan in the south and the Altai in the north. Urumchi and Yining are the main cities with other smaller oasis towns dot the piedmont areas. The region passed to the Chinese only in the mid-18th century.

==Page 773==

'''Lake Zaisan''' 
Lake Zaisan, in Russian Central Asia near the Chinese border, is located in an open valley between the Altai range on the northeast and the Tarbagatai on the south at an altitude of 1,355 ft.

'''The Irtysh . . . the Ob''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irtysh_River The Irtysh] is the chief tributary of the Ob which is a major river in western Siberia. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ob_river The Ob] is Russia's fourth longest river. The Ob-Irtysh form a major basin in Asia, encompassing most of western Siberia and the Altai Mountains.

'''Novosibirsk''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novosibirsk Novosibirsk] lies along the Ob river in the West Siberian Plain. It is Russia's 3rd largest city, after Moscow and St.Petersburg. It was founded in 1893 as the future site of the Trans-Siberian Railway bridge crossing the Ob. In early 20th century the Turkestan-Siberia Railway, connecting Novosibirsk to Central Asia and the Caspian Sea, was completed.

'''The Paris of Siberia''' 
By 1900 Irkutsk (Cf [[ATD_748-767#Page_764|page 763: Irkutsk]]) had been nicknamed as such.

'''''kupechestvo''''' 
Russian: the merchant community.

'''Glaskovsk''' 
A suburb in Irkutsk across the Irkut river.

==Page 774==

'''Club Golomyanka''' 
A golomyanka is a viviparous fish of the perch family, unique to Lake Baikal.

'''NAUSHNIKI''' 
As translated in the text.

'''1895 model Nagant revolver''' 
[http://world.guns.ru/handguns/hg102-e.htm Nagant revolver] was designed in Belgium by Nagant brothers in the late 1880s and was adopted by numerous countries. The major user and manufacturer was Russia which adopted it in 1895.

'''British gold sovereigns''' 
The world's most popular gold coins, [http://www.goldsovereigns.co.uk/firstsovereign.html British gold sovereign] first came to existence in 1489 under Henry VII. There was a major change in 1816 for the so-called Modern Soverign which are continure to the present day. It has a value of one pound sterling (but with a much higher trading market value) and is made of 15.55 grams of standard gold coinage alloy of 23 carat, equal to 95.83% pure gold. (Another source [http://www.onlygold.com/Coins/BritishSovereignsFullScreen.asp British gold sovereigns2] said they have a 91.7% gold.)

==Page 775==

'''Tower Hill''' 
[http://www.royalmint.com/RoyalMint/web/site/Corporate/AboutUs/History/TowerHill.asp The Royal Mint at Tower Hill], London, between 1812-1968. Now the Royal mint is at Liantrisant (10 miles west of Cardiff), Wales.

'''Young Vic''' 
Image of young Queen Victoria on the British sovereign (1 pound) piece. The first portrait for Queen Victoria was the "Youg Head", which was used on sovereigns from 1838 to 1887 inclusive. For a picture for this coin see [http://www.goldsovereigns.co.uk/heads.html Victoria Young Head]. 
Contrast with [http://www.rvhf.org/history.html Old Vic,] the theater, originally the Royal Coburg, renamed Royal Victoria in 1833—when Vic was Young. The name Old Vic "eventually" became customary and is now official. This is the house that Kevin Spacey runs.

'''Upper Tunguska, Stony Tunguska, Lower Tunguska''' 
They are the three eastern tributaries of the Yenisei River in Siberia. They cut across the swampy forests of east-central Siberia, draining the Tunguska Basin. Furthest north is the Lower Tunguska (1,590 mile long). The Stony Tunguska (980 mile long) rises west of the headwaters of the Lower Tunguska. The Upper Tunguska is the name given to the lower course of the Angara and it joins the Yenisei at Strelka. The area of the three rivers is the home of the Tungus. ([http://www.bartelby.com/65/tu/Tunguska.html Tunguska]).

'''the Ilimpiya''' 
Presumably the Ilimpeya River, a left-bank tributary of the Lower Tunguska, is named for them.

:It refers to the Tungus people from the Ilimpiya river.

'''the Shanyagir''' 
A clan of the Tungus people who lives along the Stony Tunguska.

'''Magyakan''' 
Shaman of the Ilimpiya clan, also spelled Magankan. His greatest feat was summoning a huge flock of ''agdi'', the birds made of iron that produce the thunder, for the explosion over the land of the Shanyagir clan. It flattened nearly a thousand square miles of forest and started a fire that burned for weeks, sending ash so high that it circled the Northern Hemisphere, making sunsets bright. See [http://www.answers.com/topic/shaman shaman].

'''''siberyaki''''' 
Standard spelling ''sibiryaki.'' Russian: Siberians.

'''Bratsk''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bratsk Bratsk], located on the Angara River near the vast Bratsk Reservoir, is a city in Irkutsk Oblast, Siberia, Russia.

'''Yeniseisk''' 
[http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Yeniseisk,_Siberia_(Capital) Yeniseisk], on the right bank of the Yenisei, is a Siberian city 170 miles northwest of Krasnoyarsk, capital of the government of the same name.

'''embouchure''' 
French word denoting the conformation of the mouth (in speaking, playing the clarinet, etc.).

==Page 776==

'''Dorzhieff''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agvan_Dorjiev Agvan Dorjiev] (1853/54–1938) was an ethnic Buriat who trained as a Buddhist monk in Tibet.He was one of the tutors of the 13th Dalai Lama and was his representative at the Russian court. He played a great role in the international political life, establishing various relations between Tibet and Russia. The British believed that Dorjiev had created the Shambala Russian myth. Ekai Kawaguchi, a Buddhist monk from Japan who visited Tibet at the turn of the 20th century, claimed to have heard of a pamphlet in which Dorjiev wrote “Shambhala was Russia. The Emperor, moreover, was an incarnation of Tsongkhapa, and would sooner or later subdue the whole world and found a gigantic Buddhist empire”. The religiously-based purpose of Agvan Dorjiev was the foundation of a Lamaist-oriented kingdom of the Tibetans and Mongols as a theocracy under the Dalai Lama ... [and] under the protection of Tsarist Russia ... In addition, among the Lamaists there existed the religiously grounded hope for help from a ‘Messianic Kingdom’ in the North ... called 'Northern Shambhala’. At the center of Dorjiev’s activities in Russia stood the construction of a three-dimensional mandala — the Buddhist temple in St. Petersburg. Regarding the décor, it is perhaps also of interest that there was a swastika motif which the Bolsheviks knocked out during the Second World War. Buddhist temple in St. Petersburg there was sufficient room for several lamas, who looked after the ritual life, to live on the grounds. Dorjiev had originally intended to triple the staffing and to construct not just a temple but also a whole monastery. This was prevented, however, by the intervention of the Russian Orthodox Church . Officially, the buddhist shrine was declared to be a place for the needs of the Buriat, Tuva, mongol ,and Kalmyk minorities in the capital. With regard to its occult functions it was a tantric mandala with which the Kalachakra system was to be transplanted into the West. From the lamas’ traditional point of view, founding a temple is seen as an act of spiritual occupation of a territory. Such sacred buildings as the Kalachakra temple in St. Petersburg are cosmograms which are employed by the lamas as magic seals in order to spiritually subjugate countries and peoples.

'''taiga''' 
Coniferous boreal forest; supports logging, trapping, hunting/gathering.

'''iron creatures of Agdy . . . their eyes flashing . . .''' 
"The Tungus have only one expression for the thunder - ''agdy''-, by which they also describe the old man, the lord of the thunder as well as all the thunderbirds that come down to earth and cause the thunder. The ''Agdy'' birds are as big as black grouses, are made of iron, and their eyes are fiery. The thunder arises from their flight above the earth and their eyes flash like lightning." (from a quotation in [http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/evenkiv.html Tungus eye-witnesses reports of Tunguska Event]).

'''Hindu fire-god Agni''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agni Fire-god Agni] is a Hindu and Vedic deity. The word ''Agni'' is Sanskrit for "fire". Agni is a messenger from and to the other gods. He is ever-young and immortal, because the fire is re-lit every day.

'''Ogdai Khan''' 
Cf [[ATD_748-767#Page_765|page 765: Ogdai]].

==Page 777==

'''The Church of England''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_England The Church of England] is the officially established Christian church in England, and acts as the "mother" and senior branch of the worldwide Anglican Communion, as well as a founding member of the Porvoo Communion.

'''Shamanism''' 
Decentralized religion. The village shaman engaged in spirit travel and communicated with animals, ancestors, etc., for the benefit of the people, often using bizarrely excessive amounts of drugs.

'''The Cherokee''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee The Cherokee] are a people indigenous to North American, who at the time of European contact in the 16th century inhabited what is now the Eastern and Southeastern United States. Most were forcibly moved westward to the Ozark Plateua. They were one of the tribes referred to as the Five Civilized Tribes.

'''the Apache''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache The Apache] is the collective name for several culturally related groups of Native Americans in the US. They formerly lived over eastern Arizona, north-western Mexico, New Mexico, parts of Texas.

'''the massacre of the Sioux Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee''' 
They were the largest and most important Indian tribe north of Mexico, with the exception of Chippewa, who, however, lack the solidarity of the Sioux. [http://www.indians.org/articles/sioux-indians.html The Sioux] actually came to North America from Asia about 30,000 years ago. The name Sioux means "little snake". They were generally nomadic, typically followed the pattern of the buffalo. [http://www.sonofthesouth.net/union-generals/sioux-indians/sioux-indians.htm The Sioux Indians] occupied the vast domain extending from the Arkansas River, in the south, to the western tributary of Lake Winnipeg, in the north, and westward to the eastern slopes of the Rocky. The Sioux battled the white men and fought against the government in orer to keep their land. There was a general uprising in 1862. Later there were many more fierce armed conflicts involved the Sioux. One of the better known was ''The Battle of Little Big Horn'' on June 25, 1876, in which General Custer and all of his immediate command were killed. This was one of the most significant victories, led by [http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/people/a_c/bigfoor.htm Sitting Bull] (1831-1890), of the Indian Nations. 
A new Indian's religion that promised to rid the land of white people and restore the Indians' way of life evolved in 1880s-1890s as a reaction to the Indians being forced to submit to government authority and reservation life. The new religion was called [http://www.bgsu.edu/departments/acs/1890s/woundedknee/WKghost.html the Ghost Dance] by the white because of its ceremonial ritual dance and its precepts of resurrection and reunion with the dead. The Sioux were the most enthusiastic believers. But the Bureau of Indian Affairs banned the Ghost Dance feared that the swelling numbers of Ghost Dancers and believed that the ritual was a precusor to renwered Indian militancy and violent rebellion. The confrontation led to [http://www.bgsu.edu/departments/acs/1890s/woundedknee/WKmscr.html The Wounded Knee Massacre] on December 29, 1890 in which over 350 Ghost Dancers were slained. And this was the last major armed conflict between the Indian Nations and the US Government.

==Page 779==

'''A heavenwide blast of light''' 
It refers to the greatest cosmic impact of the century, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event the Tunguska Event], happened at 7:17 A.M. on June 30, 1908 near the Stony Tunguska River at Tunguska basin in central Siberia, Russia. With no warning, a small comet or meteor about 100 ft in diameter, coming from the direction of Western China and glowing with the heat of 5,000 degrees, hurtling through space about 3-6 miles above the Earth and exploded in the sky 40 miles north of Vanavara settlement by the Stony Tunguska. It was so powerful that the seismograph at Irkutsk, some 550 miles away, registered what looked like an earthquake. The impact had a force of 20 million tons of TNT, equivalent to 1,000 Hiroshima bombs. It is estimated that 60-80 million trees were felled over an area of 830 square miless but left no obvious crater. If the explosion had occurred over St Petersburg hundreds of thousands of people would have been killed. But the Event occurred at such a remote and isolated location that no scientist bothered to investigate the "rumors" of the event for 13 years. (See also [http://www.unmuseum.org/siberia.htm Tunguska Event from UnMuseum].)
:Check your TV schedule for a History Channel special, ''Siberian Apocalypse,'' which presents old movie footage of Soviet explorations (my guess: re-enacted in the 1930s) and analyses by present-day scientists and UFOlogists, along with the usual Slo-Mo Channel animations repeated ad nauseam. The program ran on March 18, 2007. The best current information, according to a team from the University of Bologna, points to a stony asteroid (a "carbonaceous chondrite") that disintegrated some miles above the surface, leaving no fragments to be found but loading the local vegetation with elements not typical of the taiga.
:Two of the stranger hypotheses about the Event have special ''AtD'' connections. (1) The cosmic object was a chunk of antimatter, and the energy it released was due to annihilation when it came into contact with terrestrial matter (air). This would make the object, in a sense, [[ATD_57-80#Page_78|the Anti-Stone (p. 78).]] (2) The Event was the explosion produced by dissipation of a huge [[ATD_57-80#Page_73|ball lightning (p. 73).]] Both these notions are pretty remote, though, and the stony asteroid holds up better.

'''poods''' 
Russian measure of weight. One pood = 16.38 kilograms; 30 poods = 491 kg = 1081 pounds, pretty close to half a ton.

'''''ekipazh''''' 
Russian: crew, team.

'''''Právil'no''''' 
Russian: all ''right!''

'''Russian design philosophy''' 
. . . which is perpetuated in Soviet and Russian space technology.

'''Razvedka''' 
Russian: intelligence (in the military-political sense).

'''pogroms''' 
Terror campaigns, usually against Jews.

==Page 780==

'''Ofitser Nauchny''' 
Russian: science officer.

'''this Event''' 
The Tunguska Event. Cf 779: A heavenside blast of light.

'''''umnik''''' 
Russian: clever man.

'''General Sukhomlinoff''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Sukhomlinov Vladimir Alexandrovich Sukhomlinoff] (1848-1926), Russian cavalry officer, Chief of General Staff 1908-9, Minister of War 1909-15, imprisoned 1917-18 for failure to prepare the Russian Army for World War, emigrated to Finland and then to Germany.

'''''Zi!''''' 
Might be an error. "Wait" in the imperative mode is ''zhdi'' or ''podozhdi'' in Russian.

'''butterfly . . . angel''' 
The description of the damage pattern is accurate; see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event Tunguska Event.]

==Page 781==

'''''zastolye''''' 
Russian: group of regulars.

'''''Khuy''''' 
Impolite Russian: cock!

'''Bezumyoff''' 
The name derives from Russian ''bezumets'': madman.

'''''vseznaǐka''''' 
Russian: as translated in text. In keeping with the sources he must have used—many of them contemporary—Pynchon applies a bewildering assortment of rules in transliterating Russian words.

'''"potentially a hole in the earth"''' 
One of the theories regarding the real Tungaska Event is that a small black hole entered the earth. Flaw in theory: an exit has never been found. See Wikipedia ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event Tunguska Event]).

'''. . . ''at any moment'', directly beneath St Petersburg . . .''' 
"According to the Guinness Book of World Records (1966 edition), if the collision had occurred 4 hours 47 minutes later, it would have wiped out St. Petersburg, the starting point of the Bolshevik revolution." See (Wikipedia article, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event Tunguska Event]).

'''Tsarskoe Selo''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsarskoe_Selo Tsarskoe Selo], ''Tsar's Village'', was the "country" home of the Russian Tsars. It is now part of the town of Pushkin about 15 miles south from the center of St.Petersburg.

==Page 782==

'''...to reaffirm allegiance to its limits, including mortality...''' 
That is, to reaffirm the allegiance of the inhabitants of this world to the "something's" limits, remind Man of mortality and transcendent laws and limits.

'''''Nichevo''''' 
Russian: nothing.

'''Vanavara''' 
[http://www.evenkya.ru/eng/?id=obsh&sid=admterdel&ssid=41 Vanavara] is the adminstrative center, a settlement with a population of 3,000, of Tungusko-Chunsky region. It is situated on the right bank of the Stony Tunguska river. Vanavara was 40 miles south of the Tunguska Event blast center.

'''Transfinitum''' 
Cantor's mathematical concept of transfinite numbers, indefinitely large but distinct from one another.

==Page 783==

'''...to reaffirm allegiance to its limits, including mortality...''' 
That is, to reaffirm the allegiance of the inhabitants of this world to the "something's" limits, remind Man of mortality and transcendent laws and limits.

'''''dungur''''' 
A ''dungur'' is a shamanic drum.

'''homeopathic echoes to protect from its return''' 
The homeopathic principle is that small doses of what kills will cure or prevent; drumming prevents return of the huge sound.

==Page 784==

'''Raskol'niki''' 
Russian: schismatics, dissenters. Raskol'nikov in ''Crime and Punishment'' derives his name from this word.

'''Tchernobyl . . . Wormwood''' 
Now rendered more commonly as Chernobyl (Russian), Chornobyl (Ukrainian). 

Wormwood, a star that falls onto the Earth poisoning the fresh water sources per Book of Revelation 8:10-11. 

Dostoyevsky explores Tchenobyl/Wormwood, the meaning of the Book of Revelation in ''[[Idiots and Idiocy in Against the Day|The Idiot]]'', where Wormwood is also linked to the newly built net of railroads ([http://www.google.de/books?id=AWMyvJTUoFYC&pg=RA1-PA423&ots=eUY1cTqyvg&dq=idiot+wormwood&sig=9e2YFxWCZU568-eHjz_nHMM345A#PRA1-PA423,M1 Google Books]).

Absinthe, Neville and Nigel's favourite spirit, "comes from the medicinal plant Artemisia absinthium, also called grand wormwood or Absinth wormwood."[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absinthe]

'''Reindeer discovered again their ancient powers of flight, which had lapsed over the centuries since humans had invaded the North. Some were stimulated by the accompanying radiation into an epidermal luminescence at the red end of the spectrum, particularly around the nasal area.''' 
In other words, Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer and his airborne squadron mates. Seriously: magic and the possibility of change is reintroduced into the world.

'''heat . . . tended to flow unpredictably''' 
The Laws of Thermodynamics have taken a brief holiday.

'''Old Slavonic''' 
Or Old Church Slavonic; liturgical language of Russian Orthodox Church, closely related to Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian and Serbian (Tesla's father was a Serbian priest who worked in this language).

'''Aspects of the landscape of Tierra del Fuego . . . sea ernes''' 
Not exactly. The [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-tailed_Eagle White-tailed Eagle] (''Haliaeetus albicilla''), also known as the Erne or the Sea Eagle, is actually a bird of Eurasia.

==Page 785==

'''''izba''''' 
Russian: hut.

'''Ssagan''' 
In Burkhanism, a Russian religious movement that flourished among the indigenous people of Russia's Gorno Altai region between 1904 and the 1930s, Ak-Burkhan ("White Burkhan) is a deity who is depicted as an old man with white hair, a white coat, and white headgear, who rides a white horse, and is possibly analogous to the Mongolian "white old man," Tsagan Ebugen. The Buryat language (or Buriat) is a Mongolic language spoken by the Buryats of Siberia. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burkhanism]

Sacred white reindeer parallels Native American's reverence for white buffalos.

And the white stag as Christ-symbol in Renaissance paintings.

==Page 786==

'''the Sayan''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayan_Mountains The Sayan] is a mountain range in southern Siberia. The eastern Sauan extends 600 miles from the Yenisei to the southwest end of Lake Baikal, and the western Sayan forms the eastern continuation of the Altay Mountains.

'''Tannu-Ola''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tannu-Ola_Mountains The Tannu-Ola] mountain range is in southern Siberia extending east-west direction and curves along the Mongolian border.

'''Tuva''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuva Tuva] is located in extreme southern Siberia bordering with Mongolia. Its eastern part is forested and elevated, and the west is a drier lowland.

'''if a fellow was going to come riding in anywhere on a white reindeer''' 
Suggestive of Jesus riding an ass into Jerusalem

'''an unearthly guttural singing''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overtone_singing Overtone singing], also known as throat singing, overtone chanting, or harmonic singing, is a type of singing in which the singer manipulates the harmonic resonances created as air travels from the lungs... The best-known of the traditional forms comes from Tuva... Ethnomusicologists studying throat singing in these areas mark (it) as an integral part in the ancient pastoral animism that is still practised today. (Wikipedia) 
It is unearthly and fascinating. Tuvan throat singing can be seen and heard in the movie "Genghis Blues," a documentary about American musician Paul Pena's trip to Tuva to compete in a throat singing contest.
:In the early 1970s the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen got some students together and made a one-piece album called ''Stimmung'' (German: tuning up). It's '''choral''' overtone singing. "Unearthly" is right.

'''"borbanngadyr"''' 
The Wikipedia entry linked in the previous annotation mentions, but doesn't describe, a style of overtone singing called ''borbangnadyr.'' Same letters arranged differently. It doesn't follow that there is a typo; transliteration from languages like [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuvan_language Tuvan] without "literary" histories is often controversial.

'''"the heart of Earth" 
'''"all's I see's a bunch of sheep" 
'''"Exactly." 
This is Shambhala. Sheep may safely graze.

==Page 787==

'''the Wheel of Life''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhavacakra The Wheel of Life] is a complex symbolic representation of "continuous movement" in the form of a circle, used primarily in Tibetan Buddhism. "Continuous movement", ''samsāra'', is the continuous cycle of birth, life, and death from which one liberates oneself through enlightenment.

'''"Are you kind deities? or wrathful deities?"''' 
Here the interaction between Prance and the Chums of Chance resembles that between Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, and Dorothy Gale in the 1939 film [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wizard_of_Oz_%281939_film%29 The Wizard of Oz.] After descending from the sky in a pink bubble and encountering Dorothy in Munchkinland, Glinda asks "Are you a good witch or a bad witch?" Dorothy replies that she's not a witch at all, just as Randolph St. Cosmo replies that the Chums "endeavor to be kind." Darby's reference to Bo Peep seems Munchkinlandian too, as Glinda is a sort of shepherd to the Munchkins themselves. --[[User:Jpicco|Jpicco]]

Also a reference to the Buddhist hierarchy of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrathful_deities enlightened beings].
A notable feature of Tibetan Buddhism is the emphasis on wrathful deities, often alternative manifestations of normally peaceful deities. They symbolize the dynamic activity of an enlightened being, brought forth to tame negative or unsettling impulses in the human mind. (Wikipedia)

'''"Bo Peep" 
she who has lost her sheep, as in the rhyme.

'''"Never work,", muttered Darby. "They'll squash you like bugs." 
Darby, now a lawyer, now cynical, presents the archetypal response to
Prance's visiting " deities" as in classic sci-fi books and movies.

'''the Tengyur''' 
Cf [[ATD_748-767#Page_766|page 766: Tengyur]].

==Page 788==

'''band of''' '''''brodyagi''''' 
This entire passage is a reference to ''Don Quixote'', namely the incident with Gines de Pasamonte and the galley slaves. In ''Don Quixote'', Gines acts as a metafictional representation of Cervantes, as well as a symbol of the author/writer. Here, Topor acts as Gines, representing TRP (notice the name similarity). The hallucinogenic mushrooms represent the ''Quixote''--with a two part narrative, the first pleasant and wonderous, the second full of horrors--as well as AtD and novels, generally. The urine-drinking seems to be a crack at literary critics and literature fans who write about books and read what others write--essentially, drinking each other's urine: the after-products of the consumption of books. --[[User:Specklebelly|Specklebelly]]

'''''brodyagi''''' 
Russian: tramps.

'''"Topor"''' 
Russian: The Ax.

'''fusel oils''' 
Cf [[ATD_748-767#Page_756|page 756: fusel oils]]. 
Toxic byproducts of fermentation, sometimes still present in bad liquor.

'''strange mottled red mushrooms''' 
''Amanita muscaria'', an hallucinogenic mushroom. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanita_muscaria Wikipedia entry].

'''drank one another's urine''' 
Shamanistic practice also observed in some "mystery" religions. The person who ingests the drug (e.g., toxic mushroom) partly metabolizes it and excretes it; followers can get a, hrmm, watered-down dose by drinking his urine. Source: [http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/information/biography/abcde/allegro_john.html ''The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross''] by John M. Allegro (1970).

==Page 789==

'''''brodyagi''''' 
See page 788.

'''Christian propaganda mill down south''' 
A college?

'''Pacific Coast League''' 
Minor league (Triple-A) baseball league that at the time was the only professional baseball league west of St. Louis. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Coast_League Wikipedia entry].

Perhaps Colfax Vibe has become Sandy Koufax, pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 1960's.

'''barmaid from Oakland''' 
Oakland has a Pacific Coast Brewing Company with some very sweet barmaids.

==Page 790==

'''the wilderness Creature that feeds on all other creatures . . .''' 
Described by Captain Padzhitnoff on p.124

'''Krasnoyarsk''' 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krasnoyarsk Krasnoyarsk], the third largest city in Siberia, is on the Yenisei River upstream of Yeniseisk. It is an important junction on the Trans-Siberian Railway.

'''arival''' 
Misspelling of ''arrival.''

'''remittance man''' 
A man living on remittances, i.e. family funds from home, a trust fund, etc. It is also time to note that a Fleetwood is a model of Cadillac.

==Page 791==

'''the Vormance people''' 
The Vormance polar expedition was mentioned on page 130 and elsewhere.

'''taken by the wind''' Included in refrain/hook from popular Fleetwood Mac [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleetwood_Mac]song "Rhiannon"[http://www.lyricsfreak.com/f/fleetwood+mac/rhiannon_20054400.html]Perhaps an alternative to the Fleetwood/Cadillac reference.
[[User:Wagyu|Wagyu]] 15:52, 1 July 2007 (PDT)

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