ATD 397-428
- Please keep these annotations SPOILER-FREE by not revealing information from later pages in the novel.
Contents
Page 397
syntonic wireless
???
street-Arab
???
Columbian Half-Dollar
???
Page 398
nuncio
???
Evening Quarters
???
H.G. Wells
???
jeu d'esprit
???
on the subject
???
National Imprest
???
"Plug" Loafsley
Plug-ugly loafer/oaf?
Lollipop Lounge
???
turned out
(When? Before or after first visit?)
Tenderloin
???
squalid empire
Cf Alan Parker's 1976 movie "Bugsy Malone". IMDb
Page 399
indigo... yellow
Clashing-colors motif.
dicer
???
opopanax
Typo for 'opoponax'. Wikipedia
vervain
???
slide cornet
???
mandola
???
"tin pan" piano
???
houris
???
Darby
Over 21yo, if he's aged.
Page 400
paillettes
???
louche
???
"jazz"
(When did the spelling change?)
high-hats
???
Missus Grundy
???
'ying'
"Yen"?
Page 401
Angela Grace
Angel of Grace?
Gophiz... Hudson Dustuhs
Gophers, Hudson Dusters.
slickin up
Gentrification.
Mr. Mawgin
J. Pierpont Morgan.
stanchion
???
find it
(Small-penis joke.)
I AM THE WAY
???
triatomic''
Ozone = O3.
Page 402
solenoidal relay
???
Dr. Zoot
???
pale
Even tough-guy Plug fears time machine.
dynamo
???
Grandmother's day
Pre-Civil War.
Breguet
(Date?)
shimming
???
revenue diverted
(Why not no-revenue?)
Page 403
coaming
???
undog this hatch
???
faith
(Blind, not humble.)
nervous organizations
Cf drugs.
pillioned
???
horses
???
arrays of metallic points
???
Page 404
shockwaves of the Creation
Anachronistic Big Bang theory?
chamber shook
(It didn't on p403.)
not beasts
Airplanes?
smell
Cf GR on Passchendaele.
Page 405
latest Oldsmobile
(Dates.)
Candlebrow U.
???
double-domes
???
drumming
Traveling salesmanship.
Ball in Hand
???
Alonzo Meatman
???
Page 406
Imum Coeli
???
Gideon Candlebrow
???
Grossdale
???
Page 407
"Smegmo"
???
margarine
Candlebow + margarine reminds me of Camille Paglia on Renee Zellwegger as "margarine-browed" (which I don't really understand).
four thousand years
???
this year
???
flammivomous
???
1925
Lindsay c47yo?
Randolph
(Has he been absent?)
Page 408
in the way that certain odors can instantly return us to earlier years
Recalls Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu in which the taste and smell of a madeleine cookie summons a collection of childhood memories.
Page 409
"Why you insufferable little --"
This line, paired with St. Cosmo's observation at the end of the following paragraph: "And might I add, Mr. Noseworth, that these constant attempts to strangle Suckling do our public image little good," seem a fairly direct reference to a well-worn trope from the Simpsons, in which the splenetic Homer, as played here by Noseworth, expresses his no-longer-controllable frustration with Bart, here the increasingly smartalecky Suckling. Pynchon, as has been widely reported, has appeared on The Simpsons a few times.
More than even "Vineland," it seems, this book is fraught with pop culture/low comedy asides.
Asimov Transecular
Interesting to find one of Isaac Asimov's time travel machines on the pile of "picked-over hulks of failed time machines." Of course, it would have to have been deposited there from some time in the future.
to transecular adj "that is made through the centuries" (Portuguese)
Page 412
"Does a dog possess the Buddha-nature?" [...] "Yes, obviously"
According to the Zen parable the answer to the question is "Mu", which is both "No" and the sound of a dog's bark, thus neither simply yes nor no.
young Einstein
