L
L.&O.L.
649; Law and Order League
labor unions
43; 50; 178; Western Federation of Miners, 92; 98; St. Petersburg Strike, 595;
La Foam, Happy Jack
477; local pharmicist in Wall o' Death; 485;
Lafrisée, Pléiade
537; sphinxe Khnopffiene in Kursaal in Ostend; with Woevre, 560; Fernand Edmond Jean Marie Khnopff (1858-1921) was a Belgian symbolist painter. A sphinx is a mythical creature with the head of a human (or bird) and the body of a cat; A sphinxe Khnopffiene would then be someone cat-like in the style of Khnopff Wikipediaentry;
Lake County
286, 374, 391, 977. Lake Country, Colorado lies in the geographical center of the state. Its county seat is Leadville (see below), and it's named for the Twin Lakes that lie south of that city.
Lambert, Joe
283; shot by Hair-Trigger Bob
Laplacian
239; bar in Cambridge;
Lard Scandal of the '80s, the great
406; there actually was a lard scandal during the Taft Administration, in 1912; 1887 saw the introduction of the Margarine Act in Great Britain, which required margarine to be labeled as such. This was in response to the adulteration of butter by oleomargarine (made from animal fats).
lateener
250; a ship rigged with a lateen which is a triangular sail, suspended by a long yard at an angle of 45° to the mast.
Lateral World Sets
"Lateral world-sets, other parts of Creation," 221; "Let us imagine a lateral world, set infintesimally to the side," 230; "spirited, in a swift cascade of light-flashes . . . in the dark," 293; "other worlds," 394; "water . . . as a facilitator of passage between worlds," 433; "lateral jumps from one continuum to another," 438; 464; 594; 682;
- Cf., also the transdimensional travel of Buckaroo Bonzai in the Pynchon inspired film, The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984), especially the images of 8th-Dimensional creatures that Bonzai sees as he passes through the mountain. IMDB entry.
- Cf., further, the notion of a "multiverse," that is, a physical ur-structure, comprised of many, if not infinite universes, of which ours is only one. Several contemporary cosmological theories require that a multiverse exist, though its existence remains highly conjectural. Wikipedia entry.
Latewood, Cyprian
489; "embryo Apostlet", a sod (short for "sodomite", i.e., gay man) at Cambridge; to Trieste, 697; 705; in Vienna, 698; 712; in Venice, 706; talking gibberish, 713; "a catamite these last few years" 721; 722; summoned to Venice, 722; in Trieste with Bevis Moistleigh, 799; leaving Venice for the Balkans (Sarajevo), 815; Jacintha Drulov on the John of Asia, 821; bringing Danilo out of Bosnia, 829; "You have come to Sarajevo on a dummy assignment. All to lure you out here to Bosnia, where it is easier for the Austrians to take you" (spoken by Danilo), 832; at Grand-Hôtel in Jayce, 833; "on an ancient bridge, above its pure arch in silhouette, stood a figure, cloaked, solitary, unmoving, not waiting, not beckoning, not even regarding the spectacle up on the mountainside, yet containing in its severe contours a huge compressed quantity of attention" and Danilo breaks his leg, 836; in Salonica, 842; back to Trieste, 847; back in Vienna, 864; meets Yashmeen and Reef in Venice, 869; becomes invisible, 871; a bit of SM with Yashmeen, 877-78; ménage à trois with Reef and Yashmeen, 882; at Yz-les-Bains with Reef and Yashmeen, 931; main task to locate the Interdikt line and disable it, 946; arrives at convent in the Balkan Range ("Welcome home"), 956; Brides of Night, 961; "And Cyprian was taken behind a great echoless door" 962; Latewood speculations...
Law and Order League 644;
Law of Deterministic Insufficiency
862;
"laying on tells"
218; God, in poker game; "tells" are gestures or words by a player that give away the value of his/her hand; Wikipedia entry
Leadville
78, 85, 88, 89, 103, 186, 274, 283, 303, 314, 374, 650, 975, 977, 980, 981. Leadville, county seat of Lake Country, Colorado, is the highest active city in the United States (altitude 10, 152') and the place where the Colorado Silver Boom began. In the aftermath of the 1860s Pikes Peak gold-rush, silver-lead deposits were discovered there in 1876, and the town was founded in 1877 by a group that included Horace ("Haw") Tabor (AtD, p. 274)—owner of the Matchless silver mine, and later Leadville's mayor and the founder of its Tabor Opera House. By 1878 Leadville had become one of the world’s greatest silver-producing sites and a center of regional cultural activity. Oscar Wilde lectured at the Tabor Opera House during his tour of America, and Doc Halliday (q.v.), of O.K. Corrall fame, settled there around 1883. During the 1880s, when Leadville’s economy was at its peak, the town was the second largest in Colorado and a mecca for prospectors, gamblers, retailers, performing artists, and entrepreneurs. In many respects, its history epitomizes the volatile character of Colorado’s mining industry--from the rush to establish businesses, schools, churches, and newspapers in a booming mining camp to the conflict and violence of the miner’s strike of 1896. The town underwent decline after 1893, with the Repeal of the Sherman Silver Act.
Leadville is in the news again today (February, 2008), because a vast pressurized underground mass of water, saturated with toxic chemicals, has accumulated in the abandoned mines and is threatening to burst out, inundate the town, and send a flood of poisonous water downstream.
League of Prizren
653; created on June 10, 1878 in a mosque in Prizren, Kosovo, by 300 Albanian nationalist leaders, mostly from Kosovo, Albania, Western part of former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and Muslim leaders from Bosnia-Hercegovina and the Sandzak, in order to achieve an autonomous Albanian state, representing the former Ottoman vilayets of Shkodër or Skutari centered near Montenegro, the Illyria region, the Chameria region, Janina or Janjevo centered in Northern Epirus, Bitola in Republic of Macedonia and Kosovo; Wikipedia entry
Lee, Tom
339; his "tong, the On Leong"
Leghorn strawhats
42; a stiff straw hat with a flat crown. See photo.
Leonard and Lyle
441; "oil prospectors" in Sandman Saloon
Leopold
528; King of the Belgians; 543;
Le Prince, Louis Aimé Augustin (1841-1890)
1050; Frenchman who was an inventor and is generally recognized as the first person to record motion images on film. Wikipedia
LeStreet, Chester
1042; black jazz musician client of Lew Basnight, named after Chester-le-Street, a small town between Durham and Newcastle in Co. Durham, UK. No doubt TRP noted this wonderful name while researching Mason & Dixon in Durham. Other local place-names he may have been tempted by but didn't use include Thornton-le-Beans and Hetton-le-Hole (which as Hetty-le-Hole could have been an appropriate moniker for
Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin).
Levi
473; Hope Kindred's husband
Levi, Eliphaz (1810-1875)
232; or Eliphas; pseudonym of French occultist and magician Alphonse Louis Constant. Levi incorporated the Tarot cards into his magical system, and as a result the Tarot has been an important part of the paraphernalia of Western magicians. He had a deep impact on the magic of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and later Aleister Crowley (who believed himself to be the reincarnation of Levi), and it was largely through this impact that Lévi is remembered as one of the key founders of the twentieth century revival of magic; 901; Wikipedia entry
Lieutenants of Industry Scholarship Program
100;
light
59; "corner light" 61; 62; electric v. gas in London, 232; 431; 437-38; and film, 451; its future, in California, 456; counter-light, 581; 687-88; to Indians of Chiapas is "living tissue" 992;
Lightarian
60;
lightning
73; sentient ball lightning, 73;
light reading
926; Note the pun. Frank's reading "pamphlets ... hand-tinted heliographs in luminescent violets" (from p. 925) — Wren hands him "the exact same periodical"
Lincrusta-Walton
610; Lincrusta is an embossed fabric used for covering walls, similar in style to anaglypta. It was invented by Frederick Walton in 1877 and is also called Lincrusta-Walton or Lincrusta Walton. It was designed to emulate more expensive materials and hence be more oriented to a mass market. These materials were used to enrich the interiors of late Victorian architecture and now used for historic restoration projects.
Linderfelt
1013; lieutenant in the National Guard at tent city in Ludlow
lines of force
55; 122;
Lisp
"'Mr. Scarsdale Vibe's Lieutenants of Industry Scholarship Program," 100; "'difficulty with phonology, notably the voiced interdental fricative,'" 440;
Little Egypt
26; at the Chicago World's Fair; 29; Little Egypt was the stage name for two popular exotic dancers, Ashea Wabe who danced at the Seeley banquet at the 1893 World's Fair and Farida Mazar Spyropoulos, also performing under the stage name Fatima, appeared at the "Street in Cairo" exhibition on the Midway at the World's Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago in 1893; Wikipedia entry; And then there was that song by The Coasters...
597; in Göttingen;
Little Hellkite
76; mine in Colorado
Little Nemo
352; Little Nemo is the main fictional character in a series of weekly comic strips by Winsor McCay (1871-1934) that appeared in the New York Herald and William Randolph Hearst's New York American newspapers from October 15, 1905—April 23, 1911 and April 30, 1911—1913; respectively; Wikipedia entry; DISCUSSION
Littlewood, John Edensor (1885-1977)
815; British mathematician. Most of his work was in the field of mathematical analysis. He began research under the supervision of Ernest William Barnes, who suggested that he attempt to prove the Riemann hypothesis: Littlewood showed that if the Riemann hypothesis is true then the Prime Number Theorem follows and obtained the error term. Wikipedia
Ljubica
950; Serbo-Croatian: violet; pron. LYOO beet sah; daughter of Reef Traverse and Yashmeen Halfcourt; the name Ljubica turns up on page 731 (Viking Ed.) of Gravity's Rainbow, as a Herero girl's name. According to Professor Don Larsson (in his Companion's Companion to Gravity's Rainbow), "Ljubica" is a common Slavic name and was also fairly common as a Herero name, as Hereros in Südwest (now Namibia) often bore German and Slavic names.
Loafsley, "Plug"
397; "street-Arab" who delivers note to Chums of Chance
Lobatchevskian
453; function worked up by Vectorists and Quaternionists; named for the Russian mathematician Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky (1792-1856) who developed non-Euclidean geometry; Wikipedia entry
local lunatic
281; for train travelers entering Telluride, like starting a Disneyland ride with this warning: "Beside the tracks at one bend stood a local lunatic"
Lodge, Sir Oliver Joseph (1851-1940)
58; Born at Penkhull near Stoke-on-Trent and educated at Adams' Grammar School, Sir Oliver Lodge was a physicist and writer involved in the development of the wireless telegraph; 228; Wikipedia entry
Loïc
941; bartender in Yz-les-Bain, pouring Crocodiles
Lois
468; little girl in Mayva's ice-cream parlor, Cone Amor
Lollipop Lounge
398; personal headquarters of Plug - a "child bordello"
Lombroso, Dr. Cesare (1835-1909)
172; Born in Verona, Italy, Dr. Lombroso, using concepts drawn from Physiognomy, early Eugenics, Psychiatry and Social Darwinism, devised the theory that criminality was inherited, and that the born criminal could be identified by physical defects, which confirmed a criminal as savage, or atavistic; 252; 606; Wikipedia entry
In Vineland, arch-villain FBI agent Brock Vond is a fan of Lombroso's work.
Long chalk, not by a
870; The phrase "not by a long chalk" precedes "not by a long shot" and is still preferred by the Brits.
Longfellow
536;
Lorelei
493; blond at Cambridge
Lorentz, Hendrik Antoon (1853-1928)
565; Dutch physicist who shared the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pieter Zeeman for the discovery and elucidation of the Zeeman effect. In 1895 in an attempt to explain the Michelson-Morley experiment, Lorentz proposed that moving bodies contract in the direction of motion (see length contraction; George FitzGerald had already arrived at this conclusion, see FitzGerald-Lorentz Contraction). He introduced the term local time which expresses the relativity of simultaneity between reference frames in relative motion; Wikipedia entry
loss
760; "axes of sorrow and loss" 771;
Lost City
435;
Lottchen
621; girl at chloro party in Göttingen;
Louis XV
544; Wikipedia entry
Lowry, Nellie
60; Blinky Morgan's "lady friend"
Lübeck
520; City in northern Germany at the Baltic sea; Wikipedia entry
Luccheni
739; anarchist gunhand;
Lucia
246; waitress in Osteria in San Polo;
Lucien
931; concierge at Yz-les-Bains
Lucrezia
1070; "very large triplane bomber" named after the homicidal Borgia Heiress; Lucrezia Borgia (1480 - 1519) was the daughter of Rodrigo Borgia, the powerful Renaissance Valencian who later became Pope Alexander VI, and Vannozza dei Cattanei. Her brothers included Cesare Borgia, Giovanni Borgia, and Gioffre Borgia. Lucrezia's family later came to epitomize the ruthless Machiavellian politics and sexual corruption alleged to be characteristic of the Renaissance Papacy. Her family was also suspected of various murders in which Lucrezia's involvement is ambiguous. Wikipedia
Lueger, Dr. Karl (1844-1910)
807; "Jew-hating perennial Burgomeister" heads Christian-Socialist party in Vienna; Wikipedia
Lugosi, Bela
915; see Blaskó, Belá
Luigi
446;
Lupita's
286; in Telluride, "where the menudo can't be beat"
Lutine
122; of the HMS Lutine Wikipedia
Luz Blanco, Don José de la
920;
