Difference between revisions of "ATD 397-428"

Revision as of 09:18, 30 December 2006

Please keep these annotations SPOILER-FREE by not revealing information from later pages in the novel.

Page 397

syntonic wireless
???

street-Arab
???

Columbian Half-Dollar
???

"ten yeeuhz ago" Places this action in or around 1903.

Page 398

nuncio
Casulaly, a messengfer; more fomally, a permanent official Papal representative at a foreign court.

Evening Quarters
???

H.G. Wells
Herbert George Wells (1866-1946), one of the 19th Century science fiction writers whom Pynchon is both emulating and parodying in ATD. Wikipedia entry.

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 and vervain
Two fragrant, medicinal substances derived from flowering plants. They bloom yellow and violet, respectively. Wikipedia pages for opopanax and for vervain.

Though Wikipedia prefers the spelling opoponax, the OED suggests Pynchon's.

slide cornet
???

mandola
An eight-stringed instrument shaped like a mandolin but tuned the same as a viola. It is originally an Irish instrument.

"tin pan" piano
???

houris
According to the OED, a "nymph of the Muslim Paradise. Hence applied allusively to a voluptuously beautiful woman."

Darby
Over 21yo, if he's aged.

Page 400

paillettes
???

louche
???

"jazz"
The OED suggests that the spelling here was always more popular than jass, as used on [[Pages 358-373#Page 370|p. 370]. It makes sense that a musician like "Dope" Breedlove might use a less conventional spelling, as he would be familiar with the term before common usage had regularized its spelling. By contrast, within the "dime novel" idiom of the Chums of Chance narration (dime novelists not necessarily being, especially in this days, the swingin'-est of cats), while jazz still registers as a slang term, its spelling has already been regularized.

high-hats
???

Missus Grundy
???

'ying'
"Yen"?

Page 401

Angela Grace
I.e., Angel of Grace

Gophiz... Hudson Dustuhs
Gophers, Hudson Dusters.

slickin up
Gentrification.

Mr. Mawgin
J. Pierpont Morgan.

stanchion
???

find it
(Small-penis joke.)

time-corroded
Actually, on p. 154 we learn that when these structures were erected, they were intentionally antiqued, "deliberately burned, attempts being made to blacken the stylized wreckage in aesthetic and interesting ways," a description that applies also to Pynchon's historical fiction with its antiquated language and its generally favorable view of all things black. Though, of course it's been a decade since the shrine was erected, and some actual time-corrosion may have occurred.

I AM THE WAY INTO THE DOLEFUL CITY
Phrase first appears on p. 154, where it is inscribed over the shrine that the citizens erect to the Destroyer. It is a quote from Canto III of Dante's Il Inferno, where it is emblazoned over the gates to Hell.

triatomic
I.e., ozone or O₃, which is a molecule comprised of three bonded oxygen molecules. Wikipedia.

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"
Smegma is a secretion of mammalian genitals. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smegma

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

telegraphic messages
(Why at night, particularly? Email parody?)

"Goes with everything"
Cf Al Capp's Shmoos?

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.

Finney Hall
???

florescent
???

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.

Wellesianism
Typo, unless he means Orson.

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) Btchakir 16:48, 19 December 2006 (PST)

Q-98s
FM station?

vulcanite
???

Heusler's alloy
???

bonzoline
???

electrum
An alloy of gold and silver, presumably not the same as argentaurum.

lignum vitae
The very hard heavy wood of any of several tropical American guaiacum trees. In Latin, literally "wood of life."

platinoid
???

magnalium
???

packfong silver
???

safe harbor
Paradoxical, I think.

automorphic
???

Page 410

revenance
???

Symmes Street
???

gaslit
Lightfuel motif.

St. Louis Fair
1904.

fantan
???

"preserver"
Gun?

magenta-and-green
Clashing-colors motif.

Page 411

Hawaiian
???

Zennist
Practitioners of Zen Buddhism.

Caged Women of Yokohama
???

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. See the explanantion given by the Learned English Dog in Mason & Dixon (Ch. 3, p. 22).

apricot and aquamarine
Clashing-colors motif.

Bohr... Mach... Einstein... Spengler... Wells... McTaggart
???

young Einstein
Perhaps a reference to the 1988 movie of the same name. At the time of the F.I.C.O.T.T. (1895 at the earliest), Einstein would have already published "The Investigation of the State of Aether in Magnetic Fields." Ironically, Einstein's special theory of relativity would later essentially invalidate theories of luminiferous aether.

neo-Augustinian
???

vertical distance
Of pudding-drop?

Old Stearinery Bell Tower
???

Page 413

322 feet
???

disordered
Eg clocktower assassins?

homeopathist
???

"the lycopodium type"... Fear
???

sky-brother
???

other Promise... resurrected... two millennia
???

Page 414

purlieus
???

millwork
???

penumbrae
(Is the ligatured-ae appropriate here?)

interfered with
Sexually molested.

vacant
(So signs of occupancy are faked?)

dust
(Clear sign of vacancy.)

systematically deluded
Cf Descartes.

quiescence
(Meatman is cyborg?)

Page 415

"Mr. Ace"
Master race; ace of spades; Mr Earl?

phatic
Relating to speech that serves to establish social relationships rather than to inform.

denounced
(Capitalism has failed but failure still can't be mentioned.)

certain of your great dynamos
???

Fraternity of the Venturesome
Mistranslated 'Chums of Chance'.

nzzt
Electrical short?

mission assignments
Pynchon seems to explain Chums backstory.

Page 416

Squanto and the Pilgrims
???

Page 417

"we're totally--"
...fucked.

"He is not what he says he is."
Pynchon denies Chums backstory/explanation.

trespassers
???

enigmatic object
Plotpoint?

Page 418

Trespass
With a capital T.

evidence... everywhere
Cf Crying of Lot 49.

neuropathy
An abnormal and usually degenerative state of the nervous system or nerves.

contracts
With Devil.

Other Units
(So our five gossiped to others?)

exhaustive
Cf Trekkies.

came to recall
Cf PK Dick.

red and indigo
Clashing?

Page 419

"El Capitan"
Sousa march.

"Whistling Rufus"
???

consecrated
???

Richardson Romanesque
Style of American Romanesque architecture from 1880s-1890s, named after architect Henry Robson Richardson, notable for use of brown stone, rounded corners, arches and cylindrical turrets. Wikipedia Entry.

modal theory
???

chit
???

Bing Spooninger
Like "Bing" Crosby, a crooner.

rack
???

Page 420

every note
Om?

say "Wall"
???

difficult vocal feat
???

cakewalk
An African-American entertainment having a cake as prize for the most accomplished steps and figures in walking; also, a stage dance developed from walking steps and figures typically involving a high prance with backward tilt. From this, slang for a one-sided contest or an easy task.

draw-note
Note played on harmonica by "drawing" air through reed by sucking in rather than blowing out (insert crude sex joke here).

Page 421

popularity
Masochistic love of oppressors.

cover identity
Burden of resistance.

Lombardy poplars.
???

Chromatic Harp
A harmonica that plays all notes in an octave rather than a scale in a certain key. Examples.

Pitch Integrity Guard
???

harmonica-reed files
???

Page 422

I.G. Mundharfwerke
Interessen-Gemeinschaft Mundharfwerke (Harmonica-works Association of Common Interests). "Mundharf" is Swabian German for "Harmonica".

drifted
Cf Slothrop's desk.

Offenbach
Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880), French composer of operettas.Wikipedia Entry.

into the Latrine
Cf Slothrop's hallucination.

vapor bearing... minerals
???

A.D.C.
???

Page 423

None of them...
Cf butterfly dreaming it's monk?

volunteer decoys
Fan-meme.

"At a Georgia Camp Meeting"
???

"deps"
???

route out of the past
The nostalgia trap.

Page 424

'coon' material
They enjoyed the jazzy parts of the routine.

isotropy
???

presently
R. Crumb did a comic like this: pic

opposition
(Was unconscious, now conscious?)

dropped from altitudes
(Cf pudding above)

Page 425

"After the Ball"
???

Bukhara
Either the Emirate of Bukhara, a former country in Central Asia or its capital

T.D.Y.
Abbrevation for Temporary Duty? weblink

Saksaul
A plant/tree native to the deserts of Central Asia, particularly the Gobi desert; it has a very hard wood and is covered with knobs Wikipedia pic

Q. Zane Toadflax
(Sounds like Douglas Adams?). Toadflax is the name of an invasive plant species

Hypopsammotic... Hypops
???

Page 426

beating their prices
Contradicts p425 "no further expenditure".

Page 427

temporarily lapsing
???

pigs fly
Lindsay = pig.

legalistic
???

Annotation Index