Reading Notes #4

Candlebrow University is named for its endower, Gideon Candlebrow, who made his fortune in Smegmo, "an artificial substitute for everything in the edible-fat category, including margarine, which many felt wasn't that real to begin with. An eminent Rabbi of world hog capital Cincinnati, Ohio, was moved to declare the product kosher, adding that 'the Hebrew people have been waiting four thousand years for this. Smegmo is the Messiah of kitchen fats.'"

Did Offenbach really write "From the Halls of Montezuma"?

Where We're At: Parts 2.20-2.21: Iceland Spar

In New York City with the Chums (on leave); it's 1903:

• The Chums receive instructions via Plug Loafsley, a street Arab, whose headquarters is the Lollipop Lounge, a child bordello. While delivering the message Loafsley makes a casual sarcastic remark about "the time machine" and the Chums ask to meet with him further.
• Chick and Darby meet with Plug at the Lollipop Lounge to ask about the time machine; Plug takes them to see Dr. Zoot, under the Ninth Avenue el, who made the time machine. Zoot lets them have a sample ride, which he rescues them from--they see strange scary beings. He explains that he didn't build the defective machine; he bought it from Alonzo Meatman at the Ball in Hand bar at the annual summer time-travel conference at Candlebrow University in Ohio.

The Chums travel to Ohio to Candlebrow University.

• Vanderjuice is a guest lecturer at this year's conference. With Vanderjuice, the Chums visit the local junkyard and see hulls of many failed time machines--but not of Zoot's machine.
• The Chums go to the Ball in Hand bar to look for Alonzo Meatman. (Image of a girl with a pygmy lover here--third time so far for a pygmy lover.) They see a boy vanish, and leave. Chick returns and learns that the boy who vanished is Meatman.
• Meatman tells Chick that the resurrected ghosts (or whatever) are everywhere and takes Chick to meet the visiting dead.
• Chick meets Mr. Ace who explains he's come from the future for refuge from [his own] present: "We are here among you as seekers of refuge from our present--your future--a time of worldwide famine, exhausted fuel supplies, terminal poverty--the end of the capitalistic experiment. Once we came to understand the simple thermodynamic truth that Earth's resources were limited, in fact soon to run out, the whole capitalist illusion fell to pieces." Because of their economic heresy they've been forced to migrate in time--and here they are. Ace tells Chick that the Chums' assignments have all ultimately been to prevent the attempts of the future to enter the present and asks Chick to consider accepting occasional assignments from the future undead; compensation would be eternal youth (which is better than eternal life).
• Chick "[afterwards] [c]ould not rid himself of the impression...of having been psychically interfered with. Another image here of Deliverance.
• Chick reports back to the Chums--images of the Pilgrims and the Indians the Pilgrims' first winter. But what if they're not innocents, what if they're raiders, wanting to take something back to the future. Or maybe, says Chick, they're bunco artists, testing the Chums' loyalty to their Hierarchy.
• Chick brings Miles with him to meet again with Mr. Ace. Miles recognizes Ace-he's out for no good, Miles has seen them before watching him.
• The crew begins to find evidence of Trespass in the ship. (Chums, not just this bunch, had been believing that they were immune from aging by being Chums. On finding that false, they've been willing to sell out to gain (or regain) eternal youth.)
• To escape from the Trespassers, the Chums join the Marching Academy Harmonica Band at Candlebrow? In Illinois somewhere? The other student harmonicists are other Chums sections?
• Alonzo Meatman is there, too. He's a "squealer" (rat). He disappears.
• The Chums begin to wonder whether they're not actually harmonicists, whether it's all a hoax they're playing on themselves. They begin to forget the Chums, wonder whether they're actually readers who've been serving as volunteer decoys for the real Chums. They get used to the idea, the longing for the actual Chums ebbs.
• And finally they see in the distance a road, and the Inconvenience at the end of the road, and there's Pugnax. And the Trespassers are still there but the crew has learned to ignore them.
• Alonzo Meatman reappears with orders from Higher Authority--the Sfinciuno Itinerary, and orders to go to Inner Asia, Bukhara. They're to meet the frigate Saksaul, Captain Q. Zane Toadflax. They'll need Hypopsammotic Survival Apparatus ("Hypops apparatus"), which they ask Vanderjuice about. Vanderjuice tells them that Roswell Bounce invented it for the Vibe corporation.
• Bounce tells them that the Hypops apparatus lets one travel beneath sand (i.e., desert) as if beneath water. Vibe corporation stole the idea from him; he'll undercut their price. He sells six units to the Chums. Something about flight into the next dimension (time). They leave Candlebrow (and Alonzo still there) and proceed to Bukhara.

Page 428. End of Iceland Spar section.

Where We're At: Part 2.19: Iceland Spar

Frank Webb (who last we saw previously under attack by the Bob Meldrum or someone, in Telluride)

• Has escaped to "Old Mexico" ("was to spend months that seemed like years traipsing to no purpose around an empty shadowmap, a dime novel of Old Mexico, featuring gringo evildoers in exile, sudden deaths, a government that had already fallen but did not yet know it, a revolution that would never begin though thousands were already dying and suffering in its name.") with the Gaston Villa band and meets Ewball Oust, whose family is paying him to stay in Mexico and try to earn a living as a mining engineer/metallurgist. Oust sees that what Frank is really after is the spar (properly called espato in Spanish; colloquially also called espanto, "which is something either horrifying or amazing, depending"), not the argentaurum. Frank has seen ghosts through the spar.
• Frank and Ewball cross into Mexico and end up at Guanajuato. Frank keeps dreaming of Deuce Kindred, who keeps telling him that he's not here, he's miles away. Frank stumbles on a street that's been in his Deuce dreams.
• Frank and Ewball are arrested for something political. In jail they meet Dwayne Provecho. Someone's funneling money to Ewball from outside and jail is okay. Jailer Sgt Amparo Vasquez (female) tells them that the charge was something that one of them did "a long time ago, on the other side." Frank assumes it's him; Ewball has been bribing people all along but that's not enough to imprison them both for.
• Dwayne Provecho has been sent there on a mission to offer Frank contract employment because it's widely believed (in the both US and Mexico) that Frank is the Kieselguhr Kid. Apparently Ellmore Disco and Bob Meldrum both believe this--and this is why Meldrum didn't kill him on first sight ("'I frightened Hair-Trigger Bob?' 'More like professional courtesy.'")
• Frank and Ewball break out of jail. Dwayne stays behind. Frank and Ewell take off deeper into Mexico with anarchist El Nato and his parrot, Joaquin. Joaquin talks with Frank about double refraction/espato (vis-a-vis cities and states--Zacatecas, Zacatecas, etc-- being named the smae). Frank is being haunted--there's something in his past he needs to take care of. After a failed attempt to steal dynamite, Ewball drives off army men attacking Tarahumare Indians then takes off northward; El Nato peels off as well.
• Frank travels with the Indians, including El Espinero (the dowser) and his (unnamed) wife and her sister, Estrella, and heads north as well into the Sierra. El Espinero leads Frank to a large, perfect calcite; in it Frank sees Sloat Fresno (where he is), but not Deuce Kindred. Years later Ewball explains that since Ewball and Frank saved two lives, something about two lives owed to them. Deuce is one; Huerta (the leader of ???) should ideally be the other.
• Frank splits with El Espinero and ends up in a cantina somewhere, and Sloat Fresno is there. Frank kills him. The locals tell him that Deuce Kindred has already left. "This had been so quick, even, you could say, easy. He would soon begin to understand how it all might turn, was already, well before he had the godforsaken little town at his back, turning, to regret.
  

Page 396.

Where We're At: Parts 2.17-2.18: Iceland Spar

Dally

• Travels (by train) to New York (where her roommate is Katie, a would-be actress), andl ands a job working for Hop Fong as a girl being sold into white slavery in Chinatown.
• R. Willshire Vibe sees a performance and asks her to be in his Broadway production; she declines at least in part because she's under contract to Hop Fong. Vibe and Fong talk and suddenly there's a lot more money being poured into their scenes, and also suddenly tong wars (between Tom Lee's On Leong tong and rivals Mock Duck and the Hip Sing tong) break out in Chinatown and curtail the white slavery performances.
• Needing work, Dally calls on Vibe. Bad-vaudeville producer Con McVeety is also at Vibe's office; Con has work for her and Vibe doesn't, so Dally goes to work for Con (at his dime museum) as a card girl (the girl who holds cards introducing the acts). (Con also produces a Bowery version of Julius Caesar, called Dagoes with Knives; Dally loses out on a part to a girlfriend of a tong gangster.)
  
• Dally and Katie attend a party at Vibe's, where someone tries to handcuff her and she's rescued by Erlys, her birth mother, whom she goes to live with in a fabulous big apartment with Luca Zombini, Erlys's husband who she left Merle for, and their many children (including Bria, Nunzi, Cici, Dominic, Lucia, and Concetta) who participate in the family magic act.
  
• Parts of Zombini's act are built around using the Nicol prism and double refraction (via Iceland spar). Minor problem is that the double refraction is actually creating two actual people (from one). He's consulted with Vanderjuice, and it's a problem with a hole in time. The only possible way to fix it might be with mirrors which are only available from the Isola degli Specchi (Isle of Mirrors) in Venice.
• Erlys tells Katie that Merle wasn't actually her birth father--it was one Bert Snidell, who was killed before Dally was born and whose family would have nothing to do with Erlys.
• The whole Zamboni family, including Dally, travel to Venice to perform (and for Zombini to try to de-create the duplicate people via a conjurer's mirror from the Isle of Mirrors).

Reef

• Is still with Stray (and son Jessse), mostly, drifting from job to job or scam to scam. (There's another image of the closed frontier here, parlor society, loss of freedom.)
  
• Meanwhile, he's using carousing as a cover for dynamiting. He bombs something too close to home and Stray finds out about his double life. (There's a bit about the day of atonement or possibly the second coming, coming.)
• The anarchists who've died in the conflicts are relying on Reef to continue (or he's hallucinating the following a particularly loud explosion).
  
• It's time for Frank to take up the revenge action, so Frank heads for Denver to find Frank.
• En route to Denver, a man-caused avalanche nearly kills Reef; the Owners Association is after him. Reef returns to Stray, says goodbye, and goes undercover.
• Reef creates himself as "east coast nerve case" Thrapston Cheesely III and meets traveling Englishwoman Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin, who brings him along (keeps him) with her band of neurasthenics. They eventually land in New Orleans, where they part after a drunken quarrel.
• Reef meets bandleader Dope Breedlove and travelling Irish insurrectionist Wolfe Tone O'Rooney, who is raising money for the Land League to funnel to the Colorado miners and who mentions that he'd hoped to meet the Kieselguhr Kid, who seems not to be active any more.
• O'Rooney takes Reef in and introduces him to Flaco, another European anarchist dynamiter. Wolfe leaves for Mexico. Flaco and Reef wait for tramp steamer Despedida, which will be going to Genoa where they'll look for work dynamiting tunnels.

This takes us to page 373.

Where We're At: Parts 2.12-2.16

Lake Traverse

• Lake and Mayva have moved to town and are working at a cafe. Lake meets and falls in love with Deuce Kindred. (He knows who she is; she doesn't know who he is.) Lake had been seeing Dr. Willis Turnstone, from the Miner's Hospital. Oleander Prudge (female) tells Mayva that Deuce killed Webb; Mayva tells Lake; Lake won't leave Deuce; Mayva leaves Lake.
• Lake and Deuce marry; she's a virgin bride (so whatever Webb thought she was doing, she wasn't). Sloat Fresno moves in with them and Lake is sleeping with both Deuce and Sloat (simultaneously).
• The mining company has noticed that the bombings have not ceased with Webb's death; either they went for the wrong guy or Deuce lied about killing him; Deuce is warned. Has Sloat sold Deuce out? Sloat leaves.

Frank Traverse
In Denver

• Frank hides out in Denver from whoever killed Webb and as time goes on to try to find out who killed Webb. He's being approached b y mine company middle-manager types who want to employ him--these are Vibe company reps. He learns that Vibe Corp was ultimately behind Webb's murder (and knows already that Vibe is paying for Kit's schooling at Yale). Vibe Corp is trying to buy Frank's loyalty? something? and because Frank won't accept the offer he's essentially unemployable in gold mining, which leads him to specialize in zinc and spend more time in Leadville and Lake County.
• Wren Provenance is a Radcliffe grad, anthropologist studying the southwest.
  
• Crime reporter Booth Verbing warns Frank that (Cap'n) Bulkley Wells's people down from Telluride (where Reef had been) have been looking for him. Another Stations of the Cross reference-Wren has arrived here after Stations of the Cross, etc.
  
• Frank explains to Wren that if Reef hasn't avenged Webb, the job falls to Frank. He knows that the gunners were Deuce and Sloat and that they were hired by the Mine Owners Association in Telluride.

In Telluride

• Frank goes to Telluride to search for Deuce and Sloat. The city is filled state Guardsmen.
• Gunfighter and hair-trigger temper Bob Meldrum is here; his day job is security at the Tomboy mine and he also works for Cap'n Wells.
• Ellmore Disco, a shopkeeper, is "the man to see" in town. Frank sees Ellmore to try to get an appointment with Cap'n Wells, ostensibly to try to sell him on a new system for zinc mining (extracting?); Ellmore tells Frank that Frank needs to be in good with Meldrum first. Loomis is Ellmore's aide and sidekick. La Blanca is Meldrum's wife.
• Frank meets Meldrum; Meldrum won't tell him about Wells's whereabouts but Meldrum does point him toward Merle Rideout, who is working as an amalgamator at the Little Hellkite mine--Frank can try to sell his new process to Merle. Frank backs up Meldrum in a bar fight. A Japanese trade delegation is in town including a representative of international spy Baron Akashi, a roving military attache in Europe (meanwhile, there's Russia-Finland issues--Russia occupies Finland at present); they may also or instead be interested in industrial spying.
• Frank rents a horse and sets out for Little Hellkite mine (it's haunted) to see Merle Rideout. He meets Dally, who is working as a dynamiter in the mines. Merle tells Frank that he knew Webb; Frank is looking for whoever pulled the trigger on Webb, not for Wells, the boss. Merle shows him a photo of Deuce and Sloat. Dally warns Frank that Bob Meldrum (and his sidekick Rudie) is after him; Dally helps him escape through the Silver Orchard brothel.
• Merle tells Frank about Dr. Stephen Emmens in New York, who transmutes silver to argentaurum, which looks like (and is passed off as, including to the U.S. Mint) gold. Look through spar to see whether it's gold or argentaurum(?). What if the Emmens process reduces the value of gold, "knock[ing] the Gold Standard right onto its glorified ass"? Merle tells Frank that what he, Frank thinks he's looking for really isn't what he is looking for; and that Webb was also looking for (and similarly misguided re) and sends him to talk to Doc Turnstone (Lake's old beau).
• Turnstone has seen gnomes in the mines, like Merle, Dally, and Frank have.
• Turnstone earlier had helped pistolero Jimmy Drop with back pain, worked a chiropractor circuit before being hired at the Miner's hospital (where he courted Lake and Lake dumped him for Deuce--this is the first Frank learns of Lake and Deuce). Deuce used to be part of Drop's gang; Drop offers to harm Deuce as a favor to Turnstone but also because he doesn't like Deuce ("nobody liked him, mean little brush snake").
• Frank meets Jimmy Drop. Drop knew Reef, who he says has gone all the way back east.
• Ellmore helps Frank disguise himself as a Mexican musician with Gaston Villa and his band.
• Frank visits Webb's grave; Webb's ghost tells him that Deuce and Sloat have left town and split up. Frank wants to find Deuce and Lake.
• Dally leaves town and heads east.

Kit Traverse

• is at Yale and is burned out. His mentor, Gibbs, the mathematician, has died. He's being watched by Vibe henchmen.
• Vanderjuice sends for him and gives him a letter (already opened and kept from Webb for some time already) from Lake telling him that Webb had been killed and Reef and Frank were avenging him. None of the Vibes, including Colfax, mention Webb; were Vibes behind the killing?
• Tesla has erected another transmitter, on Long Island, across the Sound.
• Vanderjuice tells Kit about his working for Scarsdale Vibe earlier (and yes, Vibe was financing Tesla's work at the same time as he was financing sabotaging it). Vanderjuice suggests that Kit get out, that he take the education being paid for as blood money and that he go to Germany to study with Dr. Hillbert at Gottingen, who is developing a "Spectral Theory" which requires a vector space of infinite, not just three, dimensions. This would move Kit much further into vectorism.
• Colfax and Kit boat to Long Island to meet Tesla; Tesla knows that Scarsdale Vibe played him; thanks Kit for earlier (Colorado) suggestions.
• Colfax has been reporting to Scarsdale about Kit and was supposed to kill him (because he wants out of being bought?). Colfax suggests that Kit get out, go to Germany.
• Kit meets with Scarsdale Vibe and Foley; subtext of the conversation is that Kit knows about Webb's killing. Scarsdale would be more comfortable now with Kit out of the picture and sends him off to Germany.
• Was Scarsdale bringing Kit east an act of mercy? Is he paying off Mayva (and thereby Lake) and employing Frank? Or was he doing it to corrupt Webb, the anarchist's, children? Scarsdale is increasingly isolated and Foley worries.

(p. 335)

Reading Notes #3

I cannot believe that I'm having to research Tarot. (Also, I cannot believe that again I can get so lost so fast.) On the other hand, if I hadn't had to research Tarot, I'd never have encountered this, in Wikipedia: . Um, yeah.

Meanwhile, "the Tetractys isn't the only thing round here that's ineffable."

Trying to summarize the TWIT section, it's becoming clearer to me that this bit really is dense with new characters and new themes and it's all built on stuff I know nothing about--Tarot, development of southeastern Europe prior to World War I.

"[Clive Crouchmas] greeted the Cohen by raising his left hand, then spreading the fingers two and two away from the thumb so as to form the Hebrew letter shin, signifying the initial letter of one of the pre-Mosaic (that is, plural) names of God which may never be spoken.
'Basically wishing long life and prosperity,' explained the Cohen, answering with the same gesture."

Where We're At: Parts 2.9-2.11: Iceland Spar

TWIT/Lew Basnight:

• Lew Basnight is in London.
• Because they found him "emerg[ing] out of an explosion" Nigel and Neville have sponsored him for membership in TWIT (the True Worshippers of the Ineffable Tetractys), a psychic thing, like Madame Blavatsky ("[these groups] and other arrangements for seekers of certitude, of whom there seemed to be an ever-increasing supply as the century has rushed to its end and through some unthinkable zero and on out the other side"). He's to be a psychic detective for TWIT.
• The Grand Cohen of the London chapter of TWIT is Nicholas Nookshaft.
• Nookshaft explains the explosion as a passageway from another world and therefore Basnight may be some sort of something.
• Yashmeen Halfcourt is a Tzaddik (high level TWIT). She'll be studying math at Girton (Cambridge). She doesn't entirely believe that TWIT is what it claims to be ("it might be politics, or even some scheme to defraud").
• Yasmeen was a ward of Lt.-Colonel G. Auberon Halfcourt, who's believed to be somewhere in India.
• TWIT's mission is to track those 22 people or groups who embody the major arcana of the Tarot.
• The Devil, card #XV, is rival university professors Renfrew (at Cambridge) and Werfner (at Gottingen), who are competing experts and power-brokers in the relationship of the west, and specifically western development, in the Balkans and Asia Minor ("the Eastern Question"). The major issue at the moment is the development of the Baghdad railway (Europe through Turkey and on to the Persian Gulf--a major improvement in trade routes, even more beneficial than the Suez Canal)--who (Germany or Britain) will be allowed to do it and therefore will control it.
• Madame Natalia Eskimoff is a psychic. She used to be The Fool (one of the 22), but changed allegiances to the other side. She predicts that either Renfrew or Werfner will murder the other.
  
• Clive Crouchmas is a low-level TWIT member who works for government doing something related to the Ottoman territories in his day job--he's a channel between TWIT and Renfrew and Werfner.
• Basnight is still looking for Cyclomite dynamite, the hallucinogen.
• Dr. Coombs De Bottle runs something which investigates anarchist bombs and bombers. He's found bombs (poison gas grenades, actually) which are disguised as Australian cricket ball (Australia-England cricket matches are coming up) and which are being placed by the Gentleman Bomber of Headingly.
• Basnight is sent to Cambridge to meet with Renfrew. Renfrew is also trying to find the Gentleman Bomber of Headingly (?), who Basnight may recognize, and tries to hire Basnight to work for him (Renfrew) instead of TWIT--to bring the Bomber to him. Basnight tells the Cohen.

The Chums are in Venice.

• Their mission is to locate the Sfinciuno Itinerary, "a map of chart of post-Polo routes into Asia, believed by many to lead to the hidden city of Shambhala itself."
• The Bol'shaia Igra (Padzhitnoff) is present as well; Padzhitnoff is Counterfly's rival with a waitress.
• Domenico Sfinciuno is the Shadow-Doge-in-Exile. His family has been trading with the east (inner Asia) since the 1300s; their trading route (a chain of oases and Venetian settlements) developed into an alternative to the Silk Road that the Chums are supposed to locate.
• The Sfinciuno Itinerary is a spiritual quest and not a physical map or itinerary. Maybe. Stuff on page 249 about parallel worlds. Artisans on the Isola degli Specchi (Isle of Mirrors) (now flooded and underwater and uninhabitable, maybe unfindable) developed mirrors that revealed parallel worlds--the mirrors are paramorphoscopes. The Sfinciuno Itinerary "was encrypted as a paramorphic distortion meant to be redeemed from the invisible with the aide of one particular configuration of lenses and mirrors, whose exact specifications" have been lost. Something about Iceland spar and mirrors.
• Miles sees a vision that tells him that their quest for the Sfinciuno Itinerary is more for their own benefit than for Sfinciuno's. They're on a Pilgrimage--which is compared to the Franciscans' development of the Stations of the Cross to allow parishioners to journey to Jerusalem in place--"to save us from the blinding terror of having to make the real journey, from one episode to the next of the last day of Christ on Earth, and at last to the real, unbearable Jerusalem."
• Chick meets Renata, who reads his Tarot and finds XVI, The Tower--which signifies that the Campanile will be hit by some kind (metaphoric?) of lightning and two parties of some sort will fall.
• Something from some other existence fires at the Inconvenience and the Bol'shaia Igra and topples the Capanile.
• The Bol'shaia Igra have been trying for two years to assassinate Mr. Ryohei Uchida, in Japan; his Black Dragon Society tried to hire the Chums last year for routine aerial surveillance. The Black Dragon Society's purpose is to destroy the Russian presence in Manchuria--it's technically Russia's but Japan wants it for its opium and gold. (And here's another South Africa/gold reference.)
• Is the Bol'shaia Igra looking for the Sfinciuno Itinerary as well?

(p. 259)

Chums of Chance Books: Read 'Em All!

The Chums of Chance and the Ice Pirates
The Chums of Chance Nearly Crash into the Kremlin
The Chums of Chance at the Ends of the Earth (Reef reads this aloud to Webb or Webb's corpse as they travel back to Telluride.)
The Chums of Chance and the Caged Women of Yokohama

Reading Notes #2

I'm about a fifth of the way through Against the Day, and I'm realizing that this is a conventional big novel--one theme, a limited cast (large, but limited in the sense that the major cast members are followed episodically through time and place), plots that fold out linearly--start at Point A, go to Point B. And I'm a bit disappointed, I guess. On the one hand, it's been over 30 years since Gravity's Rainbow was published and it's a safe bet that overall Against the Day will be read under far less influence of soft drugs, but still. If I'm going to go along with over a thousand pages about labor history and why labor and socialism are right and good--and, to be clear, I agree with the sentiment--I want weird-tasting wine gums and sexually aggressive cephalopods along the way. And I'm not really getting them. What happened to World's Fairs that become, well, whiter toward their centers (the "well" there makes the sentence for me) and Alaskan exhibits with special reindeer dances? Is the turn of the century American West so very dire for the common man that there's no absurd humor to be had? For an author whose major work is about the ending of World War II and the big bomb, is that even possible? Even the perfect set-ups that are here--say, English tourists on an Oscar Wilde tour of the West--are just left hanging, unplayed-with. It's as if somewhere around the 9/11 scenes, all the goofiness went away and we're left with nice moments that don't get explored for their absurdity and humor--or, on the other hand, for the anger behind them. We've got tasteful and well-done; I miss the flashy, showy stuff that doesn't always work but when it does, is magic.

Where We're At: Parts 2.5-2.8: Iceland Spar

• Lew Basnight, the detective from Chicago, is in Denver tracking anarchists and more specifically the dynamiter called the Kieselguhr Kid. (This is a non-starter assignment that he's on because the bigger outfits got nowhere finding this guy.)
  • Lew's turning into an anarchist or at least a union/anarchist sympathizer.
  • Owner's operatives are infiltrating the mines--and may or may not be actually on the side of the owners (may be playing one or both sides).
  • Burke Ponghill is the editor of the Lodazal, Colorado newspaper; the town doesn't really exist yet and the paper is part of attracting people there. Lodazal will be a mining town that mines...something. Ponghill's brother Buddy turned in his other brother Brad as the Kieselguhr Kid, which he most likely isn't.
  • Nate Privett, the detective agency owner, vists Lew in Colorado--his annual inspection visit. Nate accidentally tells Lew that he, Lew, doesn't really need to find the Kid, just to do enough be credible enough for Nate to keep billing for his services. This disgusts Lew, and moves him definitely to the labor/anarchist side; he basically quits the case.
  • Lew accidentally eats cyclomite dynamite, a hallucinogen, and becomes obessesed with dynamite; he gets blasted and is found by Nigel and Neville, English tourists who're following Oscar Wilde's tourist path in the American West. They bring him to England (traveling through the Galveston Hurricane of 1900) as a stowaway.
• The Traverse family.
  • Daughter Lake has become a prostitute in Silverton, Colorado; she comes home to visit and father Webb throws her out of the house. Wife Mayva goes to Lake to convince her to come home again.
  • Without family around, father Webb, the miner/dynamiter, is deeper into union/mine issues. He meets Deuce Kindred and develops a father-son relationship with him.
    
  • Deuce Kindred and Sloat Fresno are miners--or not. They're management plants and they take Webb out of town at gunpoint. Deuce and Sloat take Webb (or Webb's body--it's unclear) to Jeshimon, Utah for disposal.
  • Meanwhile, Webb's son Reef convinces his brother Frank temporarily leave mining school and come with him to Nochecita, Nevada where Estrella (Stray) is pregnant with Reef's child. Stray's friend is Sage, who has Mormon relatives pressuring her to marry. Cooper is another one of Stray's suitors; he plays guitar. Frank meets schoolteacher Linnet Dawes.
    
  • Frank receives a phone call that Deuce Kindred has Webb; Frank and Reef leave Nevada to go save or retrieve Webb; they split up before arriving at Jeshimon.
  • Reef finds Webb's body in Jeshimon and brings him back home to Telluride, Colorado for burial.
  • With Webb dead, Lake comes home, Frank returns to school, and Reef returns to Nevada (and Stray and the baby, a boy). Reef vows revenge on his own and Frank's behalf--he'll use "rambling and gambling" as a cover for going away for union activities/bombing. Was Webb the Kieselguhr Kid?
    

This takes us to page 218.

Pynchon does 9/11

Here's Pynchon on 9/11. No surprise, really--he's a New Yorker. (I've always assumed that he'd live on the Upper West Side somewhere--it fits, demographically--but OTOH I like the idea of my having snarled at him at the Key Food on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope for taking 20 items into the 10-or-less express lane.) He's even got a Rudy Giuliani cameo ("His face appeared on bills posted all over the wood fences around vacant lots, the rear ends of street cars, its all-too-familiar
bone structure shining with the unforgiving simplicity of a skull").

Story-wise, the Malus's mysterious cargo causes whatever happened.

Also, somewhere in here we have another stockyards image--people funnelling into the subways. (Earlier, we had the actual stockyards at the Chicago Expo, and the closing of the American frontier limiting and directing where one could go.)

Where we're at: Parts 2.1-2.4: Iceland Spar

How is it that everything made so very much sense at the end of part 1 and suddenly within the first 30 pages of part 2 everything's gone awry for me and nothing makes sense and I can't figure out what's going on? (It's Pynchon, that's how.)

Going back to summarize makes it all make sense to me.

So. We have:

• IGLOO (Inter-Group Laboratory for Opticomagnetic Observation), a radiational clearinghouse or intelligence center--they're offstage.
  
• The Tovarishchi Slutchainyi, like the Chums in Russia, led by Igor Padzhitnoff--they promote mischief, and Padzhitnoff drops cinderblocks on his victims. Ship is the Bol'shaia Igra. Padzhitnoff talks about some animal or thing that is so scary and so dangerous as to be nameless.
  
• The Voromance Expedition.
  
• Leader is Dr. Alden Voromance.
• Ship (schooner) is the Etienne-Louis Malus.
  
• The Chums have been instructed (at the end of part 1) to find the Voromance Expedition and convince them to give up their expedition and therefore are chasing (trying to catch up to) the Malus. The Malus is carrying what they believe to be a meteorite (which "harbor[ed] not merely a consciousness but an ancient purpose as well, and a plan for carrying it out") which is the problem.
• Meeting with Voromance at an Iceland hotel: Dr. V. Ganesh Rao, a Quarternionist ISO a gateway to the Ulterior; Dodge Flannellette, an American ISO practical uses for any discoveries. Also Dr. Templeton Blope, Otto Ghloix, Hastings Froyle.
  
• Fleetwood Vibe, son of Scarsdale, is nominally present at the Voromance Expedition meeting to record and document the proceedings; he's been instructed by Scarsdale to be looking for land for railroads. (Scarsdale's competition, [railroad tycoon E.H.] Harriman, is buying up land for what may be a trans-Bering Strait rail link.)
• Scarsdale Vibe is financing the Voromance Expedition.
  
• Constance Penhallow and her grandson, Hunter (who paints), in Iceland(?). Hunter stows away on the Malus and leaves with the Voromance Expedition.
• Kit Traverse, at Yale, finally meets his benefactor, Scarsdale Vibe. Vibe tries to name Kit as his heir; Kit declines because he knows (or doesn't really know) where the money came from.
  
• We meet more Vibes: Sons Colfax (Kit's roommate, a jock; Scarsdale finds him disappointingly obedient), Cragmont (offstage; ran off with a trapeze girl); Fleetwood, whom we've met. Vibe cousin is Dittany (female), who sleeps with Kit. Scarsdale's wife is Edwarda (Eddie), who lives in the Village next door to Scarsdale's dilletante brother, R. Wilshire Vibe; both are active in the NYC theater scene.
  
• In Africa, in flashback, Yitzhak Zilberfeld, a Zionist looking for land for a Jewish homeland, meets Fleetwood.
  

The Chums catch Voromance once, fail to convince him to turn back. They're chasing him again to prevent the Malus from reaching "the city" which may be New York City. They don't(?) make it in time, and the Malus's cargo causes a 9/11-type catastrophe.

A local Icelandic food is Meat Olaf.

Several bits about South Africa and treatment of the natives (and gold, and diamonds). As a more-developed country, we build and develop in lesser-developed countries to demonstrate to the natives that our machinery--i.e., our country-- is vastly more powerful than the natives are and can kill them. Is this the same setting that shows up in a V episode and in retrospect in Gravity's Rainbow? (And if it is, can wresting bears in Vienna be far behind?)

Odd that Scarsdale has a son Fleetwood and no other offspring along the lines of Bronxville or Mount Vernon West.

This takes us to page 170.

Chums of Chance books: Read 'Em All!

The Chums of Chance and the Evil Halfwit (set in "Our Nation's Capital")
The Chums of Chance at Krakatoa
The Chums of Chance Search for Atlantis
The Chums of Chance in Old Mexico
The Chums of Chance and the Curse of the Great Kahuna
The Chums of Chance in the Bowels of the Earth ("for some reason one of the less appealing of this series")

plus something in Khartoum that Vanderjuice refers to on page 29

Where we're at: Parts 1.1-1.10: The Light Over the Ranges

So at the end of part 1, The Light Over the Ranges, we have:

• The Chums: Randolph, Lindsay, Darby (who I keep wanting to call Darby Crash), Miles, and Chick; and Pugnax, the dog. Plus shuffled offstage, Bindlestiffs (like the Chums) Riley, Zip, Penny Black. Chums' ship is the Inconvenience.
  
• The detectives: Nate Privett, detective, owns White City Investigations, and employee Lew Basnight (who apparently committed a crime he can't remember and was already ditched by wife Troth), who actually does the detecting and is presently trailing and infiltrating anarchists (and presumably was assigned to the Chums' Inconvenience to watch over related events at the Expo). They're in competition with Pinkertons. Basnight was a penitent at the Esthonia hotel (contact was Drave) and he's transferred to Denver after the Exposition. Previously, Basnight was involved in protecting Archduke Ferdinand (that Archduke Ferdinand) who was in Chicago for the Expo and was looking for new prey--such as Hungarians--to kill, and the archduke's bodyguard, Max Kautsch. All except Privett (maybe) and Basnight have been shuffled offstage.
• Professor Heino Vanderjuice (Yale) plus his handler in Chicago, Ray Ipsow, a socialist. Vanderjuice is also the Chums' "longtime friend and mentor". Vanderjuice works with electricity(?).
  
• Scarsdale Vibe, financier, with sidekick Foley Walker. Vibe hires Vanderjuice to defeat Tesla (who is backed by Pierpont Morgan, way offstage) in Tesla's quest to develop a free worldwide system of electricity. Vibe may also, we find out later, have money invested in Tesla's work.
  
• Merle Rideout, photographer, plus daughter Dally (Dahlia) and Chevrolette McAdoo the stripper. Plus offstage: Erlys, Dally's mother, and Zombini, the magician Erlys ran off with. After the Expo, Rideout (with Dally) gradually and randomly makes his way to Denver doing odd jobs along the way.
  Earlier, Rideout was an Etherist and another Etherist was Roswell Bounce; Blinky Morgan was a fugitive criminal. Roswell taught Merle photochemistry/photography.
  
• Webb Traverse, miner, dynamiter, and anarchist (socialist), Denver. Union man. Blacklisted for union? activity. Merle meets him in Denver. Wife is Mayva, kids are Reef, Frank, Kit (see below; male), Lake (female). Veikko is another dynamiter.
• Kit Traverse, electricity guy. Son of dynamiter Web Traverse. Worked for Tesla; Foley Walker met him by chance(?) and via Scarsdale Vibe sent him to study at Yale (presumably under Vanderjuice).
  

Setting notes: Chicago World's Expo 1893; Denver following.

Like most Pynchon, not a lot of women here except as accessories. Take away Oedipa Mass--maybe--and the whole oeuvre fails the Bechdel test.

I thought I had the cast pretty much straight, but I did need to refer back to the book to fill in a lot of these and various levels of detail. Still, it's clearer than Gravity's Rainbow was at this point, or maybe I've learned to read Pynchon better (or maybe I'm way off and just deluded).

These "where we're at" segments will be more frequent from here on out. 110 pages turned out to be way more than I expected to go back through and bullet out.

Reading Notes #1

So I'm around 60 pages in and I'm struck by how much easier this is for me so far than Gravity's Rainbow was. It can't be that I'm a significantly better reader or that I've developed a better memory for character names. But I even remember random book-versus-reality questions that I'd like to follow up--for example, were the buildings at the Chicago Exhibition really made of I Can't Believe It's Not Marble? So I'm wondering whether Gravity's Rainbow functions like training wheels for Against the Day in the same way that V does, in turn, for Gravity's Rainbow, or whether Pynchon is intentionally marking characters better (who we need to keep track of, who X is when X reappears)--or what.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to decide what to do with this blog. I want the discipline of writing every day, but every day writing about a book? Maybe not. And then again, looking up every random weird word or might-be-historical event would probably be unnecessary, since the book's been out for several years and there's a wiki that I think must answer most questions. But then again again, when I was reading Gravity's Rainbow it took me what seemed like hours to get a definitive answer about what "reet pleats," which were mentioned in passing, are. (The whole phrase was something like "zoot suit with reet pleats." I already knew what a zoot suit is, but two online Pynchon references and an online fashion dictionary and a hardcopy fashion dictionary all took me nowhere closer to reet pleats--which, just for the record, are pleats that are cool or snappy or any other slangy word generally meaning "good," and not, as I assumed, any particular style of pleat like inverted or Fortuny.)

Last note for today, I was amused to see Frederick Jackson Turner show up in Against the Day. I totally called that one (in an as-yet unpublished entry, but this is my blog so you'll have to trust me--or not) way back before they even got to the fair. Careful reader (or American history knowledge) points for me!

Then again, some mention of bombs (in regard to Chums in Europe backstory) had me stopping to wonder whether bombs--as in bombs bursting in air giving proof through the night--had been invented by 1893. So maybe not so much on the American history front.

Why AtD? Why now? Why blog?

For the two years since I finished reading Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon's earlier long and difficult novel, I've been floating in a sea of accessible fiction and series mysteries, mostly bought used. And while there's nothing wrong with choosing your reading material based on what someone liked enough to trade for store credit, I'm beginning to feel the need for more structure, more meat. More direction. More reward. I miss images like Grigori the octopus oozing sullenly in the corner, cows drunk on fermented sileage uttering moos with drunken umlauts on them, a pit band tootling and blatting at one another. I miss throwaway lines about Beethoven just making you want to invade Poland. I miss bad puns and filk that I can't quite place to its source. Most of all I miss great writing.

On the other hand, Against the Day runs 1085 pages and is too big to fit in any handbag I own. It's a commitment not just in time and attention, but also to carrying a totebag so that I'll be able to read on the subway. And I'm still traumatized by having taken notes to try to get a handle on Gravity's Rainbow.

I'd like to finish Against the Day before Pynchon's new work, Inherent Vice, is released August 4th. I'm enough of a fangirl to want the experience of reading the new release when it's actually new--not when there's already a consensus opinion about it among other nonprofessional readers, not when it comes out in paperback, not when it's canonized in a course somewhere. And I'd like to have finished the previous work before starting the new one. (Yes, I most certainly do understand how dorky this sounds.)

As for the blog, I need the discipline. Two months to read over a thousand pages--over a thousand pages that are fun and funny but not easy or fast--that's a lot of discipline. Here goes.

In which a Pynchon reader with a short attention span attempts to read Against the Day

This is a blog about reading Thomas Pynchon's novel, Against the Day.