Where We're At: Part 4.20: Against the Day

Lew, Merle

• Lew has a swanky office in LA (he came back to the US after the war); his assistants are movie extras. He's been drinking.
• Chester Perkins comes to Lew's office--his boss, Tony Tsangarakis, who has a club (bar/music/dance) sent him. Lew had worked for Tony during the Syncopated Strangler case. Back then, Jardine Maraca, the house band's singer had been the roommate of one of the Strangler's victims, Encarnacion; Jardine had left town and gone to Santa Barbara and now has called Tony to tell him that her Encarnacion isn't dead but someone's after her (Jardine) now.
• Lew goes to Jardine's shabby hotel room; she's checked out, but he calls one Emilio, who's a seer who reads toilet bowls. Emilio reads an address which he gives to Lew--it's bad news, lots of bodies.
• Meanwhile, Merle Rideout has been frantically calling Lew; Lew agrees to meet Merle and sends one of the girls to drive by the address.
• Before the war, Merle had randomly run into Luca Zombini, who was painting special effects at a studio. Merle sees Luca and Erlys, who filled him in on how well Dally was doing in London. Merle has forgiven Erlys. Merle became a friend of the family.
• Merle and Roswell Bounce meet with Lew. They use their machine on a photo of Jardine Maraca; they see her driving around LA somewhere and going to a motel (not the one she'd been living at).
• Roswell explains that their machine can also look at photo subjects' pasts--such as who killed a photographed corpse. (Except that unless they do something exactly right the past they see can diverge from what actually happened.) This reminds Lew of bilocation. (Meanwhile, Lew will protect Merle and Roswell, whose invention threatens the movie studios.)
• Lew goes to the address Emilio gave him and Lake answers the door. Lake and Deuce had regularly seen the dead girl, Encarnacion, at Hollywood orgies ("I believe it's a soft g but that's the idea")--she disappeared when the Strangler showed up. Deuce is working security for a studio. He's still anti-union, anti-Anarchist; the marriage is cold. Lew gets rude-ish with Deuce, who pulls a gun; one of Lew's girl assistants shows up with her gun and saves him.
• Lake is vaguely unhappy; Deuce's been having dreams ("trying to awaken from his own life"). Either he dreams he wakes up next to a corpse or he actually does. He's questioned and released.
• Lew goes to the motel he saw in the photo regression; there he sees a party of all the people (or people like the people) he'd once chased after; they're all survivors of some cataclysm; it's a reunion of outlaws and Jardine is there visiting her father. He tells her that's he's been hired to find her; she doesn't want to be found. She says that the killer is Deuce Kindred. She leaves town.
• Lew later brings a photo of Troth, his wife from way back when, to Merle.
• Merle runs a photo of Dally; she's broadcasting on the radio from Paris; he tunes in.

(page 1062, end of Part 4.)

Where We're At: Parts 4.12-4.13: Against the Day

Dally; Crouchmas

• Hunter and Dally arrive in London (from Venice). The Principesa had wanted to pimp Dally to some Italian nobleman and Dally doubted that Kit would return to Venice, so why stay?
• Ruperta gets Dally set up in a bedsit while Hunter returns to the family house somewhere posher. Ruperta's vaguely jealous of Dally wrt Hunter even though she's not actually interested in him.
• Ruperta introduces Dally to sculptor Arturo Naunt, who needs a new model for his AODs (angels of death) for soldiers' tombstones.
• Meanwhile, Ruperta has been trying to make Hunter doubt Dally, and has heard from TWIT about Hunter's activities, and appoints herself as an anti-muse, trying to keep his work out of the public eye. But at a Vaughan Williams concert in Gloucester Cathedral she (literally) levitates to the ceiling on the music, and gets humility or religion or something She knows she's been horrible and needs to atone for every one of her bad deeds.
• Hunter's paintings begin to show odd empty spaces, as if a person or thing is missing in the compositions. He won't tell Dally what it is that he won't show.
• Dally randomly runs into Wilshire Vibe, who's producing in London and casts her in several of his shows. She becomes a big hit, taking bigger roles and attracting all sorts of attention.
• Among Dally's new suitors is Clive Crouchmas, "into whose gravitational field Ruperta [a friend or acquaintance since childhood] had been able to steer the girl." Crouchmas has become some sort of powerful government spending expert, and since spending is intimately connected with arming, he's in touch with "noted death merchant Basil Zaharoff." Actually, it's because Zaharoff is so attracted to redheads that Crouchmas is hanging around Dally at all.
• So Dally's being kept again, like in Venice--this time by Crouchmas.
• Dally randomly meets Lew Basnight at a party; he tells her about looking for the twenty-two major arcana and tells her about number XVII, the Star. Lew is the go-between between people he won't identify (not TWIT) who want to know how well Dally knows Crouchmas-- they might be willing to pay a lot for certain information about his business dealings related to railway guarantees. Lew's presenting it as about gathering information about Turkish politics rather than a personal betrayal of Crouchmas, who's involved with both England and Germany.
• Dally snoops in Crouchmas's papers in some large, looming, invisible building; detectives Crouchmas hired see her there. He decides to shop her to a harem. (Meanwhile, Zaharoff is trying to buy some Q-named weapon from Japan which the Japanese seem to be afraid of.) Crouchmas tells Dally he needs to go to Constantinople and invites her along; Lew okays it to her but warns her that no one trusts Crouchmas.
• Lew wonders whether Dally is tarot number XVII, The Star.
  

Dally; Kit

• Clive Crouchmas decides to use Dally as a bribe rather than sell her to a harem-- he's greedy more than he's out for revenge.
• Imi and Erno, the men working for Crouchmas, have heard Dally described as having red hair. Zaharoff's girls are also redheads; and Imi and Erno confuse Dally with a Zaharoff girl and prepare, on the Orient Express, to kidnap her.
• Meanwhile, Kit is on another train heading for Buda-Pesth and ultimately Venice and sees through the train windows what's happening to Dally and goes to help her. Imi and Erno let slip that Crouchmas hired them.
• Kit and Dally flee together into Szeged. Kit's already been on the run since accidentally saving the life of the wrong man (an enemy of CUP, the Committee for Union and Progress) in Pera. (In Pera, Kit had just earlier randomly run into Viktor Mulciber, from Ostend. Mulciber tells Kit that engineers (which he believes Kit to be) are in huge demand for aircraft companies, particularly one specific company in Turin which he referred Kit to.)
• Kit and Dally fall in love again; Imi and Erno go back to Buda-Pesth.
• Kit and Dally decide that their best bet is to get to Buda-Pesth then on to Venice.
• Dally tells Kit about Crouchmas, both the relationship and his discovery of her spying.
  

(p. 918!)

Where We're At: Part 3.18: Bilocations

Lew Basnight

• Lew runs into Prof. Renfrew at the theater in London. He's with Max Khautsch. Whoops, that's Werfner, not Renfrew. They look a lot alike. Why is Werfner where he should not be? "[s]ome symmetry was being broken."
• Lew reports to Nookshaft, the Cohen, that Werfner's in London. Nookshaft's not surprised and kind of suggests that it might be nice if Lew would kill him.
• Lew talks to Nigel and Neville about the resemblance between Renfrew and Werfner and realizes that they're just playing the role of twit, and that Renfrew and Werfner are the same person--he's got some paranormal power to be in at least two places at one time. He also realizes that everyone at the TWIT knew, except him; he was played. he feels released from some sense of obligation to TWIT.
• Lew talks with Dr. Otto Ghloix, who's visiting from Switzerland, about bilocation. Ghloix says it's a manifestation of a "deep and fatal contradiction" within the person. And who better than a fallen geographer who might have found Shambhala, found salvation for mankind?
• Is work just penance? "[T]o live in the world [is] to do penance.... Being unable to remember sins from a previous life won't excuse you from doing penance in this one. To believe in the reality of penance is almost to have proof of rebirth."
• Lew goes to Cambridge to see Renfrew who talks about how the railroads are the key to the Balkans--look at the map from a distance. Renfrew tells him that the Gentleman Bomber is in Cambridge. Is that related to Werfner? At the cricket stadium, Lew either sees or doesn't see a mysterious armed man.
• Lew talks to Dr. Coombs de Bottle to ask about carbonyl chloride--what the Gentleman Bomber uses.
• The Grand Cohen suggests the Bomber might be a Messenger.
• Suddenly everyone else has left town and Lew's left alone.
• Lots of mail is being received with weird Swiss stamps, like what's on a letter from Yashmeen.
• Lew leaves the TWIT.

end part 3. page 693.

Where We're At: Parts 3.4-3.5: Bilocations

Deuce and Lake

• Return to his hometown, Egypt, Illinois. His sister Hope and her husband Levi are there. Deuce feels trapped.
• Since they got married Deuce no longer feels alone. Guilt re Webb eats him; he keeps finding ways (and things for which) to beg Lake's forgiveness; he doesn't realize how little it matters any more to Lake. Lake knows he killed Webb but hasn't acknowledged knowing to Deuce. She goads him; he claims he was just hired help: "They would've hired anybody" but can't quite talk about it.
• Deuce is afraid of ghosts and is waiting for Webb to find him.
• "Back in the mountains, right up till the day the Owners turned and came after him, he had felt not so much working on one side of the Law or the other as protected from the choice itself." (p 476)
• They arrive in Wall o'Death, Missouri, built around remains of a carnival inspired by the Chicago Expo. Only the Wall of Death itself remains intact; it's visited by motorcycling pilgrims. The sheriff, Eugene Boilster, takes them for an expected deputy peace officer and his wife; they take the role and the job.
• Happy La Foam is the local pharmacist.
• As deputy, Deuce is not so much looking after day to day stuff as protection against some some abstract emergency.
• The telegraph brings news from Mexico, reported by officer C. Marin, that Sloat Fresno has been killed and the killer escaped.
  
• Deuce realizes someone might be after him, too. He runs off to Texas to take revenge..
• Tace Boilster, wife of the sheriff, is Lake's friend. Lake tells Tace the whole story.
• Lake dreams about Mayva.
• A week or so later Deuce returns; he never came close to finding Frank.
• They finally discuss Webb when it's clear that he knows that she knows. He begs her for forgiveness. This is power for her.

Neville and Nigel, and Yashmeen

• Neville and Nigel are at Cambridge and are lusting for Yashmeen Halfcourt. She's interested in Cyprian Latewood, scion of the patent wallpaper Latewoods, who they know to be gay.They've spied on Yasmeen and her girlfriends swimming nude.
• Cyprian Latewood and his friend Reginald "Ratty" McHugh ("tyring without notable success to mope themselves back into the lilies-and-lassitude humour of the '90s" [p. 491])--Cyprian thinks he's in love with Yashmeen; Ratty claims she's a lesbian.
• Yashmeen's friends are Lorelei, Noellyn, and Faun. They call her Pinky.
• Ratty introduces Cyprian to Professor Renfrew. Renfrew is keeping dossiers on everyone. He calls his room with file cabinets full of dossiers his Map of the World. Ratty is one of Renfrew's favorites and while he has a louche reputation, he's involved with his work. Cyprian has noticed that Renfrew pays particular attention to Yashmeen.
• Term ends, Yashmeen returns to London. She's becoming impatient with TWIT's "protection" which amounts to surveillance. Lew Basnight is around but otherwise involved professionally. She studies Gottingen professor Riemann's Zeta function.
• Neville and Nigel develop an opium habit. Cyprian takes off for Berlin for vacation.
• Fall term. (Cyprian is getting religion--Christ conquered death.)
• Yashmeen remains obsessed with Riemann's Zeta function.She dumps Cyprian (?) to take off for Gottingen?.
• Renfrew, when he learns that Yashmeen is off to Gottingen, tries to get her to seduce Werfner? Spy on him? Distract him? He sends her a Snazzbury's Silent Frock, which doesn't rustle like normal dresses do. With the dress is a note that her appointment has been made and she's to wear the dress and bring her friends. The friends get fitted for frocks, as well.
• The Silent Frocks have military implications and are being bought up.
• Yashmeen daydreams about the Riemann problem and hits on the beginnings of a roulette system which will later make her rich.

page 504.

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)

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.

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.