Where We're At: Parts 4.1-4.2: Against the Day

Cyprian Latewood

• Cyprian, who we last saw mooning after Yashmeen at Cambridge, is posted to Trieste to monitor the docks and emigrant traffic to America. (Trieste and Fiume have become destinations for Austro-Hungarians who want to head west.) He's tracking who goes out, who comes back, and so forth.
• He'd previously been in Vienna, where Russians Misha and Grisha recruited him for a secret (must tell no one) something for someone they don't identify.They leave messages for him scheduling appointments at various locations; they're watching him. Finally he's summoned to an address in the Jewish quarter, where he's blindfolded, handcuffed, and caned by the Colonel. (who?) These assignations continue.
• Cyprian randomly runs into Ratty McHugh, his old school chum. He assumes that Ratty is working for some part of the British foreign service ("which Desk") and asks him to get him out of Vienna. Ratty needs to know exactly what kind of trouble Cyprian is in; he's in contact with people who might be able to help. ("[I]t isn't's if one starts off intending to live this way... 'Oh yes planning, you know, to seek a career in sodomy.'")
• Ratty arranges an appointment with Derrick Theign. Someone from Misha and Grisha is watching Ratty; Derrick plays it as a seduction.
• Derrick ditches the tails and sends him to Trieste. (Ratty wanted to return to England--but that's not safe, and actually he might be better off even further east than Trieste.) Then he (Derrick) sets up Grisha--he'll be arrested for having led Cyprian, as his ward, into an immoral life. Cyprian is told that the Colonel (an expert in south Slavic politics) knows where he's being sent (or where he is before he goes?). Derrick's shop has the Colonel arrested and Cyprian is free to go, owing (and now working for) Derrick.
• Derrick and Cyprian are moved to Venice--"It was occupied a fateful geopolitical cusp ever since it lay at the ancient intersection of Western and Eastern empires--as it still does in our day, though the empires have mutated around it".
• Derrick's a senior lieutenant in the navy, in the Naval Intelligence Department. He's nominally in Venice to look into stolen engineering documents. He explains that the Russians, meanwhile, have an aerial surveillance program going, in ships that are invisible.
• Derrick and Cyprian become lovers?
• Derrick's people lose track of Misha and Grisha.
• Derrick's actually in Venice to set up RUSH (rapid unit for shadowing and harassment), a crew of motorcyclists who will be able to maintain communication when war closes off telegraphs and trains, etc. Cyprian's to be one of the motorcyclists.
• Derrick sends Cyprian back to Vienna. Cyprian's of interest to British, Russian, (and Italian?) operatives all of whom want him dead.

• Cyprian returns to Vienna
• The Colonel was Max Khautsch.
• Cyprian meets Miskolci (a vampire who had worked for Theign; the vampires have their own telephone exchange in Buda-Pesth, which is of use to Theign); Dvindler, who Theign recruited in the baths (spas), Yzhitza, a whore. They all work or worked for Theign.
• There are many Socialist demonstrations going on.
• Cyprian randomly runs into Yashmeen. She's working at a dressmakers, apparently through some workings of TWIT. She complains that she's being watched, by someone local and also by Russians. She's scared. Cyprian says the Okhrana can be bought but the Austrians (Kundschaftsstelle) might be more of a problem.
• Cyprian takes Yashmeen's problem to Ratty McHugh.
• Ratty sees Yashmeen's problems relate to the "Shambhala Question" and thinks that Auberon should have been pulled back years ago.
• Ratty and Cyprian and Yashmeen meet. She tells them that she'd been contacted by Germans at Gottingen, and had been sent to Buda-Pesth where TWIT(?) was investigating the 'parapsychical.' (The Russians who've been following her are either part of the Anglo-Russian alliance or socialists.) Some of these Buda-Pesth people believe that they can predict the future. Ratty wants to know why they all left Vienna when Yashmeen did--did someone foresee something? Yashmeen explains that they were scared and no, it had nothing to do with Yevno/Monsieru Azeff, "notorious for blowing up Romanoffs whilst shopping his comrades". Yashmeen doesn't know why they left; apparently whatever they brought her to Buda-Pesth (where Mme. Eskimoff, Swome, agent Lajos Halasz, the Cohen, and others had been bickering) to do, it became clear that she couldn't.
• Cyprian returns to Venice and asks Theign to help Yashmeen.

page 723.

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 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.