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: Part 4.19: Against the Day

The Chums

• The Chums are independent now; like many affiliates, they've disaffiliated with the National Office. Also, they've expanded the ship considerably; they've got money now. Their income is mostly from investments and advertising now, not so much from missions.
• Ksenjia is now flying with them.
• There's a massive updraft over northern Africa. They go there and almost crash into Counter-Earth. They're on Counter-Earth yet still on earth. ("[T[he boys could almost believe some days that they were safely back home on Earth--on others they found an American Republic whose welfare they believed they were sworn to advance passed so irrevocably into the control of the evil and moronic that it seemed they could not, after all, have escaped the gravity of the Counter-Earth.") They can look but they're not permitted to interfere.
• In autumn 1914, a Russian agent who calls himself Baklashchan (it's an alias) visits to tell them that Padzhnitoff has been missing for months; the Russians can't find him--given the world situation, maybe someone in his own line of work can. The Chums know nothing about the European war or the Russian revolution; Baklashchan doesn't explain.
• They look for Padzhnitoff. More and more of the sky is off-limits; they see explosions on earth' there are food shortages.
• Turns out everywhere Chums had been, Padzhnitoff had been, too. Where they hadn't been, he wasn't. Were they hunting themselves? A ghost of their own dead selves?
• They fly over Flanders; Miles sees the trenches and the war--"as if some blindness had abruptly healed itself".
• Then over France they see Padzhnitoff and the new Bolshai'a Igra.
• Padzhnitoff's crew has gone independent as well, no more connections with Okhrana. Instead of dropping bricks, they're dropping food, clothing, and medical supplies (for the influenza epidemic the Chums weren't aware of). They're fugitives from whoever's in power and based out of Switzerland now. The Chums agree not to turn in Padzhnitoff to whoever's looking for him.
• The Chums travel with the Bolshai'a Igra to Geneva; both sides' wounded prisoners of war are travelling home through neutral Switzerland. There's a big black market, but also kindness of the local people to the war injured. Padzhnitoff passes his crew's extra work to the Chums. They start distributing cargo and are promoted to moving politically sensitive internees (in/from the Balkans and Siberia). Their involvement in the war began when they landed on neutral ground.
• After the armistice, the Chums are receiving contract work again on their own (but they also continue doing relief and repatriation). They receive a job offer from California--lots of money do do unspecified tasks. Randolph apologizes to Padzhnitoff for leaving.
• They have trouble negotiating the Rockies and end up over Mexico, where they fly into the Soladality of Aetheronauts, a pool of girl fliers. The five girls match up with the five Chums. And they arrive, with the girls onboard, in Los Angeles.
• Crossing America they'd noticed how much more lit up it was now--"a triumph over night whose motive none could quite grasp." They talk about the early church teaching that Lucifer is the bearer of light.
• The Californian check bounces and the lawyer who'd sent it doesn't exist. But they're in LA anyway.
• Chick randomly runs into his father, Dick Counterfly.
• Dick's got some massive machine that does... something. He introduces the Chums to two "elderly eccentrics," Merle Rideout and Roswell Bounce. They're being bothered by someone; he gives them Lew Basnight's card.
• Merle and Roswell have invented a machine that reverses the fixed-in-time process of photographs--they can start with the still photo and "integrate" it and release it back into action, into life. It's based on integrating electricity, because electricity and light are similar, just different wavelengths. The machine uses Lorandite, from Macedonia--it's a crystal. Merle's on a mission to set free the images in photographs--his own photos and others'.

(p. 1040)

Where We're At: Parts 3.2-3.3: Bilocations

Merle Rideout

• Badly misses Dally. He quits the amalgamator's job at Little Hellkite and takes off for random places eastward.
• In Audacity, Iowa he meets movie projectionist, Fisk, filling in for watchmaker Wilt Flambo, trying to keep movies running. What are movies but still images and time manipulation and light?
• Merle moves on and ends up at Candlebrow, Ohio. Candlebrow is where he's been looking for that was missing in his life; the summer conference is going on.
• As a professor discusses time as circular, a tornado descends.This specific tornado keeps returning; its name is Thorvald. The scientists have tried to communicate with it.
• Another born again image (p 453)
• Merle returns year after year, taking day jobs in between.
• One day Merle sees the Inconvenience and the Chums; they're looking for hypops gear and introduce him to Roswell Bounce who Merle knew in CLeveland. Bounce lost his (patent/intellectual property) fight against Scarsdale Vibe and has turned to dynamiting for revenge.
• Roswell is searching for the light and he's heading for California where the movies are--they're the future of light.
• Famous German mathematician Hermann Minkowski comes to give a lecture on space and time.

Frank Webb

• Returns to the US and finds himself heading for Nochechita. He's looking for Estrella Briggs. He can't understand the town any more and feels like Stray, Reef, and the rest are there but he can't quite see them. He runs into schoolteacher Linnet Dawes who tells him that Reef left Stray and Jesse, and Stray and Jesse are in Fickle Creek, NM.
• Fickle Creek is full of motorcyclists. Zoltan, one of them, is scared of X shapes. [Yet another Christ image.]
• He sees Stray with regionally famous Vang Feeley; she doesn't recognize him.
• He returns to Denver where he meets up with the Reverend Moss Gatlin driving a trolley car labelled Anarchist Heaven. Gatlin heard about Sloat and says Frank needs to tell Mayva; he points Frank toward Cripple, where Mayva is.
• Frank (with Gatlin) goes to Cripple (they "could see how forlorn and beaten down that recent battleground had become. The owners had sure won.") He runs into (the) Groucho Marx (described as Julius, etc) who tells him that Mayva has an ice-cream parlor.
• Mayva tells Frank that the owners have been paying her off, window's compensation, all along (and it's still hard times for her anyway). She knows he killed Sloat Fresno. They don't discuss it but both believe that Webb was the Kieselguhr Kid--that all the carousing was a cover and never really happened. Mayva can sleep at night even knowing that Deuce is still out there--Frank doesn't need to give her happy endings; Sloat was enough for her.

page 471.

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: 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.