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: 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 2.1-2.4: 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.