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[andrew at cee.hw.ac.uk]

David Casseres writes:
> Getting on with it, Chris asks
> 
> >     229.30 `incomprehensibly and perversely, in willful denial of God's
> >     Disposition of Time and Space, preferring 365 and a Quarter'  Well why
> >     not?  (AD)

> Because God sez (you could look it up, I'm sure) that a year is a certain 
> number of days.

But the Chinese were intending that a circle be made up of 365 and a
Quarter degrees. And why not? Change the scale, that is? Well Dixon
argues that this presents no problem for God as he has the relevant
Logarithms in his head. But it does present problems for a jobbing
astronomer. In fact these days, and equally as much for convenience,
scientific angles are usually measured in radians with PI (3.141...)
radians per circle.

> Pynchon at his trix.  The encounter *was* mentioned in the dialogue at 
> the Cudgel & Throck, but we missed it while reading the narrator's 
> account of the same event.  And that Lud, natuerlich, had something else 
> to say about it.  If you imagine the scene in the C&T as film, it's very 
> natural, the characters are talking, then we cut away to the flashback, 
> then cut back again as the conversation continues, but not where it left 
> off -- because it *didn't* leave off.

Oh, I do imagine the scene as a film (or maybe better still a
cartoon), this one was just too close to the edit. Pynchon is very
visual. And for those of us who are word-bound that's why the stoned
read is such a good bet. But this is a Tristram Shandy technique
without an adjacent Tristram to tell us what is going on. Delightful.


Andrew Dinn
-----------
How do you know but ev'ry bird that cuts the airy way
Is an immense world of pleasure clos'd by your senses five