MDDM Ch. 12 Summary & Notes

[Terrance]

Also, Pynchon is a very careful guy. He looks things up and tries to get
things right, but more importantly, he often fictionalizes the facts and
histories. So I would say,  what we might want to pay more attention to
his apparent errors. For example, P knows a lot about Sirius. The star
has figured in every novel since V. 


Looking back to the first MDMD, I noticed that Andrew Dinn thought that
P made a blatant error when he describes Sirius in this Chapter. 

Dinn's Note:  

107.15  "Ev'ry Midnight the baleful thing is there, crossing directly
overhead..."  I think this is an outright error on TRP's part:  No
single star resides overhead each midnight of the year, otherwise the
longitude problem would have been a great deal easier.  Could just be
 sloppy writing.

Or it could be that St. Helena (its stars, its  sky, its seas, volcanic
landscape, etc.)  as Wicks "Baedeckers" it (having never been there) and
Pynchon fictionalizes it, is more like Swift's floating Island in GT.
Yup, that's what it is. The island, like many of the "Baedeckered"
landscapes and cities in P's fiction, is a stage or mechanical theatre.