New Pynchon Book Theory

[Paul Mackin]

On Jun 28, 2006, at 7:04 AM, nick gardner wrote:

> I have heard that the new book will be set around or in 1897 in
> Chicago.  It's not a very obvious timeframe for much, least of all for
> Sofia Kovalevskaya, who died years earlier in Europe, or the serial
> killer thing, although, who knows maybe he could still fit it in.  I'm
> assuming that even if the book is set in 1897, that flashbacks
> included could subsume quite a range of events, including the serial
> killer thing, world fair of religions thing, etc.
>  I had the idea that this new book might be about cars.  It may be a
> stretch, but humor me.  An article detailing an 1895 race in Chicago
> referred to it as the "race of the century," one of the first versions
> of motorcar racing (or, as in 1895 the cars were called "motocycles")
> which was a major turning point in, at least Chicago, the fate of the
> automobile.
> Karl Benz invented the carburetor, speed regulation system,
> accelorator, ignition, battery, spark plug, clutch, gear shift and
> radiator.  It was the Germans, particularly Siegried Marcus, Gottlieb
> Daimler, and Karl Benz who made the most signifigant acheivements
> toward creating the automobile between 1890-1900, forshadowing German
> rocket scientists by half a century.  It is also possible that the car
> would be a link to back to Kovalevskaya, who was active in Germany as
> a mathematician at the same time.  Might her ideas, the most important
> ones of which were about mechanics, or her masterpiece work concerning
> the mathematics of a wheel rotating around a fixed point, have
> something to do with the lofty ideas of other German mechanics at that
> time?
>     Many automobiles were mocked as being ridiculous by people
> through the 1890s.  And they topped out at about 11 miles per hour, so
> that seems like fair, justifiable mockery.  By 1905 however,
> autombiles were being produced on a grand scale and the first major
> era, the brass era, of cars were created.  What happened in between?
> What did the face of the automobile look like when Americans fell in
> love with it for the first time?  How did cars come from nowhere to
> fifty years later entitling the "beat" generation to being On the
> Road, to a worldwide problem of air pollution which may be the biggest
> environmental threat to our planet, not to mention the subtextual
> motivations for the war in Iraq and "on terror"?  There is also the
> whole collusion between car industies and the defense department
> during the war and in the years leading up to the highway commisions
> which paved America in the late forties, early fifties which Pyncon
> would be familiar with from his research on GR.  There are some
> grandiose amplifications here for Pynchon to work with, not to mention
> the patent(ed) absurdity of early experimental cars, planes, etc.
> The more I think about this the more it seems like a Pynchon book, but
> I'm done thinking about it for a while.  Anybody else have thoughts on
> this?

Drop back four years and it might tie in with Edwin Pynchon and  his  
airship patent.