ATDDTA Penrose, Chums over Canada (p149), pelt/veldt (146)

[mikebailey at speakeasy.net]

Ya Sam mentioned Roger Penrose. May I note, he's also written a slimmer volume called _The Large, the Small, and the Human Mind_ which is easier to pick up? I got a couple Eureka moments out of it already..


p149 - grladams referred to it taking the Chums only a moment to get to New York with their cargo, but I think that the Malus is fraught with the cargo, whereas the Chums are racing against time to get there before the Malus (to warn everybody? or why?) - but they're last seen over Canada with Miles remarking on real estate opportunities there, and crop up again in Venice later with no intervening appearances that I could find


Pg 146 "Since Dr. Jim's little adventure it's all been Queer Street out there, hasn't it. War any moment, shouldn't wonder." He began to quote the British poet-laureate's commemorative verse, with its questionable rhyme of "pelt" and "veldt." - eehh, which verse would that be; which laureate, adventure, or Dr Jim, for that matter? I searched a little.

found something about a South African poet named Pringle:
He associated himself with the men who were working for the abolition of slavery, notably with Wilberforce, Coleridge and Clarkson, but fell ill just when his labours for abolition were reaching success, in the summer of 1834, and died in London in the same year at the early age of forty-six. In that year, besides a new edition of his poems, he published a prose work, Narrative of a Residence in South Africa, which he was revising just before his death. It was a striking work, and made much impression. Its influence may be read in the well-known lines of Locksley Hall:

Slowly comes a hungry people, as a lion creeping nigher,
Glares at one that nods and winks behind a slowly dying fire;
which, Tennyson records, were suggested to him by a passage in Pringle?s book. Tennyson was laureate for awhile, and "nigher/fire" is certainly a questionable rhyme...

but I'm guessing Dr Jim was some kind of leader in the 2nd Boer War.

poet laureates of England in those days:
1850: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, on the refusal of Samuel Russell
1896: Alfred Austin, on the refusal of William Morris

there probably is a couplet matching Pynchon's (er, Fleetwood's) description - as Fleetwood has noted of Pynchon - er, of Scarsdale, "This had the appearance of an open sharing of deep business confidences, but all it meant was that important data were being withheld, which Fleetwood, if he wished further enlightenment, must inquire after on his own." (p 131)

inquiring minds want to know...