ATDDTA (6) 156

Sun Apr 1 09:13:23 CDT 2007

Hi all,   my turn.   (eeks!)

Whoever said something to the effect that all hosts differ is 
certainly right.   My "style" (such as it is) harkens back more to 
Dave and less to John.  This is not because I appreciate the 
annotations more,  it's because I'm probably incapable of formulating 
the type of broad discussion all my predecessors in this group 
reading have pursued.    I would certainly like to see those kinds of 
broad questions asked as well as the analysis and criticism they 
engender (at least in the last day or so again) -  so please help me 
on that,  and if I think of one I'll be glad to ask it as I only have 
little tiny summary type statements on the top of each post.

I've got a small batch of posts ready organized mostly by page number 
(this one is #1) and  I'll send one or more a day  until they're 
gone,   but if I'm not up to something interesting go for it without 
me.   (lol)  I'll catch up or  grab on,  probably both.   I really 
love this section and I hope some of my enthusiasm can be transmitted 
via the medium.  I'd like to see it catch some of the less inspired 
members but there are limits.

All that said,   pages 156 - 186 according to Bekah.

****************************
We leave Hunter et al.  in a rather inconvenient cliff-hanging 
situation trying to escape some City of Lost Innocence,  and join Kit 
in New Haven where he is meeting his sponsor, Scarsdale Vibe,   "in a 
side room of the Taft Hotel" (now the Taft Apartments- 265 College 
St, New Haven, CT)   "The game"  is the order of the day and the 
colors are as important here as they were in prior sections of the 
book.   References to the Tibetan prayer wheel,  quaternions and 
vector analysis also show up in the text.

156:1-2	"The Game"
It is the weekend of the Yale-Harvard game 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(college_football)>  around 
1900.    <http://www.the-game.org/history.htm>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(college_football)>

Yale <http://www.yale.edu/about/history.html>
<http://www.the-game.org/gallery-lampoons2.htm>
a ticket to the  1900 game 
<http://www.the-game.org/tickets/Harvard-Yale-Football-Ticket-1900.jpg>

Harvard <http://www.hno.harvard.edu/guide/intro/index.html>

****************************
156: 	"Taft Hotel"  (now the Taft Apartments)
<http://www.morganreed.com/photo.2.gif> .

****************************
156: 4
Kit is met by Foley Walker who is wearing an orange and indigo sports 
suit with top hat to match.

Foley Walker  (name - see archives) 
<http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&keywords=Foley&page=11>

I don't think the color indigo is specified by accident.  Colors and 
sounds are important in Pynchon  - perhaps because sight and sound 
are produced by waves and have a measurable spectrum.  Music comes 
from sound waves and colors from light waves.   Anyway, orange and 
indigo were the last colors to make Newton's color wheel.  From 
<http://www1.umn.edu/ships/updates/newton1.htm>   (These are 
scientific attributes of color , not the artistic ones.)

"An important scientific achievement of experimentation in 
Renaissance art was an abandonment of Aristotle's long influential 
notion of color. Aristotle had claimed that yellow, red, violet, 
green and blue fit between white and black in a 7-color scale from 
light to dark and that the colors were mixtures of the two extremes. 
As in music, simple ratios of white and black in combination yielded 
colors pleasing to the senses."

"Newton's (1672)  color-mixing circle had transformed the linear 
spectrum into a circle.   Newton may have seen colors as cyclical. He 
certainly saw them as musical, much as Aristotle had. At first, 
Newton split his spectrum into five principal colors. But the number 
did not fit his conception that colors, like notes of music, 
expressed harmonies. A spectrum of colors, like a musical scale, he 
imagined, must have seven steps to make a full octave. (Note, here, 
the converse use of the color term 'chromatic' applied to musical 
scales that include all their accidentals, or half-steps.) To arrive 
at the requisite seven "notes," then, Newton inserted orange and 
indigo into his initial scheme, each addition representing a narrow 
"half-step" appropriately spaced in the spectral "scale." The roygbiv 
designation so familiar today thus not only reflects an arbitrary 
division of the spectrum, but also one shaped by a musical notion of 
octaves and the diatonic scale."
(All this makes me wonder what happens when you put a prism under 
Icelandic spar.)

And according to <http://www.abelard.org/colour/col-hi.htm>  "Indigo" 
is a quaternary hue.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue> has a pretty true Indigo  -
It's kind of the dark sky blue of very early evening.

****************************
156: 7
Walker is also wearing "smoked specs"  (probably available in 
Chinatown at the time)
<http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions/sunglasses.htm>
  "Early sunglasses served a special purpose and it wasn't to block 
the rays of the sun.  For centuries, Chinese judges had routinely 
worn smoke-colored quartz lenses to conceal their eye expressions in 
court. It wasn't until the 20th century that modern-type sunglasses 
came to be. In 1929, Sam Foster, founder of the Foster Grant company 
sold the first pair of Foster Grant sunglasses on the Boardwalk in 
Atlantic City, NJ. By 1930, sunglasses were all the rage."

****************************
156.13	"Alumni of both persuasions were milling everywhere in and 
out of the lobby, gesturing carelessly with foaming beer steins, 
sporting hats, spats, and ulsterettes vividly dyed in varying 
densities of the rival school hues."

ultserette

<http://www.rootsweb.com/~srgp/bill/fr_eva2.htm> (letters on a genealogy site)
  "I bought me a[n] Over-Coat - cost me $16.00.  It is a very nice 
one.  It is an ulsterette [a type of coat]"
<http://www.theconspiracy.us/9502/0012.html> (chasing John Wilkes Boothe)
The pursuing Federal investigators had engaged the services of a
Native American (a.k.a. "Indian") scout in their hunt for Booth.
On Sunday, April 23rd, this Native American scout, Nalgai,
returned to Washington. He carried with him two brandy bottles,
"...an ulsterette with bloodstains, a pistol, a compass, a wallet
containing $2,100 in Union currency, several letters of credit on
Canadian and British banks, and pictures of six pretty young
women and a horse." He also brought back Booth's diary.

****************************
156:14  "rival school hues"

Yale: blue and white
Harvard: crimson white, and black
(See 157.1)

****************************
156:15  ->    "Every  five  minutes a page came briskly through 
calling "Mr. Rinehart! Call for Mr. Rinehart! Oh, Mr. Rinehart!" 

Who is Mr. Rinehart and why won't he answer the page?

<http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/2001/01.18/32-timecapsule.html>
Frazier regaled his friend Basie with a sadsack version of the 
legend: "Rinehart was a friendless young Harvard who tried to present 
the illusion that he was in truth a popular sort by standing under 
his dormitory window and hailing himself," wrote Fountain. "Every 
other November, on the eve or the morning of the Harvard-Yale game, 
part of the atmosphere in the lobby of the Taft Hotel in New Haven 
was the faithful and incessant paging of Mr. Rinehart-'Call for Mr. 
Rinehart! Call for Mr. Rinehart!'- with never a Mr. Rinehart to 
answer."

Now it just so happens that in 1979 this magazine reissued the 1941 
recording as a fundraising premium, with liner notes by Primus IV. 
Noting that the lyrics "call forth a Harvard stereotype that seems 
both remotely absurd and absurdly remote," he went on to explicate 
the blues:

"The dogs and women of the second verse are twin prohibitions of a 
student manual called Rules Relating to College Studies. 'Rinehart' 
is a Harvard rallying cry that goes back to the turn of the century. 
Its eponym was one James B.G. Rinehart '00, who was often hailed by a 
classmate beneath his window. On a warm June night in 1900, the 
classmate's cry of 'Oh, R-i-i-i-n-e-HART!' was spontaneously taken up 
by hundreds of inmates of the Harvard Yard, and in after years 
reverberations were reported from sites as far off as Cairo. In 
recent years, the tradition has all but died. Rinehart himself died 
in 1952."

And color and music intertwine in the word   "Blues."

Harvard Blues. cover 1 (including Rhinehart)
The 1979 fundraising release
<http://www.harvardmagazine.com/on-line/0902168.html>
In his 1984 biography of Frazier, Another Man's Poison, Charles 
Fountain reports that in 1941 Frazier regaled his friend Basie with a 
sadsack version of the legend: "Rinehart was a friendless young 
Harvard who tried to present the illusion that he was in truth a 
popular sort by standing under his dormitory window and hailing 
himself," wrote Fountain. "Every other November, on the eve or the 
morning of the Harvard-Yale game, part of the atmosphere in the lobby 
of the Taft Hotel in New Haven was the faithful and incessant paging 
of Mr. Rinehart-'Call for Mr. Rinehart! Call for Mr. Rinehart!'- with 
never a Mr. Rinehart to answer."

More at:
<http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003880.html>156:20
Referring to the Mr. Rinehart page and subsequent chant:

"Uttered in repetition,  like this,  it's exhausting enough, but 
chorused by a hundred male voices on a summer's evening with Harvard 
Yard for an echo chamber?   well ... on the Tibetan prayer-wheel 
principle, repeat it enough and at some point something unspecified 
but miraculous will come to pass."

<http://www.dharma-haven.org/tibetan/prayer-wheel.htm>
Tibetan prayer wheels (called Mani wheels by the Tibetans) are 
devices for spreading spiritual blessings and well being. Rolls of 
thin paper, imprinted with many, many copies of the mantra (prayer) 
Om Mani Padme Hum, printed in an ancient Indian script or in Tibetan 
script, are wound around an axle in a protective container, and spun 
around and around. Typically, larger decorative versions of the 
syllables of the mantra are also carved on the outside cover of the 
wheel.

Tibetan Buddhists believe that saying this mantra, out loud or 
silently to oneself, invokes the powerful benevolent attention and 
blessings of Chenrezig, the embodiment of compassion. 

****************************
156: 23  "They teach Quaternion's there (Harvard) instead of Vector 
Analysis" Kit helpfully put in."

unrecognizably simplified:
Vector Analysis analyzes position of objects in two dimensions. 
Quaternion theory analyzes the position of objects in two *or more* 
dimensions, particularly,  for this novel,  three. 

<http://www.rdrop.com/~cary/html/dimension.html>
quaternion  "Quaternions are not a well known mathematical concept; 
but ... are the primary choice for representing spacecraft 
orientation. " "the NPS aeronautical model uses quaternions." -- 
unknown

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternion>
Vector Analysis:  Vector calculus (also called vector analysis) is a 
field of mathematics concerned with multivariate real analysis of 
vectors in two or more dimensions. It consists of a suite of formulae 
and problem solving techniques very useful for engineering and 
physics. Vector analysis has its origin in quaternion analysis, and 
was formulated by the American scientist J. Willard Gibbs.[1] 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_calculus>

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