ATDDTA (6) 166 - 170 a

[bekah]

Fleetwood continues telling his adventure tale to Kit and now 
includes a bit about Hereros,   a perfect site for a Zionist 
homeland,   an anti-Semitic joke (political? Bush?)

*************
166:1
hair ropes
Cowboy superstition: horsehair ropes kept snakes away.  
http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_149-170#Page_166


*************
166:6 - 8
Fleetwood continues his conversation with  Yitzhak the latter 
expressing the thought that a Jewish homeland will not end the hatred 
for the homeless - the hatred will just get transferred to another 
homeless group.

As it did from the Hereros  of South Africa and GR to the Jews?

*************

166:9-14
""And would there actually prove to be, right in the middle of the 
worst of the jungle, some peaceful expanse of rangeland, unsettled as 
yet. free of all competing claims, high, fertile, disease-free, 
naturally defensible and so forth? Would they come around a bend in 
the trail, or over  ridge and abruptly be taken through the 
previously hidden passage into the pure land, into Zion?"

** See Robin's excellent post 
<http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0703&msg=116533&sort=date>
( Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2007 15:38:19 +0000)
for much more re "Light over ranges"  colors and so on. 


*************

166:28-29
An elephant charges them and Pynchon tells a really old 
"anti-Semitic" joke about elephants/Jews charging.


*************

167: 15   "The headline in next week's Bush Gazette would read SAVES 
JEW FROM INSANE ELEPHANT.

  The Bush Gazette?  (Is this any reference to Mr. GW?)
  And why aren't we (they) told "who" saves the "Jew" from the 
elephant?  And yet we're told that the elephant is insane?  The 
result of the  little elephant escapade is that Fleetwood is given 
profitable tips re European banks.


*************
167: 20   Fleetwood:  "I used to read Dickens as a child. The cruelty 
didn't surprise me, but I did wonder at the moments of uncompensated 
kindness, which I had never observed outside the pages of fiction. "

"Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty"  ?   
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_act_of_kindness>


*************

167: 24
Yizak gives Kit the tip  that he buy Rand shares.

The "Rand" or reef, as the Witwatersrand is sometimes known, is 
famous for being the source of 40% of the gold ever mined from the 
earth.  Near Johannesburg.   There would be a takeover of the Nambian 
mines.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witwatersrand>
<http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Rand>


But Kit:   "There's a war going there!"
Between 1870,  when the diamond rush to Kimberley began, and 1902, 
when the South African War ended, South Africa was transformed. 
Midway between these dates, the world's largest goldfields were 
discovered in 1886 on the Witwatersrand.  An economic backwater 
became a major supplier of precious minerals to the world economy.

*************
Fleetwood must have passed on the tips to his Daddy:

167:31	Scarsdale "This money is coming from nowhere."

"I feel myself turning god-damned socialist," said Scarsdale, 
"Communist even."

So he  makes lots of money and almost turns socialist.

"South African gold production went from zero in 1886 to 23 % of the 
total world output in 1896. At the time of the South African rush 
gold production benefitted from the newly discovered techniques by 
Scottish chemists, the MacArthur-Forrest Process, of using potassium 
cyanide to extract gold from low-grade ore.[1]"
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_rush#South_Africa>

*************
167:36   " But Mr. V.,  you hate socialists."
"I hate those climber sons of bitches worse."

climber ???  ice climber?  social climber?  Nouveau riche?