AtDDtA(15): The Old Stearinery Bell Tower

[Dave Monroe]

"'Disputes as to the nature of reality whose outcomes depend in any
way on wagering,' as the County Coroner expressed it, 'have seldom
been known to conclude happily, especially here, in view of the
vertical distance involved....'  For days, while the ill-fated
encounter remained a topic for gossip, conferees were careful to find
excuses not to walk too close to the Old Stearinery Bell Tower,
inspired by the Campanile in the Piazza San Marco in Venice, and at
322 feet the tallest structure visible in any direction out to the
curve of the Earth, notorious locally for exerting a fascination upon
minds healthy and disordered alike." (AtD, Pt. II, pp. 412-3)


"wagering"

"Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me
that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not
really bring us any closer to the secret of the Old One. I, at any
rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice."

--Albert Einstein, Letter to Max Born (12 December 1926)

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein#Sourced

Cf. ...

"In recent years the University had expanded well beyond the memories
of older alumni, who, returning, found Chicago-style ironwork and
modern balloon-framing among--even in place of--the structures they
remembered ...." (p. 406)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0708&msg=120691


"the old Stearinery Bell Tower"

A stearinery (probably made-up word) is a facility where stearin is
made. Chemically, stearin is an ester of glycerol with stearic acid,
or stearic acid itself. The name also denotes the solid component of a
fat. Smegmo undoubtedly contains stearin, so the Old Stearinery was a
key part of the original production process.

"Until 1863 lard stearin was used to produce the stearic acid for
candle making. With lard expensive and in short supply, a new method
was discovered to produce the stearic acid using tallow. What lard and
lard stearin was available was instead developed into a cooking
compound. The same process was later adapted to create Crisco, the
first all-vegetable shortening."

http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_397-428#Page_412


"the vertical distance involved"

Cf. ...

"... Padzhitnoff's own specialty being to arrange for bricks and
masonry, always in the four-block fragments which had become his
'signature,' to fall on and damage targets designated by his
superiors. This lethal debris was generally harvested from the
load-bearing walls of previous targets of opportunity." (p. 123)

http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_119-148#Page_123

A young Galileo is perched atop the Leaning Tower of Pisa. He is in
the middle of his famous experiment -- the one in which he shows, by
dropping cannonballs of different weights, that all objects fall at
the same rate. It's the kind of story that's easy to imagine, easy to
remember, but whether he ever performed the experiment at the tower is
debatable.

Still, Galileo did perform some ingenious experiments on gravity while
at Pisa. In fact, for his approach to science, that of using math in
analyzing the results of experiments, he is credited with initiating
the modern style of scientific research. Galileo is also known for his
thought experiments. These are carried out entirely in the mind using
reasoning and logic to help explain complex ideas. (Einstein is
another great thinker who used thought experiments effectively.)

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/pisa/galileo.html

Galileo's "famous experiment" at the Leaning Tower of Pisa probably
never took place.  Galileo himself never claimed to have performed the
deed, and the fantastic decorum described by Viviani is even more
unlikely.  The experiment would have been largely inconclusive anyway,
except to disprove the gross misconception [wrongly] attributed to
Aristotle, according to which the speed of falling objects ought to be
proportional to their weights (this much is easily proven wrong by
less dramatic experiments which Galileo did perform)....

http://home.att.net/~numericana/answer/record.htm#galileo


"the Campanile in the Piazza San Marco in Venice"

Campanile
257; St. Mark's Campanile is the bell tower of St Mark's Basilica in
Venice, located in the square (piazza) of the same name. On July 14,
1902, the campanile collapsed completely, also demolishing the
logetta. Remarkably no one was killed, except for the caretaker's cat;
454;

http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=C

Page 256
the Basilica San Marco
St Mark's Basilica (Italian: Basilica di San Marco a Venezia), the
cathedral of Venice, is the most famous of the city's churches and one
of the best known examples of Byzantine architecture. It lies on St
Mark's Square, adjacent and connected to the Doge's Palace and has
been the seat of the Patriarch of Venice, archbishop of the Roman
Catholic Archdiocese of Venice since 1807.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilica_di_San_Marco

[...]

four-brick groupings
Padzhitnoff sees the Campanile come apart as a game of Tetris! The
"four-brick groupings [...] begin their gentle, undeadly descent,
rotating and translating in all available modes". (See page 123 for
more on Tetris.)

the tower collapses
Might have some relation to the final poem of Gravity's Rainbow. The
fall of the tower is foreshadowed -- foretold, actually -- in Chick´s
Tarot reading by Renata (See page 253).

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0705&msg=118748

Thanks, Jasper!

Cf. ...

Monument to the Third International

Tatlin's Tower was a grand monumental building envisioned and
blueprinted by the Russian artist and architect Vladimir Tatlin, but
never built. It was supposed to be erected in Petrograd after the
Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, as the headquarters and monument of the
Comintern (the third international). Its proper name was to be The
Monument to the Third International.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatlin's_Tower

http://www.tatlinstowerandtheworld.net/

Einstein Tower

The Einstein Tower is an astrophysical observatory in the Albert
Einstein Science Park in Potsdam, Germany designed by architect Erich
Mendelsohn. It was built for astronomer Erwin Finlay Freundlich to
support experiments and observations to validate Albert Einstein's
relativity theory....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_Tower

The Einstein tower is ... a solar observatory and until the second
World War the most prominent research institution of that kind in
Europe...

http://www.aip.de/einsteinturm/

Cf. ...

"The West Gate, intended to frame equinoctial sunsets, still retained
two flanking towers of rusticated stone and Gothical aspect ..." (p.
406)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0708&msg=120691

http://www.world-mysteries.com/alignments/mpl_al2c.htm

And see as well, e.g., ...

http://www.c20society.org.uk/docs/building/einstein.html

http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/Einstein_Tower.html

http://www.awi.de/en/institute/sites/potsdam/telegrafenberg/einstein_tower/

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v391/n6664/full/391217b0.html

http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/cartoon.htm

Hentschel, Klaus.  The Einstein Tower:
   An Intertexture of Dynamic Construction, Relativity Theory,
   and Astronomy.  Trans. Ann M. Hentschel.
   Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1997.

http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?book_id=2824


"322 feet"

322 feet
The average acceleration produced by gravity at the Earth's surface
(sea level) is 32.2 (or 32.17405 to be exact) feet per second per
second. This applies "in any direction out to the curve of the Earth,
notorious locally for exerting a fascination upon minds healthy and
disordered alike."

Pedantry Alert: From a height of 322 feet, you see the horizon at a
distance of 22 miles.

http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_397-428#Page_413


"out to the curve of the earth"

Cf. ..

"'At this latitude the earth's shadow races across Germany at 650
miles an hour, the speed of a jet aircraft.'" [...] The balloon goes
drifting, over countryside." (GR, Pt. II, p. 336)

http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/gravity/extra/earth.html

http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Earth_in_Gravity's_Rainbow


But why is the tower "notorious locally for exerting a fascination
upon minds healthy and disordered alike"?  Let me know ...

At any rate, much hinting at least at paradigm--"the structures they
remembered"--conficts and/or shifts here ...