rigorous AtD musings

[Michael Bailey]

1) I mis-referenced the other day and nobody corrected me:
I said that Darby was the one whose foot got caught in the rope,
whereas it was Miles --
so that whether or not it strengthens my thesis about
Darby the Plymouth Brethren theorist, w/r/t Aleister Crowley's parental
units and -/t Christian doctrine,
the fact is that in AtD, Darby it was who, far from
causing the tangle, both set things right at the time (climbing
aloft to manually reset the valve) *and* repaired the damage later

(p 16 -
"Darby, left solitary in the glow of the watch-fire, applied himself,
with his customary vivacity, to the repair of the main hydrogen
valve whose mechanical disruption earlier had nearly spelt their doom.
That unpleasant memory, like the damage beneath Darby's nimble
fingers, would soon be quite unmade...as if it were something the stripling
had only read about, in some boys' book of adventures...as if
that page of their chronicles lay turned and done, and the order
"About-face" had been uttered by some potent though invisible
Commandant of Earthly Days, toward whom Darby, in amiable
obedience, had turned again...."
-- that Chums narrator has a way with words - a weird,
sprung-rhythmic, counter-cliche-ish way ("against the cliche?"):
a) vivacity - applied to Darby as he works alone - this is unique, in
that every reference to vivacity I'm familiar with refers to
someone's behavior in company
b) "like the damage beneath Darby's nimble fingers"
just something good, supple, unexpected about the way that flows)
c) good words about the relationship of adventurers to stories
of adventure, and the power of words...I'm trying to remember
a Stanley Elkin quote about same...
d) and he not only fixes it, but forgives & forgets, in obedience
to a Commandant of Earthly Days...good Xian doctrine!

2) with price as low as it is, I bought copies for everyone
in my family and a spare for my shelf

3) for Mr Kipen's article on dogs in fiction -
too late, alas, to be of assistance,
but although Pugnax doesn't have any transliterable lines
beyond a Scooby-Doo effect,
on page 6 we do have a privileged moment w/r/t his viewpoint.

When he's, as usual, unable to smell Lindsay ("Sir Nose
D'Void-of-Funk") the musing is notably from Pugnax's POV:
"There might be an explanation, though he was not sure
he should insist upon one.  Explanations did not, as far
as he could tell, appear to be anything dogs either sought
or even were entitled to"

The curious phrasing of the Chums Narrator - "either sought or even
were entitled to" -
proceeding from "sought" to not just"being entitled to",
but all the way to "*even* being entitled to" ----

(comparable to skipping in playground raillery from "dare" to
"double dog dare" -- as in the movie "Christmas Story")

a) as though "things sought" were a
natural subset of "things one's entitled to",
implying a Victorian orderliness to one's questing in the world

and b) so that the either-or distinction, implying roughly equal
alternatives, is subverted by a differentiation in levels of
escalation, as it were -
will be dealt with fully in my 18-volume work, "Peculiarities
amongst the diction of the Chums Narrator in AtD and their
Group-Theoretical and Sociological Implications"

4) Page 7 - aha, The Chums of Chance in Old Mexico
were rendering assistance to Porfirio Diaz --- let's see,
which of the many Mexican revolutions was his?
he helped kick out Emperor Maximilian (who I bet wished
he'd stayed in Europe - curious career), held the Presidency for a while
by patronage and vote fraud.  That the Chums worked for Diaz
indicates something...but what?
me, I'm still getting my bearings in Mexican history -- I'm fuzzy
on the whole Napoleon I, II, III thing, and that Emperor Maximilian
being sort of given the boot by Franz Joseph for being too liberal
(whatever that means in an emperor) should end up as Emperor
of Mexico is tres bizarre - I mean really.  Yes I had heard of it,
but it's one of those things that gets weirder the more you contemplate it.

5) Lake, Reef, Kit, Frank -- terms of a quaternion?
(sorry, that's about as far as I can go with that one for now)