ATDDTA (3) Heavy Weather, 59-60

[Monte Davis]

>From Merle's native northwest Connecticut it's a half-hour by car north to
Slothrop territory -- the Berkshires in western Massachusetts, their
"slender church steeples poised up and down all these autumn hillsides,
white rockets about to fire, only seconds of countdown away, rose windows
taking in Sunday light." (GR 29)

Where to find a footloose Yankee, good with his hands, seeking his metier in
a country industrializiing at breakneck speed? ."A region of clockmakers,
gunsmiths and inspired tinkers" - to the south  is Waterbury, CT, a
once-brassy city that gave rise after 1850 to four of the largest national
firms making clocks and watches.
http://www.antiqueweb.com/articles/antiqueclocks.html

Then of course there was Eli Whitney, of the cotton gin and musket
manufacturing contracts. Soon Winchesters, Sharps, and Colts would pour out
of Hartford, Norwich and New Haven to tame the West, which had been unaware
of the need..
http://www.ctheritage.org/encyclopedia/topicalsurveys/inventors.htm

Pynchon simplifies the history of Connecticut's Western Reserve  in the Ohio
Territory a bit

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


to emphasize something magical in the translation -- scarcely a dislocation
-- of nearly 500 miles: "despite days and nights of traveling, Merle had an
eerie sense of not having left Connecticut—same plain gable-front houses,
white Congregational church steeples, even stone fences—more Connecticut,
just shifted west, was all." 

For a rich examination of American landscape and identity as the center of
population moved west, especially Ohio's change from unbroken forest to
farmland (oh, Stig?) around the "Forest City," you can't do better than Ian
Frazier's _Family_, which begins like genealogy and memoir but becomes
first-rate cultural history. And it's on sale right now! (Yes, that Frazier:
"Acme vs. Coyote," "Dating Your Mom"
) 

http://www.amazon.com/Family-Ian-Frazier/dp/B0000C7GF8/sr=8-6/qid=1171754950
/ref=pd_bbs_sr_6/102-3147738-4287345?ie=UTF8&s=books

Merle arrives during the manhunt for Blinky Morgan, and there's a nice dual
perspective from the first. Open one eye and see a muderer pursued by
constiuted authorities, "their black stiff hats shining like warrior
helmets." You go, officers!

 Open the other and see a "genial desperado" fleeing "bravos" who seem to
roust at random. Well, he *does* look genial -- judge for yourself (and
scroll up and down for the flatties). 

http://books.google.com/books?id=-W5JD5TO7uQC&pg=PA13&lpg=PA13&dq=%22blinky+
morgan%22&source=web&ots=tdxX7LW0Pb&sig=RGkFz50JKEIAUcHGj0xrzkqmh9A

Pass the hat for $150 so I can consult Hawkshaw and tell you much more about
Blinky:
 http://www.gsbbooks.com/cgi-bin/gsb455/10225.html

We do like our outlaws.

Our crazies... not so much. In the Northern Asylum or "tolerated
 though not
especially beloved" in the saloons we find the light-talkers, Lightarians,
light addicts, Addled Ed -- excuse me, Ed Addle, with his aetheric weather:
"Minute droplets of nothing at all, mixed in with the prevailing Ætheric
medium. Until the saturation point is reached, of course. Then there is
condensation, and storms in which not rain but precipitated nothingness
sweeps a given area
"

(During Sherman's march across the South in the American Civil War, his
engineers proved adept at quickly repairing rail lines and bridges destroyed
by retreating Confederate troops. After a while, the latter began to joke
bitterly that even blowing up tunnels was useless: "Those Yankees allus
carry spare tunnels, too."

The metaphor of surface waves in water, transverse and longitudinal and
shear waves in material media (sound, earthquakes, explosive shocks) had
been stretched and stretched again to account for light until by 1887 it was
ready to tear. Some, equipped with Maxwell's tools, were ready to move on --
but here we see those who rebounded the other way, insisting that light be
*more* like tangible stuff, aether *more* like stuff that can sustain not
just waves but pressures and fronts and storms.

You can go crazy, Pynchon seems to be saying, trying to cram something truly
new into an old scheme.  We should be grateful that today we understand
*our* world without bogus, misleading  notions like, say,  "electric
currents."  
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