ATDTDA (3) Daily Discombobulation, 64-69

[Monte Davis]

"And Merle saw the image appear. Come from nothing. Come in out of the pale
Invisible, down into this otherwise explainable world, clearer than real."
(64)

We've been on the border of Aether madness for a while. Should it surprise
us that the first image to capture Merle is of Newburgh inmates? A negative
image, of course -- with perhaps a suggestion that inside/outside the asylum
might be as reversible as black/white. The "all-night illumination" and
"inescapable glow" lead Merle to avid study and practice of
"light-portraiture," pushing the envelope with experimental emulsions that
-- while quite legit as chemistry -- have more than a hint of alchemy about
them.

***

The Cleveland Public Library (1869) wasn't the first of its kind -- by most
accounts Boston had led the way in 1854 -- but may well have been the first
non-college library with open stacks. Pynchon's tribute, as an author who's
done more than his share of research, and surely benefited from the
serendipity of the shelves, is touching.  

General history:  http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mpublibrary.html
Cleveland history: http://cpl.org/main-library-history.asp

(Before our next encounter with the evil Vibe, it's worth noting that
quintessential robber baron Andrew Carnegie built some 1700 public libraries
in the US and 800 more overseas.)
 
***

"... soon the wagon was just a damn rolling [photography lab." (65) Two
visions of what Merle was getting himself into:

http://www.albionmich.com/history/histor_notebook/images/hartungphotography.
jpg
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~mabrypix/H100.jpg

***

When he's not in the wagon, he rides the interurbans, the light-rail systems
that netted settled America from ~1880 through WWI. "Interurban Queen," a
short story by the late, idiosyncratically wonderful R.A. Lafferty, portrays
an alternate 20th century in which the investment that went into automobiles
and highways was directed instead to expanding and connecting the
interurbans, so that you could traverse the web from Atlantic to Pacific.
Sweeeeeeeeeeet.

"Every man on horseback is an arrogant man," Lafferty wrote, "however gentle
he may be on foot. The man in the automobile is one thousand times as
dangerous. I tell you, it will engender absolute selfishness in mankind if
the driving of automobiles becomes common. It will breed violence on a scale
never seen before. It will mark the end of the family as we know it, the
three or four generations living happily in one home. It will destroy the
sense of neighborhood and the true sense of Nation. It will create giantized
cankers of cities, false opulence of the suburbs, ruinized countryside, and
unhealthy conglomerations of specialized farming and manufacturing. It will
make every man a tyrant."

You could do a lot worse than get to know Lafferty's work.
http://greatsfandf.com/AUTHORS/RALafferty.php

"playing a lot of railroad euchre as a result": Wikipedia's entry for euchre
offers rules for this and other variants, calling it "the national card
game" of the 19th century and noting that its popularity today is
concentrated in the Midwest.

***

The hanging of Blinky Morgan, in the slow Columbus summer of 1888, recalls
the Tyburn episode of Mason & Dixon. Why does Merle photograph the souvenirs
obsessively? Why does Pynchon hate Columbus' coffee as much as he loves
Cleveland's library?

With the aether blown away by the Michelson-Morley result, "as if some
period of youthful folly had expired," Merle is ready for a change. We won't
get a full account of his meeting with Erlys until the Stupendica is out to
sea on p. 506, but "encountering an unmapped fork" on an unfamiliar road is
as fateful for him as it was for Oedipus. Or so say the disciples of that
young coke-head over in Austria:
http://pep-web.org/document.php?id=APA.025.0655A

There's an echo of Lew Basnight, the "Upstate-Downstate Beast," in Merle's
account to Dally (mid-p. 67) of the life he led with Erlys. Do you believe
what you read here? Does Merle expect Dally to? Or do you prefer Erlys'
idyllic (and quite inconsistent) version?

"...but them sisters in indignation... it's women beware women when *that*
starts rolling down the pike." 

Why sure, Mr. Pynchon, just drop a grisly Jacobean revenge tragedy in
anywhere you like, we're used to it by now. No, keep going, that nice Prof.
Bortz will fill us in...

http://members.aol.com/citzsite/citz/gcwbw.htm

***

Notice how a little of Merle's matter-of-fact, wise-cracking, long-resigned
tone survives into the narrator's voice through p. 68 as we watch Erlys,
Luca Zombini, and Merle. There's an opera's worth of heartbreak triangle in
500 words. All the themes of light and electricity in the book are knotted
into that "galvanic shadow."

"He didn't know what was happening. He did know." Merle had *his* love at
first sight a year or so back; now Erlys has hers. Doubles, reflections,
mirrors, negatives. You get two (at least) of everything in Against the Day,
but nobody promised they'd be matched sets.