AtDDtA1: The Stockyards

[Dave Monroe]

   "As they came in low over the Stockyards, the smell found them, the
smell and the uproar of flesh learning its mortality--like the dark
conjugate of some daylit fiction they had flown here, as appeared
increasingly likely, to promote.  Somewhere down there was the White
City promised in the Columbian Exhibition brochures, somehwere among
the tall smokestacks unceasingly vomiting black grease-smoke, the
effluvia of butchery unremitting, into which the buildings of the
leagues of city lying downwind retreated, like children into sleep
which bringeth not reprieve from the day.  In the Stockyards, workers
coming off shift, overwhelmingly of the Roman faith, able to detach
from earth and blood for a few precious seconds, looked up at the
airship in wonder, imagining a detachment of not necessarily helpful
angels." (AtD, Pt. I, Ch. 2, p. 10)


Stockyards

Slaughterhouse to the World

The Birth of the Chicago Union Stockyards

The rise and dominance of Chicago's Union Stock Yards marks a
significant period in the city's economic and social history. In 1848,
when Chicago was only a connection for transporting livestock from the
West to the rest of the country, small stockyards such as Lake Shore
Yard and Cottage Grove Yard were scattered throughout the city along
various rail lines.

Several factors contributed to Chicago's need for a larger, more
centralized, and efficient stockyard. One of these was the westward
expansion of railroads, causing Chicago to evolve into a major
railroad center and experience massive commercial growth. Another
factor was the Mississippi River blockade during the Civil War that
closed the north-south river trade route. A third factor was the
influx of meatpackers and livestock to Chicago - the city's small
stockyards were not equipped to manage the exponential growth of the
meatpacking industry....

http://www.chicagohs.org/history/stock.html

The Union Stock Yard & Transit Co., or The Yards operated on the south
side of Chicago for 106 years, beginning on Christmas Day in 1865 and
closing in 1971 after several decades of decline brought on by the
decentralization of the meat packing industry....

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

See, e.g., ...

Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906)

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/140

http://us.penguinclassics.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780143039587,00.html

"Hog Butcher for the World" --Carl Sandburg, "Chicago" (1916)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_%28poem%29


"dark conjugate of some daylit fiction"

Cf. ...

"White City ... black grease-smoke" (ibid.)

"It's always night, or we wouldn't need light." (Epigraph)

Recall, e.g., ...

"The men inside the auction room wore black mohair and had pale, cruel
faces." (Lot 49, Ch. 6, p. 183)

"White faces, like diseased blooms, bobbed along in the dark" (V., Ch.
9, Sec. i, p. 244)

Ezra Pound, "In the Station of the Metro" (1913)

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough

http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/rp/poems/pound3.html

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0103&msg=54053

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0109&msg=59200


Columbian Exhibition brochures

http://columbus.iit.edu/bookfair/00264004.html

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0607&msg=103064


"children into sleep which bringeth not reprieve from the day"

Is this an allusion to something or not?  Sounds Biblical, but ...