4th of July passages (2 of them atdtda related)

[mikebailey at speakeasy.net]

1) last night somebody, or group of somebodys, paid beaucoup
dollars to put on a fireworks show in the little triangular
park (well, it's little, but not as little as that little
triangular park in New York City that is so famous) right
across the street from our house.  A panel truck drove up,
just as it was getting dark, emitting a few gentlemen with
torches which they applied immediately to the contents of crates
which'd already been stacked in the grass.
Our quiet neighborhood, normally bare of pedestrians, was filled
with hundreds of people on front lawns and sidewalks, also 
lighting off their own displays.
No patriotic speeches, no banners, just a lot of pyros.
It was cool.

2) Miles's "Think, bloviators, think!"  He directs their
attention to the unlighted part of the trajectories.
I still am not quite sure what he's getting at.
Bloviators is a near-rhyme to aviators...
Trajectories are a big theme in Gravity's Rainbow.
If he is comparing an individual's life to the 
course of an aerial firework (we move through 
predetermined courses in darkness towards a 
glorious culmination), that is a very
afterlife-oriented religious notion -
or at least, one that denigrates
daily life in favor of what is found at its end
- one that objectively seems to have 
been abused by leaders through the ages, but still
a very powerful thought - and it prefigures Miles's
reasoning in turning down the Trespassers' offer later...

3) "Decades of odd drugs made him a vivid 
but not always a coherent story-teller....
'Anyway.  This is - what? - twenty-five years
ago maybe.  I'd gotten heavily into fireworks,
because of Act Theory.  Remember Act Theory?
No?  Jesus, things don't last long in that 
line these days, do they.  Act Theory, dig -
God, I don't know if I remember now how it
worked myself, but it was this idea about 
how life works - how life is acts, and not
thoughts or things: an act is a thought and
a thing both at once, only it has this shape,
see, so it can be analyzed.  Every act,
no matter what kind, pick up a cup, or a 
whole life, or like all of evolution, every 
act has the same shape; two acts together
are another act with the same shape; all
life is only one big act, made up of
a million smaller ones, follow?'
'Not really.'
'Don't matter.  It was the reason I got
into fireworks, though, because a rocket
has the same form as an act: initiation,
burning, explosion, burning out.  Only
sometimes that rocket, that act, sets
off another initiation, burning, explosion,
and so on, get the picture?  And so you
can set up a display that has the same
form as life.  Acts, acts, all acts.  
Shells: inside one shell you can pack a bunch
of others, which go off after the big one,
packed in like a chicken is packed inside
an egg, and inside that chicken more eggs
with more chickens, and so on odd
infinooty.  Gerbs: a gerb has the
same form as the feeling of being alive:
a bunch of little explosions and burnings
going on all the time, burning out,
initiating, burning out, that all
together make a picture, like thought
makes pictures in the middle of 
the air."
'What's a gerb?'
'A gerb, man.  Chinese fire.  You
know, that makes a picture of two 
battleships shooting at each other,
and that turns into Old Glory.'
'Oh, yeah.'
'Yeah.  Lancework we call those.  Just
like thinking.  A few people got that,
too.  Some critics.'  He said nothing
for a time, remembering vividly the
river barge where he'd set off *The
Act Entrained* and other shows.  Darkness,
and the slap of oily water; the
smell of punk.  And then the sky filled
up with fire, which is like life, 
which is light that ignites and consumes
and goes out and for a moment traces
a figure in the air that can't be
forgotten but which, in a sense, was
never there."  
(From _Little, Big_, John Crowley,
just a pretty passage)

4) Thanks, Keith, for finding the Tesla
lab notebook for July 4th 1899!