ATD review in PMC

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

          Glenn:
          P.S. reading many AstroTheology web site pages, 
          I found this; Perhaps it could inform the ATD acronym 
          T.W.I.T.?

          However, the title David (from DWD or TWT, meaning 
          "Beloved," - hence TUTankhamen) has been found to 
          refer to the kings of the Egyptian Eighteenth Dynasty, 
          that is, to the Cult of Aton.

          Again, similar with URL:
          The Biblical David, identified as Tuthmosis III 
          (1490-1436 B.C.), is derived from dwd in the Bible, 
          which becomes twt, Tuth, in Egyptian.
          http://www.shout.net/~bigred/JesusTut.html

          Again, perhaps a page worth saving away: "Arabic 
          Etymological Dictionary"
          http://etymological.freeweb.hu/AEDweb.htm
          tut : mulberry [Sem t-w-t, Mal tuta, Akk tuttu, Heb tut, 
          JNA tutha] Aze tut, Rom dud, Per tut, Ser dud, Tur 
          dut borrowed from Ar


          P.P.S.
          Astrotheology also got me to surf "anselm, hebrew" 
          and turned up this long but fascinating web page 
          from a book on common low [law]: Perhaps esp. for Robin...?

Here's my question: How far from T.W.I.T. to Thoth? Crowley's name for 
his explication/exegesis/tilt-a-whirl fun tour of his worked-over Rider-Waite
deck is "The Book of Thoth" and Thoth [correct me if I'm wrong] is a God 
of writing. And the God/Writing nexus is really the linchpin of the Kabbalah.

Bernard Duyfhuizen's review of Against the Day:

http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/current.issue/17.2duyfhuizen.html

' "The Exact Degree of Fictitiousness": Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day '
is the most intelligent critique of the book I've encountered so far. 
The longest as well. I'm posting excerpts and comments [realizing this is 
gonna be another supersized post] just to get to selected highlights, but
read the whole essay, it's full of the insights that a deep reading of the text 
affords.

          . . . . Having now read Against the Day twice, I would put 
          it in the running with Gravity's Rainbow and Mason & 
          Dixon--time will tell where it places. . . .

          . . . . .Against the Day focuses on issues of time and 
          space, and its narrative time overlaps with the emergence 
          of Einstein's theories of relativity. . . .   

And I'd point out that these Quantum concepts usually arrive in little
metaphorical packets of Light.

          . . . . a "plot" that will not be limited to the elucidation 
          of the moral and social evolution of individual 
          characters as one finds in classic "big" novels such as 
          Tolstoy's. That said, Against the Day is in many ways 
          a character-driven novel. . . .

          . . . .For many readers, patient re-reading is also required 
          to grasp Pynchon's style in Against the Day. Pynchon's 
          styles have always caused readers initial difficulty. . . .

Seriously, folks, I'm sure that a lot of you were blown away by Gravity's 
Rainbow on the first pass, but wasn't there an overall feeling of 
confusion and dislocation? The quarter didn't drop for me until the
third or fourth reading. And, while Mason & Dixon now goes down like 
draughts of "Boutille Call", my initial pass was like broken field running
over broken glass. 

          . . . .Against the Day redirects our attention to Vineland 
          and to the commentary each Pynchon novel makes 
          about the forks in the road America did not take and to 
          our collective complicity in those decisions. . . .

          . . . .In a novel so devoted to anarchist activities, the reader 
          might also expect to encounter the Tristero, the underground 
          postal system from The Crying of Lot 49. If it is here, it too is 
          undercover, operating on some of the mail that finds its 
          recipients even at times when the normal channels seem to 
          be down. The spat between Ewball Oust and his stamp-collec-
          ting father may also suggest the Tristero's presence in Against 
          the Day:

          It seemed that young Ewball had been using postage stamps 
          from the 1901 Pan-American Issue, commemorating the 
          Exposition of that name in Buffalo, New York, where the 
          anarchist Czolgosz had assassinated President McKinley. 
          These stamps bore engraved vignettes of the latest in 
          modern transportation, trains, boats, and so forth, and by 
          mistake, some of the one-cent, two-cent, and four-cent 
          denominations had been printed with these center designs 
          upside down. One thousand Fast Lake Navigation, 158 
          Fast Express, and 206 Automobile inverts had been sold 
          before the errors were caught, and before stamp-collector 
          demand had driven their prices quite through the roof[.] 
          Ewball, sensitive to the Anarchistic symbolism, had bought 
          up and hoarded as many as he could find to mail his letters 
          with. (978)

          These "center inverted" stamps ("inverse rarities" to recall 
          one of the readings of Pierce Inverarity's name) turn out 
          to be real (the four-cent invert is even considered by some 
          philatelists to have been made deliberately rather than by 
          mistake). In typical Pynchon fashion, however, the passage 
          resonates with the text's overall theme of anarchism, 
          especially the anarchism stemming from United States 
          economic policy in the 1890s. McKinley was a key player 
          in establishing the gold standard in United States monetary 
          policy of the 1890s, specifically the repeal of the Silver Act 
          in 1893. . . .

Which given a Charles Hollander-styled reading goes right to the real "plot" of
all of Pynchon's novels:

          . . . .All pretense of innocence is finally lost as they fly over 
          Flanders during the war. Miles Blunden, who among the 
          Chums most often displays the clearest insight into the 
          real world, puts the scene in perspective:

          "Those poor innocents," he exclaimed in a stricken whisper, 
          as if some blindness had abruptly healed itself, allowing him 
          at last to see the horror transpiring on the ground. "Back at 
          the beginning of this...they must have been boys, so much 
          like us.... They knew they were standing before a great 
          chasm none could see the to bottom of. But they launched 
          themselves into it anyway. Cheering and laughing. It was 
          their own grand 'Adventure.' They were juvenile heroes of 
          a World-Narrative--unreflective and free, they went on 
          hurling themselves into those depths by tens of thousands 
          until one day they awoke, those who were still alive, and 
          instead of finding themselves posed nobly against some 
          dramatic moral geography, they were down cringing in a 
          mud trench swarming with rats and smelling of shit and 
          death." (1023-24)

          The passage clearly echoes Brigadier Pudding's battlefield 
          trauma at the Ypres Salient in Belgium from Gravity's 
          Rainbow. . . .

And otherwise carries the DNA of those vectors of shit 'n' money, inheritance 
vs. disinheritence found in all of TRP's other books, restating the most obvious
of the laws of supply and demand [as stated by Robert Klein]: "We have all
the supply, so we can demand whatever the fuck we want." Always, somewhere 
in the background [the 'foley'] of OBA's texts we find the shadow state of 
international banking and oil concerns, the fiscal illumanati, like the 
Rockefellers and the Bushes. The connector here has to do with gassing, first in 
the fields of Flanders and then with Zyklon B in the death camps. Scarsdale Vibe 
is AtD's representative of this Elect class of plutocrats.