Longish review of AtD

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

Very interesting and useful essay on AtD. This section got me to thinking
of possible inspirations and scources for Against the Day: 

           The list may be the manifest sign of research the novelist 
           can’t bear to throw away—anyone with a little dangerous 
           knowledge knows how deep Pynchon’s reading runs. He 
           is rarely as poetic as when indulging himself in lists, arias 
           to the material probity of the world, to the existence whose 
           dissolution the novel makes its stuttering stand against—
           a dissolution toward that greater entropy predicted by 
           Newton’s second law of thermodynamics, the law Pynchon 
           would have loved to discover. That doesn’t mean the author 
           hasn’t realized the humorous dimension to this, like a fourth 
           hovering above the material three—the matter of matter is 
           almost always farcical in accumulation, from Dickens’s dust 
           heaps in Our Mutual Friend to Imelda Marcos’s shoes.

           The list, taken to such extremes, is a provision beyond the 
           reader’s appetite, a local surfeit that imitates, if it does not 
           divine, the overindulgence intimate to the long novel itself. 
           The meaning of the title, should Against the Day mean 
           anything, lies in shoring up the present against those ruins 
           of the future—and to that end, the list stockpiles odds and 
           ends, like boxes of Civil Defense crackers, as a specific 
           against destruction. The question is not why Pynchon’s one 
           short novel and his stories seem trivial; it’s why most of his 
           epic novels do not.

http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2007/summer/logan-pynchon-against-the-day/

Reading this little section of a very long essay on AtD---"Back to the Future: 
On Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day, William Logan"---Robert Burton's 
Anatomy of Melancholy came to mind. Remarkably enough, it's now online 
thanks to project Gutemberg. The lists and various distractions found in 
'Anatomy of Melancholy' must have been an inspiration for some of AtD's lists:


Thus Democritus esteemed of the world in his time, and this was the cause
of his laughter: and good cause he had.

[256]  "Olim jure quidem, nunc plus Democrite ride;
          Quin rides? vita haec nunc mage ridicula est."

       "Democritus did well to laugh of old,
          Good cause he had, but now much more;
        This life of ours is more ridiculous
          Than that of his, or long before."

Never so much cause of laughter as now, never so many fools and madmen.
'Tis not one [257]Democritus will serve turn to laugh in these days; we
have now need of a "Democritus to laugh at Democritus;" one jester to flout
at another, one fool to fleer at another: a great stentorian Democritus, as
big as that Rhodian Colossus, For now, as [258]Salisburiensis said in his
time, _totus mundus histrionem agit_, the whole world plays the fool; we
have a new theatre, a new scene, a new comedy of errors, a new company of
personate actors, _volupiae sacra_ (as Calcagninus willingly feigns in his
Apologues) are celebrated all the world over, [259]where all the actors
were madmen and fools, and every hour changed habits, or took that which
came next. He that was a mariner today, is an apothecary tomorrow; a smith
one while, a philosopher another, _in his volupiae ludis_; a king now with
his crown, robes, sceptre, attendants, by and by drove a loaded ass before
him like a carter, &c. If Democritus were alive now, he should see strange
alterations, a new company of counterfeit vizards, whifflers, Cumane asses,
maskers, mummers, painted puppets, outsides, fantastic shadows, gulls,
monsters, giddy-heads, butterflies. And so many of them are indeed ([260]if
all be true that I have read). For when Jupiter and Juno's wedding was
solemnised of old, the gods were all invited to the feast, and many noble
men besides: Amongst the rest came Crysalus, a Persian prince, bravely
attended, rich in golden attires, in gay robes, with a majestical presence,
but otherwise an ass. The gods seeing him come in such pomp and state, rose
up to give him place, _ex habitu hominem metientes_; [261]but Jupiter
perceiving what he was, a light, fantastic, idle fellow, turned him and his
proud followers into butterflies: and so they continue still (for aught I
know to the contrary) roving about in pied coats, and are called
chrysalides by the wiser sort of men: that is, golden outsides, drones, and
flies, and things of no worth. Multitudes of such, &c.

http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/0/8/0/10800/10800.txt