ATDTDA (5.4) - Bad Ice After Midnight

[Monte Davis]

Tore Rye Andersen wrote:

> The specificity with which Pynchon tells us the angle, as it were (90 
> degrees; not 85 or 94) does seem significant, but 90 degrees is, after 
> all, just another way of saying "right angle", and the specificity 
> does seem fitting in a novel with so much mathematics in it...

I spent several more summers working highway construction for the same 
firm of civil engineers who had done the NYC fallout-shelter survey. P's 
father was a surveyor and highway engineer as well as town official -- 
and several times in previous novels, P has used the image of a surveyor 
striking an approximate 90-degree angle by spreading his arms to the 
sides, then swinging them symmetrically forward. It's both factual -- 
surveyors do it all the time for a rough preliminary traverse -- and a 
very rich image for "here I am, gridding myself into space...". I think 
of it as video of Vitruvian Man:

http://www.phys.uu.nl/~heimel/vitruvius.jpg