cockamamie response / couple-four things I'd have mentioned earlier...

[mikebailey at speakeasy.net]

...had I been paying attention...

kelber at mindspring.com wrote:

>        Your discussion of the Vormance/Endurance/Inconvenience going off on >their adventures heedless (or as a distraction from/to) what's going on >behind or beneath them, reminded me of the story of the last Soviet >Cosmonauts orbiting the earth while the Soviet Union was breaking up beneath >them. One of them purportedly asked "Are we for sale now?" It seems a good >simile for the Chums: above it all, disconnected, but still controlled by >what's happening beneath.

   Mark Kohut - (for some reason I think of Egyptian pharaohs when I read your last name) - mused
>>Yes re Chums and Them but I ask this: When TRP steadily if infrequently >has >>the Chums encounter harsher 'reality" , may it be TRP commenting on the >>unreality of "daylit fictions"
>>    and fiction in general for us, readers???
     
 Well what about this idea: Fleetwood Vibe as the author of the Chums books - the fictional real adventurer (and I'm reminded of one of the Rockefellers who got caught by headhunters, didn't he?) encountering the fictional real/fictional Chums as an inspiration on the Vormance expedition and creating them to record his own progressive loss of innocence...

or this (p27) "There were steamers, electrics, Maxim whirling machines, ships powered by guncotton reciprocators and naphtha engines, and electrical lifting-screws of strange hyperboloidal design for drilling upward through the air, and winged aerostats, of streamlined shape, and wing-flapping miracles of ornithurgy.  A fellow scarcely knew after a while where to look - "
and then Dahlia appears...
but like the sea that Driblette (is that the right guy?) walks off into, which seems to me a lot like a sea of texts that a professor's comments sometimes disappear into (with Oedipa representing - among her other meanings - the reader searching for truth, meaning and a good story), the crowd of flying machines is like all the great literature waiting to be read...  

and then, the weird ways they get their instructions...doesn't that correspond somehow to authors getting inspirations, like who was it, the French guy who wrote best with the smell of a urinal, or of course Proust and his Madeleine

quick notes
1) where and when did Merle get the wagon?  having a wagon is pretty cool - gypsies, tinkers, reddlemen (singer Vashti Bunyan made the long trip from London to Skye Island in Scotland in a wagon in 1969) 

2) how about this paragraph (p 59) "Merle had been born and raised in northwest Connecticut (1), a region of clockmakers, gunsmiths and inspired tinkers, so his trip out to the Western Reserve (I remember some nice explanations covering the name of Case Western Reserve back a couple months) was just a personal expression of Yankee (Connecticut Yankee?) migration generally.  This strip of Ohio due west of (2) Connecticut had for years, since before American independence, been considered part of (3) Connecticut's original land grant.  So despite days and nights of traveling, Merle had an eerie sense of not having left (4) Connecticut - same plain gable-front houses, white Congregational church steeples, even stone fences - more (wait for it...) Connecticut, just shifted west, was all."
...so where's Merle from, anyway?  Massachusetts, wasn't it?

3) p.58 "He discussed it one day with his friend at Yale"
did he go to Yale?  I see him more as a lab technician, but then Vanderjuice would be his boss...except Vanderjuice is eccentric enough to be friends with his underlings...and Merle perhaps anarchic enough to characterize the relationship that way too...point being that some of the roles in a class structure are reasonable and don't preclude friendship?

4) A little sidelong raucousness: "Merle by then was also spending a lot of time, not to mention money, on a couple of sisters..." I guess it's a fairly innocuous double entendre, but it struck me funny

5) I have no freakin' clue what the secret name for the Anti-Stone would be, does everybody else know?  sssh, don't say it out loud...

6) Chicago Fair, Michelson Morley, polar expeditions, we really are hitting the high points.  Our grade school library had pretty good books on all these things (and Ty Cobb and Lou Gehrig and PT Barnum and Frank Woolworth and Thomas Edison) and my grandma's house was full of Horatio Alger books and the like...It's embarrassing, but I got what I consider to be a pretty good feel for the late 19th/early 20th century in America from kid's books
    

        -----Original Message-----
        >From: mikebailey at speakeasy.net

        >yada yada yada blah blah blah