AtDTdA: (9) 256

[Jasper]

256 The Chums in Venice (continued)

Page 256
the Basilica San Marco
St Mark's Basilica (Italian: Basilica di San Marco a Venezia), the 
cathedral of Venice, is the most famous of the city's churches and one 
of the best known examples of Byzantine architecture. It lies on St 
Mark's Square, adjacent and connected to the Doge's Palace and has been 
the seat of the Patriarch of Venice, archbishop of the Roman Catholic 
Archdiocese of Venice since 1807.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilica_di_San_Marco

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Procuratie
The Procuraties (literally, "procuracies") are three connected buildings 
on St Mark's Square in Venice. They are also connected to St Mark's 
Clocktower. They are historic buildings over arcades, the last of them 
completed, to finish off the square, under Napoleon's occupation.

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dual citizenship
They live in two places, there are two skycraft, they point a gun at one 
place but the shell strikes a different place. Lots of bi- somethings in 
this passage.
*wiki*

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the quotidian and the ghostly

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"something else about to emerge from the /sfumato/, some visitation... 
something that was to transcend both Chums and Tovarishchi, for all at 
once there was a great stunning hoarse cry from the invisibility, nearly 
a material thing, a lethal impedance in the air, as if something 
malevolent were making every exertion to take form and be released upon 
the world"

See Yeats:
http://www.mcabee.org/~lcm/lines/slouch.html

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"the medium up there through which light must pass"
the stirred up aether of the visitation

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"the little-understood enigmata of the simultaneous"
The concept of simultaneous events, including the accurate definition 
and, moreover, the very need of such a definition, played a significant 
role in the soon-to-be formulated Special Relativity Theory. One of the 
main consequences of the theory is the relativity of simultaneity.
*wiki*

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four-brick groupings
Padzhitnoff sees the Campanile come apart as a game of Tetris! The 
"four-brick groupings [...] begin their gentle, undeadly descent, 
rotating and translating in all available modes". (See page 123 for more 
on Tetris.)
*wiki*

See also p. 258 where Dr. Gerasimoff (Dr. Counterfly's counterpart) 
explains his use of "quadruple brickbats".  He says, "Tetraliths are 
only deployed in anger."

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the tower collapses
Might have some relation to the final poem of Gravity's Rainbow. The 
fall of the tower is foreshadowed -- foretold, actually -- in Chick´s 
Tarot reading by Renata (See page 253).
*wiki*

See also p. 575: "There were reports of an encounter in the sky, 
described by some as angelic."