Atdtda22: [43.2] A telltale fatality for the garish, 619

[Monte Davis]

"Yes, Private, the colors change...The question is, are they changing
*according to something*?... Not at random, but sytematically...? Is there
information for us?" (GR 642)

There's a doctoral thesis out there for anyone who'll do for AtD's palette
what Katherine Hayles and Mary Eiser did in "Coloring Gravity's Rainbow."
(Pynchon Notes 16, http://www.ham.muohio.edu/~krafftjm/pn/pn016.pdf ) I
remember vividly the "d'oh" sensation when that showed me how much chromatic
order lay behind the disconnected glints I'd perceived on my own (the title,
the recurrent pairing of magenta and green, Spectro and Weismann, black
imipolex and Slothrop's white zoot suit).

And there's a book or three in the question of how -- and how much -- that
kind of order *works* (1) for Pynchon as artificer and (2) for us as
readers. If, say, I listen to a Baroque composition entirely unaware that
the written notes are tracing a spatial symmetry on the staff ... how much
is that order getting through to me anyway as a chronological pattern in the
notes heard? And how much is it a scholarly footnote game "for those who
like that kind of thing"..?