AtDTDA 19: The Anterooms of Death [526]

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

We are introduced to Barry Nebulay, yet another complicated 
pun deciphered here on the Pynchonwiki:

          Barry Nebulay
          Pun on a term from heraldry, barry nebuly. Barry (rhymes 
          with "starry," not "carry") refers to a shield divided into an 
          even number of parts by horizontal lines. Nebuly signals 
          that the lines are deformed into stylized "cloud" shapes. . . .
          . . . .If a British author had a character with a heraldic name, 
          it would suggest a pseudonym. [1]

http://tinyurl.com/2ozpm6

Pynchon is monkeying with signifyers here as he will again throughout the 
'Grand Hôtel de la Nouvelle Digue' section of the story. I ran a post where 
I derived a result from Googling the phrase 'shaky quality of present day 
"reality" ' under the catagory of 'news' and got back:

          . . . .You just try to understand Einstein's paper first 
          published on "Annalen der physiks" titled "on the 
          electrodynamics of moving bodies" without a firm 
          understanding on both newtonian theory of movement 
          and maxwellian ecuations: you will see it doesn't matter 
          it was published by 1905, when your "copyright overlords" 
          were not so strong, everything was published and proper 
          citations were both accesible and properly in place. And 
          please remember it's not even a very hard paper; currently 
          any minimally cute 16 year old boy should understand its 
          maths without many problems. But still, you either already 
          have the maths and the underlying theories already grasped 
          or no matter how many citations or how free, the article will 
          still seem Chinese to you (unless you are Chinese, in which 
          case it will seem archaic Saxon to you).

          "The only place this is an issue for is for those who believe that 
          science leads to a definition of reality"

          I must say "bullshit". Science *is* our definition of reality. It can 
          be controversial how much our definition of reality pairs the 
          "real reality" or if there's in fact a "real reality", but there's no 
          doubt science *is* our definition of reality. Only this assumption 
          allows even you to not think that the seven lane bridge you 
          cross to go to job is not suspended over the river by any 
          magic force. 

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/25/211256

If I recall correctly Maxwell's Equations [2] are crucial to the commercial 
exploitation of 'the light over the ranges', the development of the modern 
age, modern "if only" in the technological sense. And Maxwell's Equations
deploy Quaterninons. Again from the Pynchonwiki:

     'Having been inseparable from the rise of the electromagnetic'

     In his 1865 work The Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic 
     Field, James Clerk Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism. 
     He put forth twenty equations, with twenty unknowns, in vector 
     form (though different in notation and form than the equations 
     that now bear his name) that completely described all known 
     electromagnetic phenomena. In his 1873 treatise on the subject, 
     he expressed the equations in the mathematics of quaternions. 
     It appears that the quaternion form of the equations remained 
     popular even though, at the behest of his publisher, Maxwell 
     reverted to the 1865 form in the second edition (1881)--though 
     they remain scattered throughout. In 1892 Oliver Heaviside 
     (On the Forces, Stresses, and Fluxes of Energy in the 
     Electromagnetic Field. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal 
     Society of London. A, Vol. 183. pp423-480), while spewing 
     scientific vitriol at the Quaternionists, reformulated Maxwell's 
     original 1865 equations (Heaviside chose to remove the vector 
     potential and scalar fields from the equations; the inclusion of 
     these terms had served as Maxwell's justification for the use of 
     quaternions), and provided the notation still in use today. See 
     this PDF [3] for the evolution of Maxwell's equations.

Googling 'The Anterooms of Death [thinking, perhaps, this is a famous 
literary reference] led to this 1901 article from the New York Times:

     . . . .How it feels to to be sentenced to die, to occupy a condemned 
     cell, and to hear, one by one, others who for months have been 
     living in adjoining anterooms of death being led to the fatal chair, 
     from which in the twinkling of an eye, their souls are to be launched 
     into the great unknown. . . .

 http://tinyurl.com/2pqmvn

The mathmatical field of Quaternions is dying out, the Quaternioneers 
have gone exile, this irregularly spaced World Convention underlines 
that fact:

     —they were eyed suspiciously by waiters who brought in and 
     ladled from some oversized alloyed-steel kettles vegetables 
     grown locally whose names did not readily come to mind, or 
     animal parts concealed be opaque sauces—particularly, here 
     in Belgium, forms of mayonnaise [4]—whose color schemes ran 
     to indigos and aquas, often quite vivid actually. . .

Fancy/weird food to match the fancy/weird locale.

Kit eyes all the Art Nouveau architecture and decorative art at the 
Nouvelle Digue "Pretty Fancy":

http://www.riga-life.com/media/pics/art-nouveau.jpg

http://www.behive.be/design/000188780.jpg

http://www.finescrollsaw.com/art-nouveau-cabinet-01.jpg

http://www.britishbuttonsociety.org/Images/BlueGlassArtNouveau.jpg

1: This leads to:

          "Cambridge personality Bertie ('Mad Dog') Russell observed 
          Barry Nebulay, "that most of Hegel's arguments come down 
          to puns on the word 'is'. [538]

2: The equations figure in the 'Quaternonic Weapon' foretold on pg. 542. 

3: http://www.zpenergy.com/downloads/Orig_maxwell_equations.pdf

4; You were headed for Marseilles, someone mentions La Marseillaise, you land in. . . .