AtDTDA: 19 Nothing's been rigorously what you'd call 'real' lately [535/538]

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

Root catches uo with Kit:

          "Thought you'd eloped with that redhead!" he 
          greeted Kit.

          "Got drafted by the navy," Kit said. "I think. Nothing's 
          been rigorously what you'd call 'real' lately. . . ."

Kit is led to Root's quarters, Root says it's the closest they'll get 
to seeing Anarchism in their lifetimes.

Back down in the Grand Salon 'the noise and centrifugal jollification 
picked up considerably'. This general jollification leads to a set of 
compairsons of poets to mathematicians. From the Chumps of Choice:

          There follows a game among the assembled throng where 
          mathematicians are compared to their corresponding poet: 
          Oliver Heaviside/Walt Whitman; Clerk Maxwell/Tennyson; 
          William Rowan Hamilton/Swinburn; Hermann Grassman/
          Wordsworth; Gibbs/Longfellow. What all these 19th century 
          scientists/mathematicians/engineers seem to share was the 
          major incomprehension and outright neglect of most of their 
          peers and the fact that their work, rediscovered in many cases, 
          is all essential to modern math and physics. I presumed the "ijk" 
          Quaternion label was a Pynchon language joke because every 
          other word in Flemish ends in "ijk," but instead it’s referring to 
          Hamilton’s “Eureka!” moment crossing a Dublin bridge where 
          he was struck by the Gods with the following equation which 
          was the beginning of quaternions.

http://tinyurl.com/26jnxf

Then follows the famous ijk equation, more at chumps of choice and particularlly 
at:

http://tinyurl.com/34wd5o

Root's got a hot system to beat the odds at the casino: Quarterninion 
Probabality. Kit, only carrying his fishing-boat pay, moves on in a dull 
funk, knowing he was in a temple of money, all vectors leading to the 
likes of Emperor Leopold or Scarsdale Vibe. Somewhere around the 
pass-off of page 536 to 537, Kit starts to view the scene through a 
Cubist filter:

          Oddly, Kit noticed, the room was also crawling with lopsided 
          makeup jobs, and these weren't limited to women either—
          broken symmetries everywhere. . . .

>From thge Pynchonwiki:

          broken symmetries
          Broken symmetry is a concept used widely in mathematics and 
          physics. For a simplest explanation (good enough for the text here), 
          this term means that an object breaks either rotational symmetry or 
          translational sysmetry - when one can only rotate an object in certain 
          angles or when one is able to tell if the object has been shifted 
          sideways. . . .

Then Kit encounters the first symmetrical face at a roulettle table in the shape of a:

          sphinxe Khnopffienne
          refers to the Belgian symbolist painter Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921), 
          famous for his painting "The Caress", in which a female sphinx erotically 
          lures a young man. The painting can be seen in the wikipedia entry

It's also on the CoC blog

And looking right at Kit:

          . . . .right away ruling out all sorts of introductory chitchat, 
          with a gaze animal, timeless, as if already onto whatever 
          he thought he understood now. . . .

. . . .she says she's:

          Pléiade Lafrisée
          in French, "friser" means to curl or twist. "La frisée" could mean "curled," 
          by extension "twisted." The Pleiades is a cluster of hundreds of stars, 
          though only a few are visible, sometimes referred to as The Seven Sisters. 
          If Pleiades are Sisters, Pléiade is one Sister, so her name means 
          Twisted Sister!

She says shes a 'Conseilleuse', I say she's some sort of lady spy [where's Rocco when you really need him?]









Pynchonwiki notes:

http://tinyurl.com/2orfbz