ATDTDA 751 part 2

[Ya Sam]

Bnito oil tankers
>From Pynchon Wiki
In 1870s-80s Nobels Brothers (Cf page 444: Nobel brothers) dominated distribution of oil within the Russian Empire. The Rothschilds decided to take on the Nobels and in 1886 founded their own oil company: BNITO. To break the Nobels' monopoly on distribution of oil, The Bnito Co. won a contract to transport Bnito oil east of the Suez Canal and developed the tanker, a ship specifically designed to carry oil in storage tanks built into the hull as opposed to just placing barrels of oils in the hold. (Some historians said the exploitations of Baku's oil were how did the Nobel Brothers afford a peace prize and Rothschilds acquire their bank.)
 
http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_748-767
 
Krasnovodsk
lake port in the Republic of Turkmenistan, in Balkan Welayat, on the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea. It is located 270 km (170 mi) east of and across the Caspian from Baku, Azerbaijan, in an area of desert that lies below sea level. Although a fort had existed on the site since 1717, Balkan was founded as a town in 1869, and it assumed importance when it became the western terminus of the Trans-Caspian Railroad in 1896. The town lacks a supply of fresh water, which must be imported or desalinized from the salty Caspian Sea. Balkan is an important gateway to central Asia and is a center for the import and export of a variety of products. Population (1999) 70,000.
 
http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_762508966/Krasnovodsk.html
 
Trans-Caspian Railroad
transportation line linking the countries of Central Asia to one another and with the nations to the west. Built in the late 19th cent., the line begins at Turkmenbashi (Krasnovodsk) on the Caspian Sea and passes through Ashgabat, Bukhara, Samarkand, and Tashkent. There are branches to the Fergana Valley. The Trans-Caspian line connects at Arys with the more recent Turkistan-Siberia RR and the Kazalinsk line to Orenburg. It was formerly also known as the Central Asiatic RR.
 
http://www.bartleby.com/65/tr/TransCas.html
 
Qara Qum or Kara Kum
 
Sandy desert occupying some 90% of the republic of Turkmenistan; area about 310,800 sq km/120,000 sq mi. The Kara-Kum lies to the east of the Caspian Sea, between the Aral Sea to the north and the Iranian border to the south. It is separated from the Kyzyl-Kum desert by the Amu Darya River. The desert is crossed by the Trans-Caspian railway and the Kara-Kum Canal, the largest irrigation canal in the world. The area has rich oil, gas, and sulphur deposits, all of which are being increasingly exploited. Air temperatures of over 50°C have been recorded here.
 
http://www.tiscali.co.uk/reference/encyclopaedia/hutchinson/m0014001.html
 
Here is a collection of photographs about the “Mysteries of Central Asia”, one of these is called  “On camels in Kara Kum”
 
http://www.schicklerart.com/auto_exh/Gzel_002
 
railroad-metaphysics
 
See also Lebedev’s linking of railways to the Apocalypse in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot
 
Lebedev, a self-styled interpreter of the Apocalypse, is goaded into an attack upon the spiritual vacuum of modern society: "All of this as a whole is damned, sir? The whole spirit of these last few centuries of ours, taken as a whole with its scientific and practical emphasis, is perhaps indeed damned, sir! " (6) Modern man in his relentless drive to satisfy the demands of reason, egoism and material necessity has lost the sense of spiritual well-being to be derived from an ideal which provides moral and metaphysical certainty. Modern man has no faith; only science, industry, commerce and capital. Lebedev complains that it is folly to try to erect a material fortune upon a basis of spiritual poverty, and directs this particular criticism at contemporary socialists with their "carts bringing bread to the whole of humanity, without a moral basis for this action. " (a quotation that combines a well-known statement by the Russian socialist, Alexander Herzen, with Christ's injunction that man should not live by bread alone) (7) In a deliciously irreverent anecdote Lebedev goes on to tell of a twelfth century man who, after twenty years of cannibalism, confessed and went to the stake for his sins. What was it, asks Lebedev, that drove him to confession despite the tortures that awaited him? 
There must have been something much stronger than the stake and the flames, stronger even than the habits of twenty years? There must have been an idea stronger than all misfortune, famine, torture, plague, leprosy and all that hell which mankind could not have endured without that binding idea which guided men's hearts and enriched the waters of life. Show me something resembling that force in our age of vice and railways . . . Show me an idea that binds mankind today with even half the force as in those centuries. . . And don't try to intimidate me with your prosperity, your riches, the infrequency of famine today and your rapid means of communication! There is more wealth now, but less strength; the binding idea is no more; everything has grown soft; everything and everyone is over-coddled! ... (8) 
 
http://www.utoronto.ca/tsq/DS/03/043.shtml
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