ATDTDA pp 675-ff

[Michael Bailey]

675 - "the world governed by real numbers.  His father had been
murdered by men whose allegiance, loudly and often as
they might invoke Jesus Christ and his kingdom, was to that
real axis and nothing beyond it."

cf SV p. 320 - "He [Kit] drew toward them a block of paper
quadrilled into quarter-inch squares"
"No, no, don't bother."
(Oh, the layers of misunderstanding!
On both sides!)


676 - so Kit is going to Venice...
"...he and Yashmeen met in the Kursaal..."

"A Kursaal is a public hall or room, for the use of visitors at
watering places and health resorts in Germany; German kur (from Latin
cūra: cure) + saal: hall, room."

- glad I looked that up, I was thinking it was an outdoor plaza
with traffic humming by


677 - "She'd said more flattering things, he supposed, but none so trusting."

she may have said flattering things to Kit, but I don't remember
that we are privy to any...

678 - "marcasite"
from Wikipedia
"In jewelry, pyrite used as a gem is improperly termed "marcasite".
This is wholly incorrect, as marcasite is never used as a gem."   hmmm

679 - found myself singing this to my wife, who liked it.
"proper crop o' propaganda"

680 - I rather sympathize with Nigel (having watched the
movie Tristram Shandy and felt similarly when I realized the
vast majority of the movie was not going to be about TS at all)

681 - "in general he hated the whole Habsburg idea,
and was unwise enough actually to publish these opinions,
naturally in the Jewish newspapers"
cool!

682 - "railway depot, with thousands of gates disposed radially"
recurring motif, beginning of GR for instance...
but also, cf p70, "Planted rows went turning past like
giant spokes one by one as they ranged the roads."

683 - gemuetlicher alter Junge
"good old boy"

684 - raspberries marinated in ether
does that work?

685 - "Once he was willing to accept the two
professors as a single person, Lew felt
curiously released, as if from a servitude he had never
fully understood the terms of anyway."

some similarities to his epiphany in Chicago
following the scandal of Lew's own dual nature


686-  "the world around him now obliged to
suffer the disjunction in himself which he cannot,
must not, admit...secular expressions of a rupture
within a single damaged soul"

whew!  yeah buddy, I reckon...

687 - "Years of study - if it was what you wanted."
cf DL in Vineland "Takes years to learn, and by the time
you do, it's no fun anymore." (257)

688 - "Iceland spar, which is an expression in crystal
form of Earth's velocity as it rushes through the Aether...."

well, at least the Cohen's cosmo-geology jibes with Umeki's here


689 - "...criminal masterminds hardly distinct from the
sorts of tycoons who hired 'detectives'..."
Lew's POV --

(muttered aside here: I am thinking that like
Renfrew & Werfner, there's an identity between
the voice of the Chums narrator and that of the book-as-a-whole's narrator)

-- not necessarily Pynchon's


690 - "His nose was only an inch - ten miles - above the
terrain."  cf, of course, Kit and his extra dimension for the observer

691 - "the match, which I Zingari, beginning on a rather
damp pitch, eventually won by eight wickets"
I suppose this might offer a way to pinpoint the date,
when I outgrow my current impressionist manner of reading.

692 - Gentleman B. doesn't reflect the reality of bombings
at cricket matches, does he?  More like symbolizes or
epitomizes the intrusion of the
reality of warfare into the gentlemanly structure of military life,
or say, social life...maybe

693 - "Yes Lewis, here, take a puff of this and think it over."
always good advice (-;


I think Bilocations is the middle chapter, the heart of the
book, and I think maybe these last pages of it are the top
of a crescendo on the motif...


Monday night, absent serious objections or tender of a better offer,
I'll be posting and hosting, huffing and puffing, and blind-man's-bluffing

-- "the old welcome mat is out" as Buddy Glass would say


"There are not only landmarks, but also anti-landmarks - for every
beacon, an episode of intentional blindness." (Professor Svegli, p248)