Atd (37) p. 1041. Erie Line, 'home', Lincolnwood, fascism and a pink tab

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

Page 1041 got a pink tab. . . .

          He knew the other lawfolk of his day, those who worked both 
          sides till they forgot which they were on, who'd came to rank, 
          some of them,among the baddest of the bad, now, their gray 
          mustaches long shaved away, at peace on this western shore, 
          were getting rich off of real-estate deals only slightly more legit 
          than the the train robberies they used to depend on for revenue. . . .
          p. 1041

          She thought of a hotel room in Mazatlan whose door had just 
          been slammed, it seemed forever, waking up two hundred birds 
          down in the lobby; a sunrise over the library slope at Cornell 
          University that nobody out on it had seen because the slope faces 
          west; a dry, disconsolate tune from the fourth movement of the Bartok 
          Concerto for Orchestra; a whitewashed bust of Jay Gould that Pierce 
          kept over the bed on a shelf so narrow for it she'd always had the 
          hovering fear it would someday topple on them. Was that how he'd 
          died, she wondered, among dreams, crushed by the only ikon in the 
          house? That only made her laugh, out loud and helpless: You're so 
          sick, Oedipa, she told herself, or the room, which knew. . . .
          CoL 49, first page

Jay Gould ran the Erie Line, cited at the top of the page. Pynchon's technique 
frequently is based on associative relation---not logical or sequential but more 
like a parallel port, interleaving information and not always setting it 
down straight on the page. 

There is a conscious resonance with the Crying of Lot 49 here, a whiff of the 
eau de Robber Baron hybridized with the stank of train robbers, the two 
classes regarded as moral equals save for vast differences in the scale
of their respective enterprises.

I'm sure that out author is aware of his family history--one doesn't spend that 
much time checking out old newspapers* without allowing the eyes to catch 
whenever one finds their none-to-common family name in the New York Times 
or the Times of London. And OBA's moral ambiguity as regards these distant 
ancestors is all over Against the Day, the author showing us time and again 
how projects funded by the George M./Pynchon & Co. juggernaut both 
enhanced and damaged the world, Electric Lights, Radio and Rail Lines 
getting extra attention.

*"Indeed, when annotating Gravity's Rainbow, one of my greatest surprises 
came with the discovery that details of story reveal a narrative 
chronometrics that can be concisely plotted. I mean detail of the most 
unobtrusive sort: images of the moon, remarks about weather, movies 
playing at London theaters, a song playing over the radio, references to 
BBC programs and newspaper headlines and saints' days. Many of 
these were available to Pynchon through one of his main sources, the 
Times of London. . . ." 
Steven C. Weisenburger: "A Gravity's Rainbow Companion, page 9.