AtD/VL-related: The Varieties of Religious Experience

[David Morris]

Obviously Pynchon doesn't mind "stretching the definitions" with a wry smile.

At the time of my first reading of AtD, this passage struck me a funny
because of the name of the airship, "The Inconvenience."  One of the
definitions of the word "convenience" is the following:

7. Euphemistic chiefly Brit a lavatory, esp a public one
make a convenience of to take advantage of; impose upon

One man's (or dog's) convenience is another man's...  religious experience?

David Morris

On Sun, Nov 21, 2010 at 6:52 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
<lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
> "An old aerostat hand by now, Pugnax had also learned, like the rest of the crew, to respond to 'calls of nature' by proceeding to the downwind side of the gondola, resulting in surprises among the surface populations below, but not often enough, or even notably enough, for anyone to begin to try to record, much less coordinate reports of, these lavatorial assaults from the sky. They entered rather the realm of folklore, superstition, or perhaps, if one does not mind stretching the definitions, the religious." (p. 5)