Thomas Pynchon Wiki - User contributions [en]

Pages 336-359

2008-12-10T07:46:00Z

Jc: /* Page 347 */

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==Page 337==
'''''337:17 stvyeh''s and ''znyi''s''' 
These are suffixes but both of the examples which Weisenburger quotes from Terrill Shepard Soules miss the point. There is no such word as ''sdravstuyeh''; the Russian word for 'hello' is ''zdravstvuy'' or ''zdravstvuyte'', second person imperative forms of the verb zdravstvovat', literally 'to be healthy". There is no such word as ''nebreznieh'' either; ''nebrezhnyi'' (masculine, singular) means 'careless, neglectful'. The suffix ''-stviye'' produces nouns, as in ''udovol'stviye'', 'pleasure'. The suffix ''-nyi'' (where y is for the central close vowel "yery", and i is for the half-vowel y) is an adjective ending (masculine, singular, nominative); when it is attached to a noun stem with z, it becomes -znyi, as in ''groznyi'', 'terrible".

==Page 338==

'''338:21 Seven Rivers Country''' 
In Russian, Semirechye; the relatively fertile easternmost region of Kazakhstan, near the present-day Chinese border. The western and norther parts of Kazakhstan (then an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic within the Russian Federation) was the target of intensive Russification at that time but Slavic resettlement did not affect the Semirechye.

'''the local Likbez center''' 
Likbez was a campaign of eradication of illiteracy in Soviet Russia in the 1920s and 1930s. It was started on December 26, 1919, when Lenin signed the decree "On eradication of illiteracy among the population of RSFSR." According to this decree, all people from 8 to 50 years old were required to become literate in their native language.

==Page 339==
339.17-18 '''naked Leningrad encounters with the certainty of his death''' 
The 872-day Siege of Leningrad by German forces in World War II was one of the longest battles in the history of warfare and one of the costliest in human lives.

==Page 347==
347.2-5 '''an enormous closed sleigh, big as a ferryboat, bedizened all over with Victorian gingerbread - inside are decks and levels for each class of passenger, velvet saloons, well-stocked galleys...''' 

Echoes here of the opening passage of the book, with its 'carriage, which is built on several levels', the 'velveteen darkness', and the class theme - 'ruinous secret cities of the poor'. Then there are the girders 'old as an iron queen', perhaps a reference to Queen Victoria and/or Victoria Station, echoed here by the Victorian gingerbread. That passage has a lot of metal(s) in it, and it turns out to be a dream from which wakes Captain Prentice, feeling metallic. Here, we have 'Captain' Tchitcherine, a man who is 'more metal than anything else'.

Certainly the multi-leveled carriages are deliberate mirrorings. Is there a connection between Prentice and Tchitcherine?

==Page 351==
351.06 '''Jablochkov candles''' 
Paul Jablochkov (or Pavel Yablochkov, 1847-1894) was a Russian engineer. His "candles" were the first practical electric carbon-arc lamps, hence the connection here with Tchitcherine’s vision of the carbonized faces of the war dead.

==Page 354==
'''354:33-36 Dutch Shell... the Nobels''' 
Both Royal Dutch Shell and the Nobel brothers had interests in the Baku oil industry until it was taken over by the bolshevik régime. As the foreign engineers "went all home", the nationalized industry was rebuilt using American know-how in the 1920s.

==Page 355==
'''355:38-39 Samarkand and Pishpek, Verney and Tashkent''' 
Samarkand and Tashkent are cities in Uzbekistan; Pishpek (now Bishkek) in Kyrgyzstan, and Vernyi (correct transcription of the original Russian name; now Almaty) in Kazakhstan.
[[http://www.example.com link title]]

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Talk:Pages 3-7

2008-12-09T22:32:11Z

Jc: Corydon Throsp, Rossetti, Chelsea Embankment

== Corydon Throsp, Rossetti, Chelsea Embankment ==

Is Corydon Throsp an anagram? It seems as if it surely must be, and such an obvious one too, but.... Ok, Corydon is very close to Croydon, the London borough, but so what?

Anyway, I was curious enough to do that little bit of digging on
Rossetti, which isn't so hard these days with Google, wikipedia etc.
Anyway, it was sad and poignant to note that:

"Rossetti's later years were darkened by his drug addiction and his
increasing mental instability. He died at Birchington-on-Sea, Kent,
England." Shades of The White Visitation?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_Gabriel_Rossetti

"Rossetti described the sonnet form as a 'moment's monument', implying
that it sought to contain the feelings of a fleeting moment, and to
reflect upon their meaning. The House of Life was a series of
interacting monuments to these moments - an elaborate whole made from a
mosaic of intensely described fragments. This was Rossetti's most
substantial literary achievement."

How about that "a mosaic of intensely described fragments"?

Thought it worth quoting this, from the beginnig of the afore-mentioned
'The House of Life':

http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/thslf10.txt

"A Sonnet is a moment's monument,--
Memorial from the Soul's eternity
To one dead deathless hour. Look that it be,
Whether for lustral rite or dire portent,
Of its own arduous fulness reverent:
Carve it in ivory or in ebony,
As Day or Night may rule; and let Time see
Its flowering crest impearled and orient."

Think Pynchon would have liked that 'impearled'.

Pages 3-7

2008-12-09T22:25:39Z

Jc: /* Page 5 */ Chelsea, Chenye Walk, mushrooms, Ask Alice

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==Page 3==

3.03 '''The Evacuation''' 
First instance in ''Gravity's Rainbow'' of a lifetime stylistic trait of Pynchon's: unpredictable use of Capitalization. Capitalization is usually applied to nouns, but not uniformly. Often a matter of emphasis. See ''Mason & Dixon'' for the widest use, there imitating the writing of the time in which the book is set. 
The use throughout all his work might indicate how well-read and influenced by works written before capitalization was standardized Pynchon is. 
The full rules of capitalization for English are complicated. The rules have also changed over time, generally to capitalize fewer terms; to the modern reader, an 18th century document seems to use initial capitals excessively. Wikipedia

3.03 '''theatre''' 
Besides the normal meanings, including "theater of war", 'theatre' is the name that fireworks' organizers call a sky display.

3.05 '''iron queen''' 
a queensize bed made of iron. Hardly made after 1900. Queen Victoria had a famous brass (and iron) one in the Crystal Palace! "Beds made of hollow tubes of steel, iron, and brass came to be manufactured in the mid 19th century.
These were to be used both by soldiers and civilians. Their main advantage at that time was that unlike wooden beds, these could not be infested with bedbugs. Queen Victoria's brass bed at the Crystal Palace has been the most famous antique brass bed. 
By the late 19th century, metal beds were nearly out of fashion." Antique beds [[http://www.bestinbeds.com/beds/antique-bed.html]]

Also, In The Odyssey, when Odysseus goes to the Underworld, he refers to Persephone as '''the Iron Queen'''. Of the four gods of Empedocles' elements it is the name of Persephone alone that is taboo, for the Greeks knew another face of Persephone as well. She was also the terrible Queen of the dead, whose name was not safe to speak aloud, who was named simply "The Maiden". Wikipedia
[[http://www.en.wikipedia.org/Persephone]]

3.07 '''crystal palace''' 
See Alpha entry, especially this re cultural meaning: 
The Crystal Palace made a strong impression on visitors coming from all over Europe, including a number of writers. It soon became a symbol of modernity and civilization, hailed by some and decried by others.

In ''What Is to Be Done?'', Russian author and philosopher Nikolai Chernyshevsky pledges to transform the society into a Crystal Palace thanks to a socialist revolution. 
Fyodor Dostoevsky implicitly replied to Chernyshevsky in ''Notes from Underground''. The narrator thinks that human nature will prefer destruction and chaos to the harmony symbolized by the Crystal Palace.

When the first major international exhibition of arts and industries was held in London in 1851, the London Crystal Palace epitomized the achievements of the entire world at a time when progress was racing forward at a speed never before known to mankind. The Great Exhibition marked the beginning of a tradition of world's fairs, which would be held in major cities all across the globe. Following the success of the London fair, it was inevitable that other nations would soon try their hand at organizing their own exhibitions. In fact, the next international fair was held only two years later, in 1853, in New York City. This fair would have its own Crystal Palace to symbolize not only the achievements of the world, but also the nationalistic pride of a relatively young nation and all that she stood for. Walt Whitman, the great American poet, wrote in "The Song of the Exposition": 
http://www.ric.edu/rpotter/cryspal.html

That the Crystal Palace Exhibition "marked the beginning of a tradition of world's fairs" can remind that ''Against the Day'' starts at the Columbian Exhibition of 1893 in Chicago. More international optimism.

3.14 '''second sheep''' 
Compare the narrator’s discussion of William Slothrop’s heretical tract "On Preterition," which argued for the holiness of the preterite, and Weisenburger’s note at [[Pages 549-557#555|555.29-31]].

A wide symbology relates to sheep in ancient art, traditions and culture. Judaism uses many sheep references including the Passover lamb. Christianity uses sheep-related images, such as: Christ as the good shepherd, or as the sacrificed Lamb of God (Agnus Dei); the bishop's Pastoral; the lion lying down with the lamb (a reference to all of creation being at peace, without suffering, predation or otherwise). Greek Easter celebrations traditionally feature a meal of Paschal lamb. Sheep also have considerable importance in Arab culture; Eid ul-Adha is a major annual festival in Islam in which a sheep is sacrificed. 
Herding sheep plays an important historico-symbolic part in the Jewish and Christian faiths, since Abraham, Jacob, Moses, and King David all worked as shepherds. wikipedia
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheep] 

Sheep are often associated with obedience due to the widespread perception that they lack intelligence and their undoubted herd mentality, hence the pejorative connotation of the adjective 'ovine'. In George Orwell's satirical novel ''Animal Farm'', sheep are used to represent the ignorant and uneducated masses of revolutionary Russia. The sheep are unable to be taught the subtleties of revolutionary ideology and can only be taught repetitive slogans such as "Four legs good, two legs bad" which they bleat in unison at rallies. The rock group Pink Floyd wrote a song using sheep as a symbol for ordinary people, that is, everyone who isn't a pig or dog. People who accept overbearing governments have been pejoratively referred to as "sheeple". wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheep] 

3.19 '''half-silvered''' 
adj. (of a mirror) having an incomplete reflective coating, so that half the incident light is reflected and half transmitted: used in optical instruments and two-way mirrors. Collins Dictionary 
See the splitting of light all through ''Against the Day'', Pynchon's 2006
novel.

3.19 '''view finder''' 
as two words, this seems to refer to handheld devices in which slides were slid and viewed in 3-dimensions. Here is a version still being made
[http://porters.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=PCS&Product_Code=520098&Product_Count=&Category_Code= view finder]. "half-silvered" above seems most correct with this kind of device.

3.22 '''They pass in line''' 
A Pynchonian leitmotif. The linearity of lining up has resonances throughout his work, articulated most straightforwardly in ''Against the Day'', which starts with "Single up all Lines!", and perhaps dealt with
most profoundly in ''Mason & Dixon'', a novel about creating the "Mason & Dixon line".

3.25 '''Rain comes down''' 
Pynchon's first published story is called ''The Small Rain''. See his remarks on rain in fiction in ''Slow Learner''.

3.30 '''naptha winters''' 
Naptha is the flammable liquid obtained from the distillation of coal and used to fire gaslights and heaters. ...

3.32 '''rolling-stock absence''' 
Rolling stock is the collective term that describes all the vehicles which move on a railway.

3.35 '''Absolute Zero''' 
Theoretical state when no molecules move. [http://www.pa.msu.edu/sciencet/ask_st/012992.html..Absolute Zero]. State
of entropy, a key concept of Thomas Pynchon's. See early story, ''Entropy'' in ''Slow Learner''.

3.36 '''places whose ''names he has never heard''''' 
'secret cities of poor', deep under these fallen girders. Places
that have never been spoken of, yet exist. Lower than ''Low-lands''. 
Later in Pynchon's world,in other books, ''Mason & Dixon'' and ''Against the Day'', we will travel deeper underground, to places with no names we know, it seems. See a "progressive ''knotting into''", 3.26 in GR.

3.37 '''the walls break down''' 
See "wall of death" later in ''Gravity's Rainbow''. A-and in ''Against the Day''.

===Page 4===
4.01 '''getting narrower...cornering tighter and tighter''' 
Cf. the rationalization of choice and similar phrasing in ''Against the Day'', pynchon wiki p. [http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_1-25 10]

4.05 '''caravan''' 
1) a procession, in single file, of merchants or pilgrims
2) a procession of mules, camels or certain other animals. Sources: Online dictionary and wikipedia. 3) ''Caravan'' is a song by Van Morrison included on his 1970 album, ''Moondance''. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caravan_%28Van_Morrison_song%29 Caravan] 
Pilgrim has Pynchonian resonances, especially in ''Against the Day''. A-And, once again, notice the singleing up of lines.

4.07 '''cockade''' 
1) n. An ornament, such as a rosette or knot of ribbon, usually worn on the hat as a badge. [Alteration of obsolete cockard , from French.] 

2) Operational code name for Allied deception operations intended to draw attention away from Normandy prior to D-Day
[http://www.secondworldwar.co.uk/glossc.html]

Cf. pun: cock aid, esp. as Slothrop's 'condition' within ''Gravity's Rainbow'' is revealed.

4.07 '''the color of lead''' 
cockades are usually brightly colored. Lead is not. 

Lead is a malleable toxic metallic element, bluish-white in color that
tarnishes to a dull gray. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead Lead] 

Lead is the only currency-carrying element which does not absorb nor emit heat. Entropic, so to speak. Another resonance for "toward the zero"? 

Lead is what bullets are made of.

4.12 '''corridors straight and functional''' 
More forced linearity.

4.31 '''But it is already light...light has come percolating in''' 
See also the opening lines of Pynchon's next book, 'Vineland', which begins with someone waking from a (possibly prophetic) dream, with light streaming in.

4.37 '''the different levels of the enormous room''' 
The transition from dream to waking is so subtle, and beautifully done, right down to little details, such as how the dreamer's real and dreamt surroundings cross over: the multi-levelled carriage of the dream becomes, on awaking, the room with many levels; the carriage's evacuees ('second sheep') become the room's 'drunken wastrels', etc.

==Page 5==
5.03 '''His name is Capt. Geoffrey ("Pirate") Prentice.''' 
Pirate’s name derives from Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta ''The Pirates of Penzance'', in which the hero’s nurse has made a fateful error in carrying out her employer’s instructions: Instead of having the boy apprenticed to a (ship’s) '''pilot''', he was apprenticed to a pirate, hence a "'''pirate''' ‘prentice." The name, though, is not simply a fortuitous pun: In her error, the nurse has lost a message, like the hare of Herero myth, and thus guaranteed her young charge’s preterition. (There are also connections here to the theme of "communications entropy," which is central to ''The Crying of Lot 49'' and the short story "Entropy.")

5.03 '''He is wrapped in a thick blanket, a tartan of orange, rust, and scarlet. His skull feels made of metal.''' 

The rust in the tartan goes well with the metal-feeling skull. And there's a lot of metal in the preceding pages - lead, girders, the iron queen, the metal train tracks, etc. So it's appropriate that Prentice wakes feeling metallic.

5.22-24 '''not far from Chelsea Embankment, by Corydon Throsp, an acquaintance of the Rossettis' who wore hair smocks and liked to cultivate pharmaceutical plants up on the roof''' 

This is a pretty posh address for this lot, is it not? Kensington? The area includes the famous Chenye Walk where Keith Richards, not unfamiliar with Osbie Feel's kind of mushrooms, once lived. As did Rossetti, who we're told Throsp is on nodding terms with. Rosetti's wife died of a drug overdose, he took to keeping wombats as pets, one of these wombats used to attend the dinner table, and was said to have provided the inspiration for the Dormouse character in Alice in Wonderland.

That Dormouse's advice - "feed your head" - was used at the end of Jefferson Airplane's mushroom flavoured, Alice-inspired song 'White Rabbit'. Way later on in the book, Slothrop has a dream in which a statue of the White Rabbit in Llandudno is giving him sage advice, but he loses it as he wakes. Oddly enough, the drug that killed Rosetti's wife was laudanum, which isn't very different from 'Llandudno'. Of course that's almost certainly just a coincidence, but all of the foregoing is the sort of stuff you find yourself digging up by chasing after the countless references Pynchon sews into the fabric of the book.

5.32 '''all got scumbled together, eventually, by the knives of the seasons, to an impasto, feet thick, of unbelievable black topsoil''' 

Didn't notice 'scumbled' first time round, I was going too fast. Second
read I looked it up. Scumbled? Isn't that some sort of painting
technique? Pynchon make a mistake there? Mean to say scrambled?
Hmmmmmmmm. Then I thought of the 'knives' bit, wondered if artists might
use a [http://painting.about.com/od/paintingforbeginners/a/Painting_Knife.htm palette knife] to do this scumbling business. A Google search for
"scumble knife palette " found me this:

http://www.messums.com/sub_newsview.ink?nid=11191

"Hard impasto ridges left by the edge of the knife provided the texture
I needed to bring the waves crashing in."

[http://www.thefreedictionary.com/impasto Impasto] eh? I thought that just meant paste. So the knives in "knives of
the seasons" makes perfect sense. And Dictionary.com throws up another
interesting nugget:

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=scumbled

"To blur the outlines of: a writer who scumbled the line that divides
history and fiction."

Apt example!

A-and the wonderful phrase, "knives of the seasons" embodies another lifelong deep theme in Pynchon's work: that the 'wheeling' of time [see later in ''Gravity's Rainbow'' and ''Against the Day''], the cycle of nature, is an ineluctable good thing, even as it knifes us, ravages, us. It thickens us, impasto-like, gives us topsoil in our characters, so to speak.
 

==Page 6==

[[image:dna-molecule.jpg|thumb|100px|right]]6.09 '''a spiral ladder''' 
Suggests the double-helix structure of the DNA molecule that preserves the "living genetic chains" evoked at [[Pages 7-16#10|10.14]]. 
Double-helix structure like a mandala, pervasive in GR: 
"Mandala" is an ancient Sanskrit word meaning "sacred circle that protects the soul." It also refers to the sacred cosmograms that serve as core symbols of all cultures. Westerners have been fascinated for centuries about the mandalas of the Hindu-Buddhist cultures of Asia, most often painted geometric diagrams of great beauty and sophistication, that draw the viewer into a realm of balance, harmony, and calm. But such diagrams are actually architectural blueprints of the purified realm of bliss that we can only realize through enlightenment. They represent three-dimensional spaces of personal and communal exaltation, palaces for the regal confidence of love, compassion, and universal satisfaction of self and other. Understanding their role in anchoring the world-picture of a culture or a person provides a new insight into the "mandalas" of our own culture – the national space anchored by the Washington monument and its environs, or the personal cosmological space anchored by the models of the solar system, '''the DNA double-helix molecule''', and the atom. [http://www.amazon.com/Mandala-Enlightenment-Denise-Patry-Leidy/dp/1585678503 Mandala]
 

A recent scientific magazine also had an essay [citation needed] on the similarity of the double-helix sructure and the structure of the mandala. A-and, GR, containing mandalas, has been argued to be structured like a mandala. SPOILER of upcoming GR tropes: "Slothrop finds mandalas, sees mandalas in the sky and all around him, and becomes a mandala himself".
"mandalas are part of a spiritual or mythic panoply"...
From ''Thomas Pynchon, The Art of Illusion'' by David Cowart, p. 126.

Cf. p. 209, ''Mason & Dixon'': " oblique angles with all meridians and that is a spiral coiling round the poles but never reaching them."...

Cf. ''V.'' where the isle of Malta is also likened to a sort of mandala.

==Page 7==
7.09 '''Pick bananas''' 
Pirate's decision after a paragraph on the inevitablity of the rocket's flight can remind one of a famous Buddhist sutra on picking a strawberry:
The Sweetest Strawberry 
Buddha told a parable in a sutra: 
A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him. Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted! 
-Paul Reps, ''Zen Flesh, Zen Bones'' 
from ''Everyday Mind'', edited by Jean Smith
[[http://www.tricycle.com/issues/2_174/dailydharma/3192-1.html]]

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Pages 3-7

2008-12-09T22:14:08Z

Jc: /* Page 4 */ multi-levelled carriage beomes multi-levelled room

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==Page 3==

3.03 '''The Evacuation''' 
First instance in ''Gravity's Rainbow'' of a lifetime stylistic trait of Pynchon's: unpredictable use of Capitalization. Capitalization is usually applied to nouns, but not uniformly. Often a matter of emphasis. See ''Mason & Dixon'' for the widest use, there imitating the writing of the time in which the book is set. 
The use throughout all his work might indicate how well-read and influenced by works written before capitalization was standardized Pynchon is. 
The full rules of capitalization for English are complicated. The rules have also changed over time, generally to capitalize fewer terms; to the modern reader, an 18th century document seems to use initial capitals excessively. Wikipedia

3.03 '''theatre''' 
Besides the normal meanings, including "theater of war", 'theatre' is the name that fireworks' organizers call a sky display.

3.05 '''iron queen''' 
a queensize bed made of iron. Hardly made after 1900. Queen Victoria had a famous brass (and iron) one in the Crystal Palace! "Beds made of hollow tubes of steel, iron, and brass came to be manufactured in the mid 19th century.
These were to be used both by soldiers and civilians. Their main advantage at that time was that unlike wooden beds, these could not be infested with bedbugs. Queen Victoria's brass bed at the Crystal Palace has been the most famous antique brass bed. 
By the late 19th century, metal beds were nearly out of fashion." Antique beds [[http://www.bestinbeds.com/beds/antique-bed.html]]

Also, In The Odyssey, when Odysseus goes to the Underworld, he refers to Persephone as '''the Iron Queen'''. Of the four gods of Empedocles' elements it is the name of Persephone alone that is taboo, for the Greeks knew another face of Persephone as well. She was also the terrible Queen of the dead, whose name was not safe to speak aloud, who was named simply "The Maiden". Wikipedia
[[http://www.en.wikipedia.org/Persephone]]

3.07 '''crystal palace''' 
See Alpha entry, especially this re cultural meaning: 
The Crystal Palace made a strong impression on visitors coming from all over Europe, including a number of writers. It soon became a symbol of modernity and civilization, hailed by some and decried by others.

In ''What Is to Be Done?'', Russian author and philosopher Nikolai Chernyshevsky pledges to transform the society into a Crystal Palace thanks to a socialist revolution. 
Fyodor Dostoevsky implicitly replied to Chernyshevsky in ''Notes from Underground''. The narrator thinks that human nature will prefer destruction and chaos to the harmony symbolized by the Crystal Palace.

When the first major international exhibition of arts and industries was held in London in 1851, the London Crystal Palace epitomized the achievements of the entire world at a time when progress was racing forward at a speed never before known to mankind. The Great Exhibition marked the beginning of a tradition of world's fairs, which would be held in major cities all across the globe. Following the success of the London fair, it was inevitable that other nations would soon try their hand at organizing their own exhibitions. In fact, the next international fair was held only two years later, in 1853, in New York City. This fair would have its own Crystal Palace to symbolize not only the achievements of the world, but also the nationalistic pride of a relatively young nation and all that she stood for. Walt Whitman, the great American poet, wrote in "The Song of the Exposition": 
http://www.ric.edu/rpotter/cryspal.html

That the Crystal Palace Exhibition "marked the beginning of a tradition of world's fairs" can remind that ''Against the Day'' starts at the Columbian Exhibition of 1893 in Chicago. More international optimism.

3.14 '''second sheep''' 
Compare the narrator’s discussion of William Slothrop’s heretical tract "On Preterition," which argued for the holiness of the preterite, and Weisenburger’s note at [[Pages 549-557#555|555.29-31]].

A wide symbology relates to sheep in ancient art, traditions and culture. Judaism uses many sheep references including the Passover lamb. Christianity uses sheep-related images, such as: Christ as the good shepherd, or as the sacrificed Lamb of God (Agnus Dei); the bishop's Pastoral; the lion lying down with the lamb (a reference to all of creation being at peace, without suffering, predation or otherwise). Greek Easter celebrations traditionally feature a meal of Paschal lamb. Sheep also have considerable importance in Arab culture; Eid ul-Adha is a major annual festival in Islam in which a sheep is sacrificed. 
Herding sheep plays an important historico-symbolic part in the Jewish and Christian faiths, since Abraham, Jacob, Moses, and King David all worked as shepherds. wikipedia
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheep] 

Sheep are often associated with obedience due to the widespread perception that they lack intelligence and their undoubted herd mentality, hence the pejorative connotation of the adjective 'ovine'. In George Orwell's satirical novel ''Animal Farm'', sheep are used to represent the ignorant and uneducated masses of revolutionary Russia. The sheep are unable to be taught the subtleties of revolutionary ideology and can only be taught repetitive slogans such as "Four legs good, two legs bad" which they bleat in unison at rallies. The rock group Pink Floyd wrote a song using sheep as a symbol for ordinary people, that is, everyone who isn't a pig or dog. People who accept overbearing governments have been pejoratively referred to as "sheeple". wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheep] 

3.19 '''half-silvered''' 
adj. (of a mirror) having an incomplete reflective coating, so that half the incident light is reflected and half transmitted: used in optical instruments and two-way mirrors. Collins Dictionary 
See the splitting of light all through ''Against the Day'', Pynchon's 2006
novel.

3.19 '''view finder''' 
as two words, this seems to refer to handheld devices in which slides were slid and viewed in 3-dimensions. Here is a version still being made
[http://porters.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=PCS&Product_Code=520098&Product_Count=&Category_Code= view finder]. "half-silvered" above seems most correct with this kind of device.

3.22 '''They pass in line''' 
A Pynchonian leitmotif. The linearity of lining up has resonances throughout his work, articulated most straightforwardly in ''Against the Day'', which starts with "Single up all Lines!", and perhaps dealt with
most profoundly in ''Mason & Dixon'', a novel about creating the "Mason & Dixon line".

3.25 '''Rain comes down''' 
Pynchon's first published story is called ''The Small Rain''. See his remarks on rain in fiction in ''Slow Learner''.

3.30 '''naptha winters''' 
Naptha is the flammable liquid obtained from the distillation of coal and used to fire gaslights and heaters. ...

3.32 '''rolling-stock absence''' 
Rolling stock is the collective term that describes all the vehicles which move on a railway.

3.35 '''Absolute Zero''' 
Theoretical state when no molecules move. [http://www.pa.msu.edu/sciencet/ask_st/012992.html..Absolute Zero]. State
of entropy, a key concept of Thomas Pynchon's. See early story, ''Entropy'' in ''Slow Learner''.

3.36 '''places whose ''names he has never heard''''' 
'secret cities of poor', deep under these fallen girders. Places
that have never been spoken of, yet exist. Lower than ''Low-lands''. 
Later in Pynchon's world,in other books, ''Mason & Dixon'' and ''Against the Day'', we will travel deeper underground, to places with no names we know, it seems. See a "progressive ''knotting into''", 3.26 in GR.

3.37 '''the walls break down''' 
See "wall of death" later in ''Gravity's Rainbow''. A-and in ''Against the Day''.

===Page 4===
4.01 '''getting narrower...cornering tighter and tighter''' 
Cf. the rationalization of choice and similar phrasing in ''Against the Day'', pynchon wiki p. [http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_1-25 10]

4.05 '''caravan''' 
1) a procession, in single file, of merchants or pilgrims
2) a procession of mules, camels or certain other animals. Sources: Online dictionary and wikipedia. 3) ''Caravan'' is a song by Van Morrison included on his 1970 album, ''Moondance''. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caravan_%28Van_Morrison_song%29 Caravan] 
Pilgrim has Pynchonian resonances, especially in ''Against the Day''. A-And, once again, notice the singleing up of lines.

4.07 '''cockade''' 
1) n. An ornament, such as a rosette or knot of ribbon, usually worn on the hat as a badge. [Alteration of obsolete cockard , from French.] 

2) Operational code name for Allied deception operations intended to draw attention away from Normandy prior to D-Day
[http://www.secondworldwar.co.uk/glossc.html]

Cf. pun: cock aid, esp. as Slothrop's 'condition' within ''Gravity's Rainbow'' is revealed.

4.07 '''the color of lead''' 
cockades are usually brightly colored. Lead is not. 

Lead is a malleable toxic metallic element, bluish-white in color that
tarnishes to a dull gray. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead Lead] 

Lead is the only currency-carrying element which does not absorb nor emit heat. Entropic, so to speak. Another resonance for "toward the zero"? 

Lead is what bullets are made of.

4.12 '''corridors straight and functional''' 
More forced linearity.

4.31 '''But it is already light...light has come percolating in''' 
See also the opening lines of Pynchon's next book, 'Vineland', which begins with someone waking from a (possibly prophetic) dream, with light streaming in.

4.37 '''the different levels of the enormous room''' 
The transition from dream to waking is so subtle, and beautifully done, right down to little details, such as how the dreamer's real and dreamt surroundings cross over: the multi-levelled carriage of the dream becomes, on awaking, the room with many levels; the carriage's evacuees ('second sheep') become the room's 'drunken wastrels', etc.

==Page 5==
5.03 '''His name is Capt. Geoffrey ("Pirate") Prentice.''' 
Pirate’s name derives from Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta ''The Pirates of Penzance'', in which the hero’s nurse has made a fateful error in carrying out her employer’s instructions: Instead of having the boy apprenticed to a (ship’s) '''pilot''', he was apprenticed to a pirate, hence a "'''pirate''' ‘prentice." The name, though, is not simply a fortuitous pun: In her error, the nurse has lost a message, like the hare of Herero myth, and thus guaranteed her young charge’s preterition. (There are also connections here to the theme of "communications entropy," which is central to ''The Crying of Lot 49'' and the short story "Entropy.")

5.03 '''He is wrapped in a thick blanket, a tartan of orange, rust, and scarlet. His skull feels made of metal.''' 

The rust in the tartan goes well with the metal-feeling skull. And there's a lot of metal in the preceding pages - lead, girders, the iron queen, the metal train tracks, etc. So it's appropriate that Prentice wakes feeling metallic.

5.32 '''all got scumbled together, eventually, by the knives of the seasons, to an impasto, feet thick, of unbelievable black topsoil''' 

Didn't notice 'scumbled' first time round, I was going too fast. Second
read I looked it up. Scumbled? Isn't that some sort of painting
technique? Pynchon make a mistake there? Mean to say scrambled?
Hmmmmmmmm. Then I thought of the 'knives' bit, wondered if artists might
use a [http://painting.about.com/od/paintingforbeginners/a/Painting_Knife.htm palette knife] to do this scumbling business. A Google search for
"scumble knife palette " found me this:

http://www.messums.com/sub_newsview.ink?nid=11191

"Hard impasto ridges left by the edge of the knife provided the texture
I needed to bring the waves crashing in."

[http://www.thefreedictionary.com/impasto Impasto] eh? I thought that just meant paste. So the knives in "knives of
the seasons" makes perfect sense. And Dictionary.com throws up another
interesting nugget:

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=scumbled

"To blur the outlines of: a writer who scumbled the line that divides
history and fiction."

Apt example!

A-and the wonderful phrase, "knives of the seasons" embodies another lifelong deep theme in Pynchon's work: that the 'wheeling' of time [see later in ''Gravity's Rainbow'' and ''Against the Day''], the cycle of nature, is an ineluctable good thing, even as it knifes us, ravages, us. It thickens us, impasto-like, gives us topsoil in our characters, so to speak.
 

==Page 6==

[[image:dna-molecule.jpg|thumb|100px|right]]6.09 '''a spiral ladder''' 
Suggests the double-helix structure of the DNA molecule that preserves the "living genetic chains" evoked at [[Pages 7-16#10|10.14]]. 
Double-helix structure like a mandala, pervasive in GR: 
"Mandala" is an ancient Sanskrit word meaning "sacred circle that protects the soul." It also refers to the sacred cosmograms that serve as core symbols of all cultures. Westerners have been fascinated for centuries about the mandalas of the Hindu-Buddhist cultures of Asia, most often painted geometric diagrams of great beauty and sophistication, that draw the viewer into a realm of balance, harmony, and calm. But such diagrams are actually architectural blueprints of the purified realm of bliss that we can only realize through enlightenment. They represent three-dimensional spaces of personal and communal exaltation, palaces for the regal confidence of love, compassion, and universal satisfaction of self and other. Understanding their role in anchoring the world-picture of a culture or a person provides a new insight into the "mandalas" of our own culture – the national space anchored by the Washington monument and its environs, or the personal cosmological space anchored by the models of the solar system, '''the DNA double-helix molecule''', and the atom. [http://www.amazon.com/Mandala-Enlightenment-Denise-Patry-Leidy/dp/1585678503 Mandala]
 

A recent scientific magazine also had an essay [citation needed] on the similarity of the double-helix sructure and the structure of the mandala. A-and, GR, containing mandalas, has been argued to be structured like a mandala. SPOILER of upcoming GR tropes: "Slothrop finds mandalas, sees mandalas in the sky and all around him, and becomes a mandala himself".
"mandalas are part of a spiritual or mythic panoply"...
From ''Thomas Pynchon, The Art of Illusion'' by David Cowart, p. 126.

Cf. p. 209, ''Mason & Dixon'': " oblique angles with all meridians and that is a spiral coiling round the poles but never reaching them."...

Cf. ''V.'' where the isle of Malta is also likened to a sort of mandala.

==Page 7==
7.09 '''Pick bananas''' 
Pirate's decision after a paragraph on the inevitablity of the rocket's flight can remind one of a famous Buddhist sutra on picking a strawberry:
The Sweetest Strawberry 
Buddha told a parable in a sutra: 
A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him. Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted! 
-Paul Reps, ''Zen Flesh, Zen Bones'' 
from ''Everyday Mind'', edited by Jean Smith
[[http://www.tricycle.com/issues/2_174/dailydharma/3192-1.html]]

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==Page 337==
'''''337:17 stvyeh''s and ''znyi''s''' 
These are suffixes but both of the examples which Weisenburger quotes from Terrill Shepard Soules miss the point. There is no such word as ''sdravstuyeh''; the Russian word for 'hello' is ''zdravstvuy'' or ''zdravstvuyte'', second person imperative forms of the verb zdravstvovat', literally 'to be healthy". There is no such word as ''nebreznieh'' either; ''nebrezhnyi'' (masculine, singular) means 'careless, neglectful'. The suffix ''-stviye'' produces nouns, as in ''udovol'stviye'', 'pleasure'. The suffix ''-nyi'' (where y is for the central close vowel "yery", and i is for the half-vowel y) is an adjective ending (masculine, singular, nominative); when it is attached to a noun stem with z, it becomes -znyi, as in ''groznyi'', 'terrible".

==Page 338==

'''338:21 Seven Rivers Country''' 
In Russian, Semirechye; the relatively fertile easternmost region of Kazakhstan, near the present-day Chinese border. The western and norther parts of Kazakhstan (then an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic within the Russian Federation) was the target of intensive Russification at that time but Slavic resettlement did not affect the Semirechye.

'''the local Likbez center''' 
Likbez was a campaign of eradication of illiteracy in Soviet Russia in the 1920s and 1930s. It was started on December 26, 1919, when Lenin signed the decree "On eradication of illiteracy among the population of RSFSR." According to this decree, all people from 8 to 50 years old were required to become literate in their native language.

==Page 339==
339.17-18 '''naked Leningrad encounters with the certainty of his death''' 
The 872-day Siege of Leningrad by German forces in World War II was one of the longest battles in the history of warfare and one of the costliest in human lives.

==Page 347==
347.2-5 '''an enormous closed sleigh, big as a ferryboat, bedizened all over with Victorian gingerbread - inside are decks and levels for each class of passenger, velvet saloons, well-stocked galleys...''' 

Echoes here of the opening passage of the book, with its 'carriage, which is built on several levels', the 'velveteen darkness', and the class theme - 'ruinous secret cities of the poor'. Then there are the girders 'old as an iron queen', perhaps a reference to Queen Victoria and/or Victoria Station, echoed here by the Victorian gingerbread. That passage has a lot of metal(s) in it, and it turns out to be a dream from which wakes Captain Prentice. Here, we have 'Captain' Tchitcherine, a man who is 'more metal than anything else'.

Certainly the multi-leveled carriages are deliberate mirrorings. Is there a connection between Prentice and Tchitcherine?

==Page 351==
351.06 '''Jablochkov candles''' 
Paul Jablochkov (or Pavel Yablochkov, 1847-1894) was a Russian engineer. His "candles" were the first practical electric carbon-arc lamps, hence the connection here with Tchitcherine’s vision of the carbonized faces of the war dead.

==Page 354==
'''354:33-36 Dutch Shell... the Nobels''' 
Both Royal Dutch Shell and the Nobel brothers had interests in the Baku oil industry until it was taken over by the bolshevik régime. As the foreign engineers "went all home", the nationalized industry was rebuilt using American know-how in the 1920s.

==Page 355==
'''355:38-39 Samarkand and Pishpek, Verney and Tashkent''' 
Samarkand and Tashkent are cities in Uzbekistan; Pishpek (now Bishkek) in Kyrgyzstan, and Vernyi (correct transcription of the original Russian name; now Almaty) in Kazakhstan.
[[http://www.example.com link title]]

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Pages 3-7

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Jc: /* Page 5 */ lots of metals

{{GR PbP Text}}

==Page 3==

3.03 '''The Evacuation''' 
First instance in ''Gravity's Rainbow'' of a lifetime stylistic trait of Pynchon's: unpredictable use of Capitalization. Capitalization is usually applied to nouns, but not uniformly. Often a matter of emphasis. See ''Mason & Dixon'' for the widest use, there imitating the writing of the time in which the book is set. 
The use throughout all his work might indicate how well-read and influenced by works written before capitalization was standardized Pynchon is. 
The full rules of capitalization for English are complicated. The rules have also changed over time, generally to capitalize fewer terms; to the modern reader, an 18th century document seems to use initial capitals excessively. Wikipedia

3.03 '''theatre''' 
Besides the normal meanings, including "theater of war", 'theatre' is the name that fireworks' organizers call a sky display.

3.05 '''iron queen''' 
a queensize bed made of iron. Hardly made after 1900. Queen Victoria had a famous brass (and iron) one in the Crystal Palace! "Beds made of hollow tubes of steel, iron, and brass came to be manufactured in the mid 19th century.
These were to be used both by soldiers and civilians. Their main advantage at that time was that unlike wooden beds, these could not be infested with bedbugs. Queen Victoria's brass bed at the Crystal Palace has been the most famous antique brass bed. 
By the late 19th century, metal beds were nearly out of fashion." Antique beds [[http://www.bestinbeds.com/beds/antique-bed.html]]

Also, In The Odyssey, when Odysseus goes to the Underworld, he refers to Persephone as '''the Iron Queen'''. Of the four gods of Empedocles' elements it is the name of Persephone alone that is taboo, for the Greeks knew another face of Persephone as well. She was also the terrible Queen of the dead, whose name was not safe to speak aloud, who was named simply "The Maiden". Wikipedia
[[http://www.en.wikipedia.org/Persephone]]

3.07 '''crystal palace''' 
See Alpha entry, especially this re cultural meaning: 
The Crystal Palace made a strong impression on visitors coming from all over Europe, including a number of writers. It soon became a symbol of modernity and civilization, hailed by some and decried by others.

In ''What Is to Be Done?'', Russian author and philosopher Nikolai Chernyshevsky pledges to transform the society into a Crystal Palace thanks to a socialist revolution. 
Fyodor Dostoevsky implicitly replied to Chernyshevsky in ''Notes from Underground''. The narrator thinks that human nature will prefer destruction and chaos to the harmony symbolized by the Crystal Palace.

When the first major international exhibition of arts and industries was held in London in 1851, the London Crystal Palace epitomized the achievements of the entire world at a time when progress was racing forward at a speed never before known to mankind. The Great Exhibition marked the beginning of a tradition of world's fairs, which would be held in major cities all across the globe. Following the success of the London fair, it was inevitable that other nations would soon try their hand at organizing their own exhibitions. In fact, the next international fair was held only two years later, in 1853, in New York City. This fair would have its own Crystal Palace to symbolize not only the achievements of the world, but also the nationalistic pride of a relatively young nation and all that she stood for. Walt Whitman, the great American poet, wrote in "The Song of the Exposition": 
http://www.ric.edu/rpotter/cryspal.html

That the Crystal Palace Exhibition "marked the beginning of a tradition of world's fairs" can remind that ''Against the Day'' starts at the Columbian Exhibition of 1893 in Chicago. More international optimism.

3.14 '''second sheep''' 
Compare the narrator’s discussion of William Slothrop’s heretical tract "On Preterition," which argued for the holiness of the preterite, and Weisenburger’s note at [[Pages 549-557#555|555.29-31]].

A wide symbology relates to sheep in ancient art, traditions and culture. Judaism uses many sheep references including the Passover lamb. Christianity uses sheep-related images, such as: Christ as the good shepherd, or as the sacrificed Lamb of God (Agnus Dei); the bishop's Pastoral; the lion lying down with the lamb (a reference to all of creation being at peace, without suffering, predation or otherwise). Greek Easter celebrations traditionally feature a meal of Paschal lamb. Sheep also have considerable importance in Arab culture; Eid ul-Adha is a major annual festival in Islam in which a sheep is sacrificed. 
Herding sheep plays an important historico-symbolic part in the Jewish and Christian faiths, since Abraham, Jacob, Moses, and King David all worked as shepherds. wikipedia
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheep] 

Sheep are often associated with obedience due to the widespread perception that they lack intelligence and their undoubted herd mentality, hence the pejorative connotation of the adjective 'ovine'. In George Orwell's satirical novel ''Animal Farm'', sheep are used to represent the ignorant and uneducated masses of revolutionary Russia. The sheep are unable to be taught the subtleties of revolutionary ideology and can only be taught repetitive slogans such as "Four legs good, two legs bad" which they bleat in unison at rallies. The rock group Pink Floyd wrote a song using sheep as a symbol for ordinary people, that is, everyone who isn't a pig or dog. People who accept overbearing governments have been pejoratively referred to as "sheeple". wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheep] 

3.19 '''half-silvered''' 
adj. (of a mirror) having an incomplete reflective coating, so that half the incident light is reflected and half transmitted: used in optical instruments and two-way mirrors. Collins Dictionary 
See the splitting of light all through ''Against the Day'', Pynchon's 2006
novel.

3.19 '''view finder''' 
as two words, this seems to refer to handheld devices in which slides were slid and viewed in 3-dimensions. Here is a version still being made
[http://porters.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=PCS&Product_Code=520098&Product_Count=&Category_Code= view finder]. "half-silvered" above seems most correct with this kind of device.

3.22 '''They pass in line''' 
A Pynchonian leitmotif. The linearity of lining up has resonances throughout his work, articulated most straightforwardly in ''Against the Day'', which starts with "Single up all Lines!", and perhaps dealt with
most profoundly in ''Mason & Dixon'', a novel about creating the "Mason & Dixon line".

3.25 '''Rain comes down''' 
Pynchon's first published story is called ''The Small Rain''. See his remarks on rain in fiction in ''Slow Learner''.

3.30 '''naptha winters''' 
Naptha is the flammable liquid obtained from the distillation of coal and used to fire gaslights and heaters. ...

3.32 '''rolling-stock absence''' 
Rolling stock is the collective term that describes all the vehicles which move on a railway.

3.35 '''Absolute Zero''' 
Theoretical state when no molecules move. [http://www.pa.msu.edu/sciencet/ask_st/012992.html..Absolute Zero]. State
of entropy, a key concept of Thomas Pynchon's. See early story, ''Entropy'' in ''Slow Learner''.

3.36 '''places whose ''names he has never heard''''' 
'secret cities of poor', deep under these fallen girders. Places
that have never been spoken of, yet exist. Lower than ''Low-lands''. 
Later in Pynchon's world,in other books, ''Mason & Dixon'' and ''Against the Day'', we will travel deeper underground, to places with no names we know, it seems. See a "progressive ''knotting into''", 3.26 in GR.

3.37 '''the walls break down''' 
See "wall of death" later in ''Gravity's Rainbow''. A-and in ''Against the Day''.

===Page 4===
4.01 '''getting narrower...cornering tighter and tighter''' 
Cf. the rationalization of choice and similar phrasing in ''Against the Day'', pynchon wiki p. [http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_1-25 10]

4.05 '''caravan''' 
1) a procession, in single file, of merchants or pilgrims
2) a procession of mules, camels or certain other animals. Sources: Online dictionary and wikipedia. 3) ''Caravan'' is a song by Van Morrison included on his 1970 album, ''Moondance''. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caravan_%28Van_Morrison_song%29 Caravan] 
Pilgrim has Pynchonian resonances, especially in ''Against the Day''. A-And, once again, notice the singleing up of lines.

4.07 '''cockade''' 
1) n. An ornament, such as a rosette or knot of ribbon, usually worn on the hat as a badge. [Alteration of obsolete cockard , from French.] 

2) Operational code name for Allied deception operations intended to draw attention away from Normandy prior to D-Day
[http://www.secondworldwar.co.uk/glossc.html]

Cf. pun: cock aid, esp. as Slothrop's 'condition' within ''Gravity's Rainbow'' is revealed.

4.07 '''the color of lead''' 
cockades are usually brightly colored. Lead is not. 

Lead is a malleable toxic metallic element, bluish-white in color that
tarnishes to a dull gray. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead Lead] 

Lead is the only currency-carrying element which does not absorb nor emit heat. Entropic, so to speak. Another resonance for "toward the zero"? 

Lead is what bullets are made of.

4.12 '''corridors straight and functional''' 
More forced linearity.

4.12 '''But it is already light...light has come percolating in''' 
See also the opening lines of Pynchon's next book, 'Vineland', which begins with someone waking from a (possibly prophetic) dream, with light streaming in.

==Page 5==
5.03 '''His name is Capt. Geoffrey ("Pirate") Prentice.''' 
Pirate’s name derives from Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta ''The Pirates of Penzance'', in which the hero’s nurse has made a fateful error in carrying out her employer’s instructions: Instead of having the boy apprenticed to a (ship’s) '''pilot''', he was apprenticed to a pirate, hence a "'''pirate''' ‘prentice." The name, though, is not simply a fortuitous pun: In her error, the nurse has lost a message, like the hare of Herero myth, and thus guaranteed her young charge’s preterition. (There are also connections here to the theme of "communications entropy," which is central to ''The Crying of Lot 49'' and the short story "Entropy.")

5.03 '''He is wrapped in a thick blanket, a tartan of orange, rust, and scarlet. His skull feels made of metal.''' 

The rust in the tartan goes well with the metal-feeling skull. And there's a lot of metal in the preceding pages - lead, girders, the iron queen, the metal train tracks, etc. So it's appropriate that Prentice wakes feeling metallic.

5.32 '''all got scumbled together, eventually, by the knives of the seasons, to an impasto, feet thick, of unbelievable black topsoil''' 

Didn't notice 'scumbled' first time round, I was going too fast. Second
read I looked it up. Scumbled? Isn't that some sort of painting
technique? Pynchon make a mistake there? Mean to say scrambled?
Hmmmmmmmm. Then I thought of the 'knives' bit, wondered if artists might
use a [http://painting.about.com/od/paintingforbeginners/a/Painting_Knife.htm palette knife] to do this scumbling business. A Google search for
"scumble knife palette " found me this:

http://www.messums.com/sub_newsview.ink?nid=11191

"Hard impasto ridges left by the edge of the knife provided the texture
I needed to bring the waves crashing in."

[http://www.thefreedictionary.com/impasto Impasto] eh? I thought that just meant paste. So the knives in "knives of
the seasons" makes perfect sense. And Dictionary.com throws up another
interesting nugget:

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=scumbled

"To blur the outlines of: a writer who scumbled the line that divides
history and fiction."

Apt example!

A-and the wonderful phrase, "knives of the seasons" embodies another lifelong deep theme in Pynchon's work: that the 'wheeling' of time [see later in ''Gravity's Rainbow'' and ''Against the Day''], the cycle of nature, is an ineluctable good thing, even as it knifes us, ravages, us. It thickens us, impasto-like, gives us topsoil in our characters, so to speak.
 

==Page 6==

[[image:dna-molecule.jpg|thumb|100px|right]]6.09 '''a spiral ladder''' 
Suggests the double-helix structure of the DNA molecule that preserves the "living genetic chains" evoked at [[Pages 7-16#10|10.14]]. 
Double-helix structure like a mandala, pervasive in GR: 
"Mandala" is an ancient Sanskrit word meaning "sacred circle that protects the soul." It also refers to the sacred cosmograms that serve as core symbols of all cultures. Westerners have been fascinated for centuries about the mandalas of the Hindu-Buddhist cultures of Asia, most often painted geometric diagrams of great beauty and sophistication, that draw the viewer into a realm of balance, harmony, and calm. But such diagrams are actually architectural blueprints of the purified realm of bliss that we can only realize through enlightenment. They represent three-dimensional spaces of personal and communal exaltation, palaces for the regal confidence of love, compassion, and universal satisfaction of self and other. Understanding their role in anchoring the world-picture of a culture or a person provides a new insight into the "mandalas" of our own culture – the national space anchored by the Washington monument and its environs, or the personal cosmological space anchored by the models of the solar system, '''the DNA double-helix molecule''', and the atom. [http://www.amazon.com/Mandala-Enlightenment-Denise-Patry-Leidy/dp/1585678503 Mandala]
 

A recent scientific magazine also had an essay [citation needed] on the similarity of the double-helix sructure and the structure of the mandala. A-and, GR, containing mandalas, has been argued to be structured like a mandala. SPOILER of upcoming GR tropes: "Slothrop finds mandalas, sees mandalas in the sky and all around him, and becomes a mandala himself".
"mandalas are part of a spiritual or mythic panoply"...
From ''Thomas Pynchon, The Art of Illusion'' by David Cowart, p. 126.

Cf. p. 209, ''Mason & Dixon'': " oblique angles with all meridians and that is a spiral coiling round the poles but never reaching them."...

Cf. ''V.'' where the isle of Malta is also likened to a sort of mandala.

==Page 7==
7.09 '''Pick bananas''' 
Pirate's decision after a paragraph on the inevitablity of the rocket's flight can remind one of a famous Buddhist sutra on picking a strawberry:
The Sweetest Strawberry 
Buddha told a parable in a sutra: 
A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him. Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted! 
-Paul Reps, ''Zen Flesh, Zen Bones'' 
from ''Everyday Mind'', edited by Jean Smith
[[http://www.tricycle.com/issues/2_174/dailydharma/3192-1.html]]

{{GR PbP}}

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Jc: But it is already light...

{{GR PbP Text}}

==Page 3==

3.03 '''The Evacuation''' 
First instance in ''Gravity's Rainbow'' of a lifetime stylistic trait of Pynchon's: unpredictable use of Capitalization. Capitalization is usually applied to nouns, but not uniformly. Often a matter of emphasis. See ''Mason & Dixon'' for the widest use, there imitating the writing of the time in which the book is set. 
The use throughout all his work might indicate how well-read and influenced by works written before capitalization was standardized Pynchon is. 
The full rules of capitalization for English are complicated. The rules have also changed over time, generally to capitalize fewer terms; to the modern reader, an 18th century document seems to use initial capitals excessively. Wikipedia

3.03 '''theatre''' 
Besides the normal meanings, including "theater of war", 'theatre' is the name that fireworks' organizers call a sky display.

3.05 '''iron queen''' 
a queensize bed made of iron. Hardly made after 1900. Queen Victoria had a famous brass (and iron) one in the Crystal Palace! "Beds made of hollow tubes of steel, iron, and brass came to be manufactured in the mid 19th century.
These were to be used both by soldiers and civilians. Their main advantage at that time was that unlike wooden beds, these could not be infested with bedbugs. Queen Victoria's brass bed at the Crystal Palace has been the most famous antique brass bed. 
By the late 19th century, metal beds were nearly out of fashion." Antique beds [[http://www.bestinbeds.com/beds/antique-bed.html]]

Also, In The Odyssey, when Odysseus goes to the Underworld, he refers to Persephone as '''the Iron Queen'''. Of the four gods of Empedocles' elements it is the name of Persephone alone that is taboo, for the Greeks knew another face of Persephone as well. She was also the terrible Queen of the dead, whose name was not safe to speak aloud, who was named simply "The Maiden". Wikipedia
[[http://www.en.wikipedia.org/Persephone]]

3.07 '''crystal palace''' 
See Alpha entry, especially this re cultural meaning: 
The Crystal Palace made a strong impression on visitors coming from all over Europe, including a number of writers. It soon became a symbol of modernity and civilization, hailed by some and decried by others.

In ''What Is to Be Done?'', Russian author and philosopher Nikolai Chernyshevsky pledges to transform the society into a Crystal Palace thanks to a socialist revolution. 
Fyodor Dostoevsky implicitly replied to Chernyshevsky in ''Notes from Underground''. The narrator thinks that human nature will prefer destruction and chaos to the harmony symbolized by the Crystal Palace.

When the first major international exhibition of arts and industries was held in London in 1851, the London Crystal Palace epitomized the achievements of the entire world at a time when progress was racing forward at a speed never before known to mankind. The Great Exhibition marked the beginning of a tradition of world's fairs, which would be held in major cities all across the globe. Following the success of the London fair, it was inevitable that other nations would soon try their hand at organizing their own exhibitions. In fact, the next international fair was held only two years later, in 1853, in New York City. This fair would have its own Crystal Palace to symbolize not only the achievements of the world, but also the nationalistic pride of a relatively young nation and all that she stood for. Walt Whitman, the great American poet, wrote in "The Song of the Exposition": 
http://www.ric.edu/rpotter/cryspal.html

That the Crystal Palace Exhibition "marked the beginning of a tradition of world's fairs" can remind that ''Against the Day'' starts at the Columbian Exhibition of 1893 in Chicago. More international optimism.

3.14 '''second sheep''' 
Compare the narrator’s discussion of William Slothrop’s heretical tract "On Preterition," which argued for the holiness of the preterite, and Weisenburger’s note at [[Pages 549-557#555|555.29-31]].

A wide symbology relates to sheep in ancient art, traditions and culture. Judaism uses many sheep references including the Passover lamb. Christianity uses sheep-related images, such as: Christ as the good shepherd, or as the sacrificed Lamb of God (Agnus Dei); the bishop's Pastoral; the lion lying down with the lamb (a reference to all of creation being at peace, without suffering, predation or otherwise). Greek Easter celebrations traditionally feature a meal of Paschal lamb. Sheep also have considerable importance in Arab culture; Eid ul-Adha is a major annual festival in Islam in which a sheep is sacrificed. 
Herding sheep plays an important historico-symbolic part in the Jewish and Christian faiths, since Abraham, Jacob, Moses, and King David all worked as shepherds. wikipedia
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheep] 

Sheep are often associated with obedience due to the widespread perception that they lack intelligence and their undoubted herd mentality, hence the pejorative connotation of the adjective 'ovine'. In George Orwell's satirical novel ''Animal Farm'', sheep are used to represent the ignorant and uneducated masses of revolutionary Russia. The sheep are unable to be taught the subtleties of revolutionary ideology and can only be taught repetitive slogans such as "Four legs good, two legs bad" which they bleat in unison at rallies. The rock group Pink Floyd wrote a song using sheep as a symbol for ordinary people, that is, everyone who isn't a pig or dog. People who accept overbearing governments have been pejoratively referred to as "sheeple". wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheep] 

3.19 '''half-silvered''' 
adj. (of a mirror) having an incomplete reflective coating, so that half the incident light is reflected and half transmitted: used in optical instruments and two-way mirrors. Collins Dictionary 
See the splitting of light all through ''Against the Day'', Pynchon's 2006
novel.

3.19 '''view finder''' 
as two words, this seems to refer to handheld devices in which slides were slid and viewed in 3-dimensions. Here is a version still being made
[http://porters.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=PCS&Product_Code=520098&Product_Count=&Category_Code= view finder]. "half-silvered" above seems most correct with this kind of device.

3.22 '''They pass in line''' 
A Pynchonian leitmotif. The linearity of lining up has resonances throughout his work, articulated most straightforwardly in ''Against the Day'', which starts with "Single up all Lines!", and perhaps dealt with
most profoundly in ''Mason & Dixon'', a novel about creating the "Mason & Dixon line".

3.25 '''Rain comes down''' 
Pynchon's first published story is called ''The Small Rain''. See his remarks on rain in fiction in ''Slow Learner''.

3.30 '''naptha winters''' 
Naptha is the flammable liquid obtained from the distillation of coal and used to fire gaslights and heaters. ...

3.32 '''rolling-stock absence''' 
Rolling stock is the collective term that describes all the vehicles which move on a railway.

3.35 '''Absolute Zero''' 
Theoretical state when no molecules move. [http://www.pa.msu.edu/sciencet/ask_st/012992.html..Absolute Zero]. State
of entropy, a key concept of Thomas Pynchon's. See early story, ''Entropy'' in ''Slow Learner''.

3.36 '''places whose ''names he has never heard''''' 
'secret cities of poor', deep under these fallen girders. Places
that have never been spoken of, yet exist. Lower than ''Low-lands''. 
Later in Pynchon's world,in other books, ''Mason & Dixon'' and ''Against the Day'', we will travel deeper underground, to places with no names we know, it seems. See a "progressive ''knotting into''", 3.26 in GR.

3.37 '''the walls break down''' 
See "wall of death" later in ''Gravity's Rainbow''. A-and in ''Against the Day''.

===Page 4===
4.01 '''getting narrower...cornering tighter and tighter''' 
Cf. the rationalization of choice and similar phrasing in ''Against the Day'', pynchon wiki p. [http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_1-25 10]

4.05 '''caravan''' 
1) a procession, in single file, of merchants or pilgrims
2) a procession of mules, camels or certain other animals. Sources: Online dictionary and wikipedia. 3) ''Caravan'' is a song by Van Morrison included on his 1970 album, ''Moondance''. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caravan_%28Van_Morrison_song%29 Caravan] 
Pilgrim has Pynchonian resonances, especially in ''Against the Day''. A-And, once again, notice the singleing up of lines.

4.07 '''cockade''' 
1) n. An ornament, such as a rosette or knot of ribbon, usually worn on the hat as a badge. [Alteration of obsolete cockard , from French.] 

2) Operational code name for Allied deception operations intended to draw attention away from Normandy prior to D-Day
[http://www.secondworldwar.co.uk/glossc.html]

Cf. pun: cock aid, esp. as Slothrop's 'condition' within ''Gravity's Rainbow'' is revealed.

4.07 '''the color of lead''' 
cockades are usually brightly colored. Lead is not. 

Lead is a malleable toxic metallic element, bluish-white in color that
tarnishes to a dull gray. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead Lead] 

Lead is the only currency-carrying element which does not absorb nor emit heat. Entropic, so to speak. Another resonance for "toward the zero"? 

Lead is what bullets are made of.

4.12 '''corridors straight and functional''' 
More forced linearity.

4.12 '''But it is already light...light has come percolating in''' 
See also the opening lines of Pynchon's next book, 'Vineland', which begins with someone waking from a (possibly prophetic) dream, with light streaming in.

==Page 5==
5.03 '''His name is Capt. Geoffrey ("Pirate") Prentice.''' 
Pirate’s name derives from Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta ''The Pirates of Penzance'', in which the hero’s nurse has made a fateful error in carrying out her employer’s instructions: Instead of having the boy apprenticed to a (ship’s) '''pilot''', he was apprenticed to a pirate, hence a "'''pirate''' ‘prentice." The name, though, is not simply a fortuitous pun: In her error, the nurse has lost a message, like the hare of Herero myth, and thus guaranteed her young charge’s preterition. (There are also connections here to the theme of "communications entropy," which is central to ''The Crying of Lot 49'' and the short story "Entropy.")

5.03 '''all got scumbled together, eventually, by the knives of the seasons, to an impasto, feet thick, of unbelievable black topsoil''' 

Didn't notice 'scumbled' first time round, I was going too fast. Second
read I looked it up. Scumbled? Isn't that some sort of painting
technique? Pynchon make a mistake there? Mean to say scrambled?
Hmmmmmmmm. Then I thought of the 'knives' bit, wondered if artists might
use a [http://painting.about.com/od/paintingforbeginners/a/Painting_Knife.htm palette knife] to do this scumbling business. A Google search for
"scumble knife palette " found me this:

http://www.messums.com/sub_newsview.ink?nid=11191

"Hard impasto ridges left by the edge of the knife provided the texture
I needed to bring the waves crashing in."

[http://www.thefreedictionary.com/impasto Impasto] eh? I thought that just meant paste. So the knives in "knives of
the seasons" makes perfect sense. And Dictionary.com throws up another
interesting nugget:

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=scumbled

"To blur the outlines of: a writer who scumbled the line that divides
history and fiction."

Apt example!

A-and the wonderful phrase, "knives of the seasons" embodies another lifelong deep theme in Pynchon's work: that the 'wheeling' of time [see later in ''Gravity's Rainbow'' and ''Against the Day''], the cycle of nature, is an ineluctable good thing, even as it knifes us, ravages, us. It thickens us, impasto-like, gives us topsoil in our characters, so to speak.
 

==Page 6==

[[image:dna-molecule.jpg|thumb|100px|right]]6.09 '''a spiral ladder''' 
Suggests the double-helix structure of the DNA molecule that preserves the "living genetic chains" evoked at [[Pages 7-16#10|10.14]]. 
Double-helix structure like a mandala, pervasive in GR: 
"Mandala" is an ancient Sanskrit word meaning "sacred circle that protects the soul." It also refers to the sacred cosmograms that serve as core symbols of all cultures. Westerners have been fascinated for centuries about the mandalas of the Hindu-Buddhist cultures of Asia, most often painted geometric diagrams of great beauty and sophistication, that draw the viewer into a realm of balance, harmony, and calm. But such diagrams are actually architectural blueprints of the purified realm of bliss that we can only realize through enlightenment. They represent three-dimensional spaces of personal and communal exaltation, palaces for the regal confidence of love, compassion, and universal satisfaction of self and other. Understanding their role in anchoring the world-picture of a culture or a person provides a new insight into the "mandalas" of our own culture – the national space anchored by the Washington monument and its environs, or the personal cosmological space anchored by the models of the solar system, '''the DNA double-helix molecule''', and the atom. [http://www.amazon.com/Mandala-Enlightenment-Denise-Patry-Leidy/dp/1585678503 Mandala]
 

A recent scientific magazine also had an essay [citation needed] on the similarity of the double-helix sructure and the structure of the mandala. A-and, GR, containing mandalas, has been argued to be structured like a mandala. SPOILER of upcoming GR tropes: "Slothrop finds mandalas, sees mandalas in the sky and all around him, and becomes a mandala himself".
"mandalas are part of a spiritual or mythic panoply"...
From ''Thomas Pynchon, The Art of Illusion'' by David Cowart, p. 126.

Cf. p. 209, ''Mason & Dixon'': " oblique angles with all meridians and that is a spiral coiling round the poles but never reaching them."...

Cf. ''V.'' where the isle of Malta is also likened to a sort of mandala.

==Page 7==
7.09 '''Pick bananas''' 
Pirate's decision after a paragraph on the inevitablity of the rocket's flight can remind one of a famous Buddhist sutra on picking a strawberry:
The Sweetest Strawberry 
Buddha told a parable in a sutra: 
A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him. Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted! 
-Paul Reps, ''Zen Flesh, Zen Bones'' 
from ''Everyday Mind'', edited by Jean Smith
[[http://www.tricycle.com/issues/2_174/dailydharma/3192-1.html]]

{{GR PbP}}

Pages 3-7

2008-12-06T13:49:13Z

Jc:

{{GR PbP Text}}

==Page 3==

3.03 '''The Evacuation''' 
First instance in ''Gravity's Rainbow'' of a lifetime stylistic trait of Pynchon's: unpredictable use of Capitalization. Capitalization is usually applied to nouns, but not uniformly. Often a matter of emphasis. See ''Mason & Dixon'' for the widest use, there imitating the writing of the time in which the book is set. 
The use throughout all his work might indicate how well-read and influenced by works written before capitalization was standardized Pynchon is. 
The full rules of capitalization for English are complicated. The rules have also changed over time, generally to capitalize fewer terms; to the modern reader, an 18th century document seems to use initial capitals excessively. Wikipedia

3.03 '''theatre''' 
Besides the normal meanings, including "theater of war", 'theatre' is the name that fireworks' organizers call a sky display.

3.05 '''iron queen''' 
a queensize bed made of iron. Hardly made after 1900. Queen Victoria had a famous brass (and iron) one in the Crystal Palace! "Beds made of hollow tubes of steel, iron, and brass came to be manufactured in the mid 19th century.
These were to be used both by soldiers and civilians. Their main advantage at that time was that unlike wooden beds, these could not be infested with bedbugs. Queen Victoria's brass bed at the Crystal Palace has been the most famous antique brass bed. 
By the late 19th century, metal beds were nearly out of fashion." Antique beds [[http://www.bestinbeds.com/beds/antique-bed.html]]

Also, In The Odyssey, when Odysseus goes to the Underworld, he refers to Persephone as '''the Iron Queen'''. Of the four gods of Empedocles' elements it is the name of Persephone alone that is taboo, for the Greeks knew another face of Persephone as well. She was also the terrible Queen of the dead, whose name was not safe to speak aloud, who was named simply "The Maiden". Wikipedia
[[http://www.en.wikipedia.org/Persephone]]

3.07 '''crystal palace''' 
See Alpha entry, especially this re cultural meaning: 
The Crystal Palace made a strong impression on visitors coming from all over Europe, including a number of writers. It soon became a symbol of modernity and civilization, hailed by some and decried by others.

In ''What Is to Be Done?'', Russian author and philosopher Nikolai Chernyshevsky pledges to transform the society into a Crystal Palace thanks to a socialist revolution. 
Fyodor Dostoevsky implicitly replied to Chernyshevsky in ''Notes from Underground''. The narrator thinks that human nature will prefer destruction and chaos to the harmony symbolized by the Crystal Palace.

When the first major international exhibition of arts and industries was held in London in 1851, the London Crystal Palace epitomized the achievements of the entire world at a time when progress was racing forward at a speed never before known to mankind. The Great Exhibition marked the beginning of a tradition of world's fairs, which would be held in major cities all across the globe. Following the success of the London fair, it was inevitable that other nations would soon try their hand at organizing their own exhibitions. In fact, the next international fair was held only two years later, in 1853, in New York City. This fair would have its own Crystal Palace to symbolize not only the achievements of the world, but also the nationalistic pride of a relatively young nation and all that she stood for. Walt Whitman, the great American poet, wrote in "The Song of the Exposition": 
http://www.ric.edu/rpotter/cryspal.html

That the Crystal Palace Exhibition "marked the beginning of a tradition of world's fairs" can remind that ''Against the Day'' starts at the Columbian Exhibition of 1893 in Chicago. More international optimism.

3.14 '''second sheep''' 
Compare the narrator’s discussion of William Slothrop’s heretical tract "On Preterition," which argued for the holiness of the preterite, and Weisenburger’s note at [[Pages 549-557#555|555.29-31]].

A wide symbology relates to sheep in ancient art, traditions and culture. Judaism uses many sheep references including the Passover lamb. Christianity uses sheep-related images, such as: Christ as the good shepherd, or as the sacrificed Lamb of God (Agnus Dei); the bishop's Pastoral; the lion lying down with the lamb (a reference to all of creation being at peace, without suffering, predation or otherwise). Greek Easter celebrations traditionally feature a meal of Paschal lamb. Sheep also have considerable importance in Arab culture; Eid ul-Adha is a major annual festival in Islam in which a sheep is sacrificed. 
Herding sheep plays an important historico-symbolic part in the Jewish and Christian faiths, since Abraham, Jacob, Moses, and King David all worked as shepherds. wikipedia
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheep] 

Sheep are often associated with obedience due to the widespread perception that they lack intelligence and their undoubted herd mentality, hence the pejorative connotation of the adjective 'ovine'. In George Orwell's satirical novel ''Animal Farm'', sheep are used to represent the ignorant and uneducated masses of revolutionary Russia. The sheep are unable to be taught the subtleties of revolutionary ideology and can only be taught repetitive slogans such as "Four legs good, two legs bad" which they bleat in unison at rallies. The rock group Pink Floyd wrote a song using sheep as a symbol for ordinary people, that is, everyone who isn't a pig or dog. People who accept overbearing governments have been pejoratively referred to as "sheeple". wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheep] 

3.19 '''half-silvered''' 
adj. (of a mirror) having an incomplete reflective coating, so that half the incident light is reflected and half transmitted: used in optical instruments and two-way mirrors. Collins Dictionary 
See the splitting of light all through ''Against the Day'', Pynchon's 2006
novel.

3.19 '''view finder''' 
as two words, this seems to refer to handheld devices in which slides were slid and viewed in 3-dimensions. Here is a version still being made
[http://porters.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=PCS&Product_Code=520098&Product_Count=&Category_Code= view finder]. "half-silvered" above seems most correct with this kind of device.

3.22 '''They pass in line''' 
A Pynchonian leitmotif. The linearity of lining up has resonances throughout his work, articulated most straightforwardly in ''Against the Day'', which starts with "Single up all Lines!", and perhaps dealt with
most profoundly in ''Mason & Dixon'', a novel about creating the "Mason & Dixon line".

3.25 '''Rain comes down''' 
Pynchon's first published story is called ''The Small Rain''. See his remarks on rain in fiction in ''Slow Learner''.

3.30 '''naptha winters''' 
Naptha is the flammable liquid obtained from the distillation of coal and used to fire gaslights and heaters. ...

3.32 '''rolling-stock absence''' 
Rolling stock is the collective term that describes all the vehicles which move on a railway.

3.35 '''Absolute Zero''' 
Theoretical state when no molecules move. [http://www.pa.msu.edu/sciencet/ask_st/012992.html..Absolute Zero]. State
of entropy, a key concept of Thomas Pynchon's. See early story, ''Entropy'' in ''Slow Learner''.

3.36 '''places whose ''names he has never heard''''' 
'secret cities of poor', deep under these fallen girders. Places
that have never been spoken of, yet exist. Lower than ''Low-lands''. 
Later in Pynchon's world,in other books, ''Mason & Dixon'' and ''Against the Day'', we will travel deeper underground, to places with no names we know, it seems. See a "progressive ''knotting into''", 3.26 in GR.

3.37 '''the walls break down''' 
See "wall of death" later in ''Gravity's Rainbow''. A-and in ''Against the Day''.

===Page 4===
4.01 '''getting narrower...cornering tighter and tighter''' 
Cf. the rationalization of choice and similar phrasing in ''Against the Day'', pynchon wiki p. [http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_1-25 10]

4.05 '''caravan''' 
1) a procession, in single file, of merchants or pilgrims
2) a procession of mules, camels or certain other animals. Sources: Online dictionary and wikipedia. 3) ''Caravan'' is a song by Van Morrison included on his 1970 album, ''Moondance''. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caravan_%28Van_Morrison_song%29 Caravan] 
Pilgrim has Pynchonian resonances, especially in ''Against the Day''. A-And, once again, notice the singleing up of lines.

4.07 '''cockade''' 
1) n. An ornament, such as a rosette or knot of ribbon, usually worn on the hat as a badge. [Alteration of obsolete cockard , from French.] 

2) Operational code name for Allied deception operations intended to draw attention away from Normandy prior to D-Day
[http://www.secondworldwar.co.uk/glossc.html]

Cf. pun: cock aid, esp. as Slothrop's 'condition' within ''Gravity's Rainbow'' is revealed.

4.07 '''the color of lead''' 
cockades are usually brightly colored. Lead is not. 

Lead is a malleable toxic metallic element, bluish-white in color that
tarnishes to a dull gray. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead Lead] 

Lead is the only currency-carrying element which does not absorb nor emit heat. Entropic, so to speak. Another resonance for "toward the zero"? 

Lead is what bullets are made of.

4.12 '''corridors straight and functional''' 
More forced linearity.

==Page 5==
5.03 '''His name is Capt. Geoffrey ("Pirate") Prentice.''' 
Pirate’s name derives from Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta ''The Pirates of Penzance'', in which the hero’s nurse has made a fateful error in carrying out her employer’s instructions: Instead of having the boy apprenticed to a (ship’s) '''pilot''', he was apprenticed to a pirate, hence a "'''pirate''' ‘prentice." The name, though, is not simply a fortuitous pun: In her error, the nurse has lost a message, like the hare of Herero myth, and thus guaranteed her young charge’s preterition. (There are also connections here to the theme of "communications entropy," which is central to ''The Crying of Lot 49'' and the short story "Entropy.")

5.03 '''all got scumbled together, eventually, by the knives of the seasons, to an impasto, feet thick, of unbelievable black topsoil''' 

Didn't notice 'scumbled' first time round, I was going too fast. Second
read I looked it up. Scumbled? Isn't that some sort of painting
technique? Pynchon make a mistake there? Mean to say scrambled?
Hmmmmmmmm. Then I thought of the 'knives' bit, wondered if artists might
use a [http://painting.about.com/od/paintingforbeginners/a/Painting_Knife.htm palette knife] to do this scumbling business. A Google search for
"scumble knife palette " found me this:

http://www.messums.com/sub_newsview.ink?nid=11191

"Hard impasto ridges left by the edge of the knife provided the texture
I needed to bring the waves crashing in."

[http://www.thefreedictionary.com/impasto Impasto] eh? I thought that just meant paste. So the knives in "knives of
the seasons" makes perfect sense. And Dictionary.com throws up another
interesting nugget:

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=scumbled

"To blur the outlines of: a writer who scumbled the line that divides
history and fiction."

Apt example!

A-and the wonderful phrase, "knives of the seasons" embodies another lifelong deep theme in Pynchon's work: that the 'wheeling' of time [see later in ''Gravity's Rainbow'' and ''Against the Day''], the cycle of nature, is an ineluctable good thing, even as it knifes us, ravages, us. It thickens us, impasto-like, gives us topsoil in our characters, so to speak.
 

==Page 6==

[[image:dna-molecule.jpg|thumb|100px|right]]6.09 '''a spiral ladder''' 
Suggests the double-helix structure of the DNA molecule that preserves the "living genetic chains" evoked at [[Pages 7-16#10|10.14]]. 
Double-helix structure like a mandala, pervasive in GR: 
"Mandala" is an ancient Sanskrit word meaning "sacred circle that protects the soul." It also refers to the sacred cosmograms that serve as core symbols of all cultures. Westerners have been fascinated for centuries about the mandalas of the Hindu-Buddhist cultures of Asia, most often painted geometric diagrams of great beauty and sophistication, that draw the viewer into a realm of balance, harmony, and calm. But such diagrams are actually architectural blueprints of the purified realm of bliss that we can only realize through enlightenment. They represent three-dimensional spaces of personal and communal exaltation, palaces for the regal confidence of love, compassion, and universal satisfaction of self and other. Understanding their role in anchoring the world-picture of a culture or a person provides a new insight into the "mandalas" of our own culture – the national space anchored by the Washington monument and its environs, or the personal cosmological space anchored by the models of the solar system, '''the DNA double-helix molecule''', and the atom. [http://www.amazon.com/Mandala-Enlightenment-Denise-Patry-Leidy/dp/1585678503 Mandala]
 

A recent scientific magazine also had an essay [citation needed] on the similarity of the double-helix sructure and the structure of the mandala. A-and, GR, containing mandalas, has been argued to be structured like a mandala. SPOILER of upcoming GR tropes: "Slothrop finds mandalas, sees mandalas in the sky and all around him, and becomes a mandala himself".
"mandalas are part of a spiritual or mythic panoply"...
From ''Thomas Pynchon, The Art of Illusion'' by David Cowart, p. 126.

Cf. p. 209, ''Mason & Dixon'': " oblique angles with all meridians and that is a spiral coiling round the poles but never reaching them."...

Cf. ''V.'' where the isle of Malta is also likened to a sort of mandala.

==Page 7==
7.09 '''Pick bananas''' 
Pirate's decision after a paragraph on the inevitablity of the rocket's flight can remind one of a famous Buddhist sutra on picking a strawberry:
The Sweetest Strawberry 
Buddha told a parable in a sutra: 
A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him. Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted! 
-Paul Reps, ''Zen Flesh, Zen Bones'' 
from ''Everyday Mind'', edited by Jean Smith
[[http://www.tricycle.com/issues/2_174/dailydharma/3192-1.html]]

{{GR PbP}}

Pages 3-7

2007-01-03T16:25:58Z

Jc: scumbled

{{GR PbP Text}}

==Page 3==

'''second sheep''' 
3.14
Compare the narrator’s discussion of William Slothrop’s heretical tract "On Preterition," which argued for the holiness of the preterite, and Weisenburger’s note at [[Pages 549-557#555|555.29-31]].

==Page 5==
5.03 '''His name is Capt. Geoffrey ("Pirate") Prentice.''' 
Pirate’s name derives from Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta ''The Pirates of Penzance'', in which the hero’s nurse has made a fateful error in carrying out her employer’s instructions: Instead of having the boy apprenticed to a (ship’s) '''pilot''', he was apprenticed to a pirate, hence a "'''pirate''' ‘prentice." The name, though, is not simply a fortuitous pun: In her error, the nurse has lost a message, like the hare of Herero myth, and thus guaranteed her young charge’s preterition. (There are also connections here to the theme of "communications entropy," which is central to ''The Crying of Lot 49'' and the short story "Entropy.")

5.03 '''all got scumbled together, eventually, by the knives of the seasons, to an impasto, feet thick, of unbelievable black topsoil''' 

Didn't notice 'scumbled' first time round, I was going too fast. Second
read I looked it up. Scumbled? Isn't that some sort of painting
[technique? Pynchon make a mistake there? Mean to say scrambled?
Hmmmmmmmm. Then I thought of the 'knives' bit, wondered if artists might
use a palette knife to do this scumbling business. A Google search for
"scumble knife palette " found me this:

http://www.messums.com/sub_newsview.ink?nid=11191

"Hard impasto ridges left by the edge of the knife provided the texture
I needed to bring the waves crashing in."

Impasto eh? I thought that just meant paste. So the knives in "knives of
the seasons" makes perfect sense. And Dictionary.com throws up another
interesting nugget:

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=scumbled

"To blur the outlines of: a writer who scumbled the line that divides
history and fiction."

Apt example!

 

==Page 6==

[[image:dna-molecule.jpg|thumb|100px|right]]6.09 '''a spiral ladder''' 
Suggests the double-helix structure of the DNA molecule that preserves the "living genetic chains" evoked at [[Pages 7-16#10|10.14]].

{{GR PbP}}