“Wernfer, damn him, keen-witted but unheimlich, is obsessed with railway lines, history emerges from geography of course, but for him the primary geography of the planet is the rails, obeying their own necessity, interconnections, places chosen and bypassed, centers and radiations therefrom, grades possible and impossible, how linked by canals, crossed by tunnels and bridges either in place or someday to be, capital made material – and flows of power as well, expressed for example in massive troop movements, now and in futurity – he styles himself the prophet of Eisenbahntüchtigkei, or railworthiness, each and every accomodation to the matrix of meaningful points, each taken as a coefficient in the planet’s unwritten equation…” (ATD p. 242)

For more on this see for instance Matterarts The Invention of Communication…

“As if innocence were some sort of humorous disease , transmitted, in a stage farce, from one character to another, Lew soon found himself wondering if he had it, and if so who he’d caught it from. Not to mention how sick exactly it might be making him. The other way to ask the question being, who in this was playing him for a fish, and how deep was their game? If it was the T.W.I.T. itself using him for motives even more “occult” the they’d pretended to let him in on, then this was serious manure pile, and he’d best find a way out of it, soon as he could.” (ATD p. 223)

Hmmm, remember Slothrop, paranoia & anti-paranoia in GR…?

A typewritten letter by Thomas Pynchon, scanned, at the British Telegraph, concerning some plagiarism-allegations against Ian McEwan:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/graphics/2006/12/05/nwriter06big.gif.

Here’s a wonderful description of one reader (& Pynchonwiki-member) and his reading set-up, with laptop + paper notebook: http://www.frontier.iarc.uaf.edu/~cswingle/?p=47.

I am reading ATD at stretches of about 10 pages & then make notes in a simple text-editor, plus go through some googling for references.

“Suppose it were happen to us, in the civilized world. If ‘another form of life’ decided to use humans for similar purposes, and being out on a mission of comparable desperation, as its own resources dwindled, we human beasts would likewise simply be slaughtered one by one, and those still alive obliged to, in some sense, eat their flesh.”
(…)
“Sir, that is disgusting.”
“Not literally then … but we do use another, often mortally, with the same disablement of feeling, of conscience … each of us knowing that at some point it will be our own turn. Nowhere to run but into a hostile and lifeless waste.”
“You refer to present world conditions under capitalism and the Trusts.”
“There appears to be little difference. How else could we have come to it?”
“Evolution. Ape evolves to man, well, what’s the next step — human to what? Some compound organism, the American Corporation, for instance, in which even the Supreme Court has recognized legal personhood — a new living species, one that can out-perform most anything an individual can do by himself, no matter how smart or powerful he is.”

Ah well, hit 5, pynchonwiki, ATD. Whereas there really seem to be ‘quaternionists’ in the history of mathematics.

See for instance here: “A prominent quaternionist, P. G. Tait, wrote, “Even Prof. Willard Gibbs must be ranked as one of the retarders of Quaternion progress…” After quoting this remark, M. J Crowe continues, “Gibbs did retard quaternion progress for his … Elements of Vector Analysis marks the beginning of modern vector analysis.” (A History of Vector Analysis (2nd edition, p. 150)) Crowe considers Oliver Heaviside (1850-1925) an independent and nearly simultaneous creator of the modern system.” http://members.aol.com/jeff570/v.html.

How many Pynchonites are visiting these same pages… one wonders….

Or, just at Amazon: “Ever since the Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton introduced quaternions in the nineteenth century–a feat he celebrated by carving the founding equations into a stone bridge–mathematicians and engineers have been fascinated by these mathematical objects. Today, they are used in applications as various as describing the geometry of spacetime, guiding the Space Shuttle, and developing computer applications in virtual reality.”

Ah, so that’s what Hamiltonian faith (p.132) refers to…

And it’s all already in the Pynchon-wiki.

“Another Quest for another damned Magic Crystal. Horsefeathers, I say. Wish I’d known before I signed on. Say, you aren’t one of these sentient Rocksters, are you?”

Mineral consciousness figured even back in that day as a source of jocularity – had they known what was waiting in that category … waiting to move against them, grins would have frozen and chuckles turned to dry-throated coughing.

About every search I ‘throw’ into Google since yesterday, will yield as its 7th or 8th result something with “plays an important role in Against the Day”… sure – I was searching for Icelandic Spar because I’m reading ATD… but still.

Should we imagine that ‘the internet’ reads ATD too?

Uh, well, anyhow, wikipedians read Pynchon — that much is sure: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcite.)

“But if you look at the history, modern chemistry only starts coming in to replace alchemy around the same time capitalism really gets going. Strange eh? What do you make of that?” Webb nodded agreeably. ” Maybe capitalism decided it didn’t need the old magic anymore.” An emphasis whose contempt was not meant to escape Merle’s attention. “Why bother, had their own magic, doin just fine, thanks, instead of turning lead into gold, they could take poor people’s sweat and turn it into greenbacks, and save that lead for enforcement purposes.” (ATD p.79)

http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/. I do not even have to google “Blinky Morgan” myself…