Chapter 1: Section 1: Page 5: Line 39

 He had learned with the readiness peculiar to dogs how with the utmost delicacy to turn pages using nose or paws, and anyone observing him thus engaged could not help noting the changing expressions of his face, in particular the uncommonly articulate eyebrows, which contributed to an overall effect of interest, sympathy, and—the conclusion could scarce be avoided—comprehension.

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Big deal! Pugnax can turn the pages of a book! My cat can yell at me and paw me and knock stuff over until I do exactly what it wants! Of course, my cat doesn't have the weird nearly human eyebrows of the dog. As George Carlin pointed out, cats just have all them fucking whiskers stuck up all over the place. Or whatever. What am I, the quote section of IMDB?!

My cat, Gravy, also knows that the doorknobs open the door but she can't quite figure out how to turn them with her stupid thumbless hands. That doesn't stop her from trying. Whenever I'm in the bathroom, I wind up thinking some murderer with a debilitating muscle disease is fumbling weakly with the doorknob, unable to quite get it turned.

In essence, Pynchon is saying, "Look at dogs! Just like people!" He once said, "Dogs do such human things which is totally an attribute of dogs and not commentary on how we humans humanize them! They really do read and turn pages and speak German and talk with famous surveyors! They're so cute the majority of humans don't mind picking up their warm steaming feces in their bagged hands to carry back home (or, for the worst of the dog owners (and, to be as judgmental as possible, we all know dog owners are already the worst of the humans! Oh, don't get offended! Don't tell me when you see somebody who smokes walking a dog with an acoustic guitar on their back, you don't immediately think, 'There goes one needy motherfucker!'), carry only so far as the next house's garbage can)."

Just try to prove that's not a direct Pynchon quote!

So can Pugnax read or did he just learn, the way dogs learn by just watching and then by encouragement when they mimic their human friends, to turn the pages of a book? Pynchon sort of leaves it open to interpretation here. Here we see a dog doing that thing dogs do when they learn a trick and that trick looks like it's doing something absolutely human to a human watching it.

My money is on Pugnax being able to read. Pynchon's world is always better than the real world.

Chapter 1: Section 1: Page 5: Line 38

Ever since the Chums, during a confidential assignment in Our Nation's Capital (see The Chums of Chance and the Evil Halfwit), had rescued Pugnax, then but a pup, from a furious encounter in the shadow of the Washington Monument between rival packs of the District's wild dogs, it had been his habit to investigate the pages of whatever printed material should find its way on board Inconvenience, from theoretical treatments of the aeronautical arts to often less appropriate matter, such as the "dime novels"—though his preference seemed more for sentimental tales about his own species than those exhibiting extremes of human behavior, which he appeared to find a bit lurid.

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Ah! Finally one of those terribly long Pynchon sentences to break down! This is an easy one compared to some of Pynchon's truly titanic attempts at destroying the definition of a sentence. At least this one isn't about toothpaste.

Being that I'm on the Internet, a bunch of people are going to automatically assume that I'm insulting the toothpaste bit from Gravity's Rainbow and rush to its defense. "Oh, I loved that bit!" they will say in such a way that assumes I did not love that bit nor did anybody else, for that matter, love the bit as much as they did. I assure you, I thoroughly enjoyed the bit about the toothpaste and the toothpaste containers and the toothpaste itself journeying through the mouths and bowels and dreams of the adults and children of London until it was washed out to sea. I'm sorry if I don't treat the things I love and enjoy as sacred! You know, it is possible to defecate on something you love! You would know this if you were General Brigadier Pudding.

 Oh! "But the sentence," you cry, "what about the sentence?!" As if you need me to say anything at all about it! You do know there are Thomas Pynchon Wikis out there dedicated to squeezing out every drop of possible discourse from every reference Pynchon makes, right? That's why I'm not doing that. My philosophy is "Sometimes you don't know what you know about the thing you're shitting on until you've shat on it." I wish I had children so I could pass that down as our family motto.

Plus I don't think I'm shitting on Pynchon in this blog (I've given up on the not swearing. It's become an affectation to avoid my true self much like my silver walking stick topped by the platinum wolf's head has become not just a literal but a metaphorical crutch). Saying that I have is just me overcompensating for my Eee! Tess Ate Chai Tea comic book blog. That blog is dedicated to my love of comics in much the same way a Christian bestows their love upon God by blowing Satan.

What I'm saying is love is complicated.

So, the Chums picked up a dog while on a secret mission in Washington, D.C. I wonder who "The Evil Halfwit" was! Judging by the age of the Chums of Chance, it's got to be Grover Cleveland or Benjamin Harrison, right?! No wait! This book was written in 2006 and I always forget to look at Pynchon's stuff through the eyes of the time it was written and not through the eyes of the time the book takes place (as if time had eyes! Ha ha!)! So the Evil Halfwit is definitely George W. Bush. Bosh! Sorted it.

Of course that doesn't make sense in the fiction but does that matter since the book, The Chums of Chance and the Evil Halfwit, doesn't actually exist anyway. This fake story has the children rescuing a puppy from a huge dog fight in the capital. Did they name him Pugnax because of his aggressive and combative origins? Probably! Who else would have named him, idiot?! (That's me scolding myself and not me scolding you, the reader. I would never! Unless you're a Trump fan and then get the fuck out of here, dickfart.) 

As an aside—as I'm happy to constantly admit my own ignorance—scrolling through a list of past presidents to see which presidents could have been in power during the Chums' short lifetimes is like scrolling through a list of the most mediocre white-bread-and-mayonnaise deli sandwiches (if some of the sandwiches were exceptionally stern and off-putting).

Look at fucking McKinley ordering his mediocre sandwich! That expression scolds, "WASABI?! GOD NO! LIGHT MAYO! AND HOLD THE GODDAMNED DEVILISH PICKLES, YOU APISH VOID!"

I know I went from comparing the pictures to sandwiches to comparing them to a person ordering sandwiches but what can you do? I certainly don't have the passion to correct or edit myself!

I'd like to believe some sort of hint regarding when this Chums of Chance mission took place could be garnered from Pugnax being a pup and now being not a pup but Pynchon doesn't give us Pugnax's age. How long are dogs considered puppies for anyway? Four years? Eight?! Nobody knows.

I would be remiss to not point out that the Washington Monument is an erect phallus. Good one, Pynchon! Ha ha! Boing! Boner City!

The main point suggested by this sentence is that Pugnax can read and enjoys doing so. He will read anything he can get his paws on but prefers Jack London to William Shakespeare. Although he'll have to wait about ten years or so to enjoy London's work. Hopefully he's not too old of a dog! Bah, this is a Pynchon book. Pugnax will probably outlive everybody and also wind up being the narrator of the entire book. He probably wrote all the Chums of Chance stories! What a good boy.