Chapter 1: Section 1: Page 7: Line 60

 Though the extreme hazard was obvious to all, Darby's enthusiasm for the task at hand created, as ever, a magical cloak about his elfin form that seemed to protect him, though not from the sarcasm of Chick Counterfly, who now called after the ascending mascotte, "Hey! Suckling! Only a saphead would risk his life to see how fast the wind's blowing!"

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"A magical cloak"? "His elfin form"? What am I reading? Tolkien?!

Actually, I would be reading Tolkien right now but I couldn't find my copy of The Lord of the Rings. But just like the dumb hobbits and lousy elves in that series, Darby Suckling very much has a magical cloak that protects him while climbing around on the outside of the balloon; it's called plot armor. He has to live so that he can grow into a surly teenager and punch Lindsay in his smart (so smart it's practically Vulcanic!) mouth. Unless that never happens and now I'm worried Darby might fall to his death in this scene!

Chick is totally right about sapheads in this sentence (and it is "a sentence" even though Chick's quotation contains three sentences of its own! Language! Go figure, right?!). Some people can be fooled into risking their lives for the most mundane reasons and those people are rightly called sapheads. My guess is the derogatory term derives from the term sappers and the menial, often dangerous work they did.

I first learned what a sapper is from playing the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay game. I probably learned most of the stuff I first learned by playing roleplaying games. I first encountered Dungeons & Dragons when I was ten or eleven and was soon also playing Gamma World, Star Frontiers, Boot Hill, and Top Secret. Probably more games than that because my friends and I played whatever we could get our hands on, even making up a game that encompassed ideas from all the games we were playing which we called Now & Later.

For some reason, this scene reminds me of an old video from the 80s or early 90s when "caught on tape" video shows were all the rage. It was footage taken by an Australian teacher out on a hike with students. He warned a couple of them not to go out on this thin pass over a chasm and was filming them as they were not heeding his cries. Suddenly the path gave out beneath them and they began tumbling down into the ravine while he followed their progress with his camera and shouting, "I told you not to go out there!"

Man. Remembering that video always makes me laugh! It also makes me envious that I'll never get an "I told you so!" in quite as quickly or as ill-timed as that bastard!

Apparently there was a silent comedy from the 1920s called The Saphead. The synopsis is "The scatterbrained son of a Wall Street tycoon goes to the stock exchange and saves his father from bankruptcy." He's probably called a saphead because he helps some dumb rich guy stay rich. Boo! Hiss! We hates him!

Chapter 1: Section 1: Page 7: Lines 58-59

 (For readers here making their first acquaintance with our band of young adventurers, it must be emphasized at once that—perhaps excepting the as yet insufficiently known Chick Counterfly—none would e'er have entered the morally poisonous atmosphere of the "frontón," as such haunts are called down there, had it not been essential to the intelligence-gathering activities the Chums had contracted to render at that time to the Interior Ministry of President Porfirio Díaz. For details of their exploits, see The Chums of Chance in Old Mexico.)

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This parenthetical reference answers some of my questions about the previous sentence. Some people might be thinking, "Yeah. That's how books work. Maybe give the author a little time to explain themselves!" But other people might be thinking, "Shut up, jerk!"

Actually, I don't mind taking the time after each sentence to consider what's being said or, more aptly, what's not being said. It helps a person get a handle on the story in their own way. What if I read one sentence, considered it, and came to a stunning conclusion which is confirmed in the next sentence? That's something most readers wouldn't experience if they didn't stop to let things percolate. They just might go on living their lives thinking the author exposed the twist in Sentence B when the author had actually exposed the twist in Sentence A!

It's too bad I didn't go on a tangent in the previous entry about the kids participating in gambling like I almost did because this parenthetical reference would have seemed to be speaking directly to me. My favorite bit of the disclaimer about how the Chums would never participate in this mean activity is the Narrator saying, "Except maybe Chick! We don't know enough about him yet, being he's new to the group!" You know what the Narrator really wanted to say but is too couth to say it is, "Counterfly would have lost the Chums of Chance's per diem for the entire trip on football bets and prostitutas, no doubt about it!"

The Chums of Chance were contracted to work for the Mexican government in this story. So they seem to be a mercenary organization. Or freelancers, if the term "mercenary" seems a bit too rough. That could still mean their organization is tied up with the U.S. government though.

This sentence also gives us the name of the book which may have been evocative to the youth of the 19th Century but just sounds boring after my supposed title of The Chums of Chance are Bested by Football Hooligans. Some 19th Century kid was probably all, "Oh boy! Gee squillikers! Old Mexico! By gum, that does sound exciting, doesn't it, Mother?! Could we possible not eat for four days so that I may indulge in a right jolly good adventure fantasy!"

You know what I just got an idea for? A role-playing game based on Horatio Alger novels!

Chapter 1: Section 1: Page 7: Line 57

 It will be recalled that this method of passing information had been adopted by the crew during their brief though inconclusive sojourn "south of the border," where they had observed it among the low elements who dissipate their lives in placing wagers on the outcomes of pelota games.

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It will not be recalled because nobody read any of these fictional Chums of Chance novels, you jerk! What was this novel called? The Chums of Chance are Bested by Football Hooligans?

The Chums of Chance work for an organization that probably isn't the United States of America or else wouldn't they constantly be causing international incidents with their adventures in other countries like Mexico or Indonesia or Atlantis? On the other hand, they do seem pretty patriotic if I had to judge by their celebratory bunting. But that also just might be camouflage for the Chicago World's Fair!

The phrase "dissipate their lives" feels particular insulting to me. Thanks, Pynchon!

Chapter 1: Section 1: Pages 6-7: Line 56

 Miles, with his marginal gifts of coördination, and Chick, with a want of alacrity fully as perceptible, took their stations at the control-panels of the apparatus, as Darby Suckling, meantime, went scrambling up the ratlines and shrouds of the giant ellipsoidal envelope from which the gondola depended, to the very top, where the aery flux was uninterrupted, in order to read, from an anemometer of the Robinson's type, accurate wind measurements, as an index of how rapidly the ship was proceeding, conveying these down to the bridge by means of a written note inside a tennis-ball lowered on a length of line.

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Here we go again with the "Miles is a fat klutz" shit! I know Pynchon hasn't given us an actual physical description of Miles but I would wager that 98% of all casting agents would only put a call out for overweight kids for this part. It's a trope for a reason and that reason is the same reason it was, for many years (and still today maybe?), to have every fat person in a film or television show shown holding food whenever they were on camera! Unless the reason is unimaginative script writers, directors, and casting agents?

If I were on dating apps, I would simply lift the description of Chick and use it to describe myself. "A want of alacrity fully as perceptible." Okay, maybe I'd have to change the wording a bit by taking out the "as"! But you get my point if you know the meaning of "alacrity" and "perceptible" and "want" used to mean "lacking" (which is what I guess it always means although it connotes a slightly different feeling when used as a verb, as if your desire for the thing you lack is the foregrounded idea).

What Pynchon does at the beginning of this sentence is to just cement the two-dimensional, cartoon nature of these two characters (which cements the idea that the whole Chums of Chance crew is a 70s cartoon (or, you know, Victorian era kid adventure dime novel). Miles is the blundering (Blundell!) fatty and Chick is the slackluster rebel (COUNTERfly!) without a fuck. So that's the subject of the first sentence of this sentence taken care of!

The other half of the sentence (the object, I guess? Because that half is about the object the subject is verbing? (Hee hee. So dirty!)) helps flesh out the description of the Inconvenience from the previous sentence. I thought maybe there was a ladder but now we see Darby is just climbing up the ropes surrounding the balloon (ellipsoidal!) to which the gondola is attached and that the anemometer is located directly on top of the balloon so as to get a perfectly clear and unobstructed reading of the direction and strength of the wind. So Darby's really risking his tail here!

The Robinson Anemometer (which is what the text under the anemometer says but you probably couldn't read it)

Darby sends the data back to Randolph by writing a note while clinging to the top of the balloon buffeted by the winds and then stuffing that note (if it hasn't blown away) into a cut open tennis ball (who hasn't cut open a tennis ball and then used it for all sorts of strange purposes one of which was almost certainly some weird new space vehicle for their Star Wars Jawa action figure) and lowering it down on a line. I know I just repeated a bunch of what Pynchon said but I wanted to highlight how difficult it probably was for poor Darby!