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 "That could put us in Chicago before nightfall," reckoned Randolph St. Cosmo.

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What Pynchon is expressing here is that the Chums of Chance will soon be at the Chicago's World Fair (aka the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago if you like lengthier—probably girthier—names). Possibly before nightfall.

Is this the moment where the reader experiences the title of the novel? They're racing against the day to get to Chicago! Hmm, no, probably not.

Since this line seems short on subtext, maybe the real point of this sentence is to show how Pynchon can't ever shorten Randolph St. Cosmo's name. That's some weird cosmic angel shit right there, right?

I haven't done an anagram of Randolph St. Cosmo's name because I can't come up with anything clever. I mean, how do I explain "Scalp door months" or "Maths pond colors"? And I've just interpreted his name as a kind of vague feeling. But maybe you're supposed to read "Randolph" as sort of "random" and "Cosmo" as cosmic so that we get the view of Randolph's universe as chaotic and random but, generally, tending toward good ("St."). Unless the "St." is supposed to be read as "street"! Then maybe his name is the intersection between randomness and the cosmic (which isn't random because it relies on consistent natural laws even if those laws produce events that are basically random).

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 "We're doing a way better than a mile a minute," remarked Chick Counterfly from the control-console, unable to eliminate from his voice a certain awe.

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If I were to read the above line, I would assume that the person who typed it into their blog did a typo. But I did not. It's probably a regional way of saying the thing Chick is saying, like embarrassingly adding the article "the" in front of freeway numbers when you live in Southern California (the gross and icky California) but intelligently leaving the article off freeway numbers when you live in Northern California (the good and proper California). As a Northern Californian, I would have phrased Chick's statement like this: "We're doing a ways better than a mile a minute" or "We're doing way better than a mile a minute." But I would not have said it exactly like he said it.

Or she! I'm still not backing off my assumption that Chick Counterfly is both a woman and a lover of silverware. One of the greatest adventure tropes in pre-modern times is that of the young woman pretending to be a man so as to experience the world freely. Maybe that trope is even a modern trope! I wouldn't know because I'm a man so I can walk around at night without fearing some other man is going to do something awful to me. I mean, another man might do something awful to me! But it's not a presupposition like it is for a woman because men are scarier than bears and mountain lions and probably sharks. It's probably because sharks and bears and mountain lions can love unconditionally but men cannot.

This sentence shows that Chick Counterfly isn't just the insult comic of the crew who doesn't really want to be there. Chick is fascinated with the ship and its abilities and seems to truly want to be an integral part of this life. Of course, what other option does Chick have, having recently become a dead member of this haunting ghost ship? Presumably, of course! Chick might be a living boy and she also might be an undead girl! Or some combination of those! Who can really know (other than the people who have already read this book and Thomas Pynchon, of course)?

The phrase "unable to eliminate" reminds us that Chick still wants to be seen as the apathetic rebel who couldn't give two toots about anything but his emotional excitement in the grip of crewing the ship betrays him.

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 The Screw device soon accelerated the ship to a speed which, added to that of the wind from directly astern, made it nearly invisible from the ground.

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Oh yeah! Remember how we were, plotwise, actually aboard the Inconvenience headed to Chicago dealing with the wind change when that story about Chick Counterfly's origin began? Now Pynchon just drops us back in like nothing happened. It's not as confusing here because the story, so far, is relatively straightforward. But try to keep your head wrapped around the plot when Pynchon does shit like this in Gravity's Rainbow. Without any warning, Pynchon will drop you into a story about some guy being drugged for an experiment and it'll happen while you're still confused over the way the chapter started with some list of different ways the phrase "The Kenosha Kid" can be communicated to another person and then suddenly the character is in some club trying to fish his harmonica out of a toilet while worried about being ass-fucked by the bathroom attendant (who is also almost certainly Malcom X) so he climbs deeper into the system where he's flushed further down into some underwater city where there is only one of everything and he meets a cowboy and the cowboy's sidekick and I'd go on but I'm not sure I ever really found my way through to the other side. I just shrugged and went on to the next section hoping it would be less confusing!

This section helps clarify some of my questions about the people who had shit and piss randomly rain down on their heads and why they would just shrug and go about their lives by somehow getting over it and not hunting down the people who shit on them with a thirst for vengeance unknown by even God Himself. The airship was just too fast for people on the ground to see! That totally makes sense. I guess The Screw device gave the ship warp speed powers.

Remember that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Picard and the crew of the Enterprise learned that warp travel was tearing down the fabric of the universe? And their solution was not to stop using warp drives but to cut their speed in half and then hope everybody else in the Federation (as well as their enemies) would follow their lead, thus doubling the amount of time before the fabric of the universe fell apart? That was a pretty good story to show how far mankind had gone that they're instantly willing to sort of but not really stop participating in actions that will destroy their home (in this case, the universe; in the allegorical point of the case, the Earth). It's painted as responsible but it also contains the germ of what makes humanity suck. The Federation is all, "Well, yes, warp drives are destroying the universe. But we really like warp drives and we pretty much need warp drives now and what? We're supposed to totally stop using them until we can come up with something different? That's crazy. We'll just use them a little bit for now." But then the Enterprise represents America (right?) so they still go faster than Warp Five whenever they feel they need to. "Oh, yeah, sure. We have limits on warp speed for environmental concerns that won't rear their ugly heads for thousands of years but right now, in this second, we really have to get Worf to some Klingon festival in twelve hours."