Chapter 1: Section 1: Page 9: Line 93

 "Yes."

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Oh, look how clever you are, you clever blogger with the clever idea you! What are you going to do now?! Are you going to explicate this line divorced from the text?! It's just a stupid affirmative! It doesn't mean anything on its own! Unless you're Yoko Ono fishing for John Lennon, I guess. But other than that, it needs context! What is the yes in reference to?! Oh no. It can't be. I thought natural law was in effect in this book!

This is Randolph St. Cosmo declaring that Chick is correct that if you go north and pass over the Pole, you'll find yourself going south. Fine. That's not a shocker. But he's saying it in Chick's deconstruction of the analogy that going up is like going north. So the only conclusion to draw from this "yes" is that if you go up far enough, you'll pass some space where you're suddenly going down! That's crazy!

Oh wait. It isn't crazy at all! It's exactly what happened when those Americans landed on the moon! They went up so far that they suddenly started going down and then landed on the moon. Whew! Okay, good. I figured I could count on Lindsay's declaration that nobody had escaped to the realm of the counterfactual!

Also, would I have reached that conclusion had I not already read ahead? Maybe! There's no way to tell for sure though!

I hope I didn't miss anything here like how I missed that bit where Lindsay corrected Chick's use of ain't by declaring isn't was more preferable when in the way Chick used "ain't," "isn't" wouldn't have worked either. I knew Lindsay was just one of those annoying pedants who simply follows rules for rules' sake. Is that the proper punctuation of "rules for rules' sake"? I wish Lindsay were here to correct me.

Chapter 1: Section 1: Page 9: Line 92

 "But," it occurred to Chick, "if you keep going far enough north, eventually you pass over the Pole, and then you're heading south again."

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And thus the super galaxy brain meme was invented by Chick Counterfly in 1893.

This sounds like anybody on acid. I once went on a rant about how you press the pause button to pause the tape in the VCR but then you hit the pause button again to get it to play instead of hitting the play button. Right now, you're thinking, "Um. What? So. You can probably hit play too, right? Who cares?!" But you're only thinking that because you're not currently on LSD. Although if you are currently on LSD and you did just read that, I apologize for blowing your mind.

Here's the thing: I would totally be making fun of Chick Counterfly believing that every aspect of an analogy needs to be accurate to be a good analogy except I've read the rest of this conversation already and, apparently, Randolph St. Cosmo really thought this thing through. It's super accurate!

But pretend I didn't know that yet! Here's the thing with Chick thinking the analogy somehow needs to be iron clad. Does he expect Randolph to say, "Oh, yeah. That's true so I guess my analogy doesn't make complete sense. I'll have to think up another." Except if your analogy has to perfectly mirror the situation it is analogizing then you might as well just state the original situation! The only comparative story that's going to match your story is your original story!

Analogies are terrible anyway. I'm not saying they're not interesting or can be cute or whimsical or fun! But the only reason anybody makes an analogy is because the analogy makes the original situation look better or worse to the person you're debating. Also, if you think the original statement is too confusing and needs to be stated by using an example of a different situation that's similar, what makes you think your analogy is going to be understood without its own analogy?! Can we just discuss the matter at hand and stop with all this nonsense?!

Oh man. I think I'm arguing Lindsay's side of this! I approve of the way Lindsay just stated the facts! Except didn't I come to the conclusion that Lindsay's statement of the natural law that temperature decreases with altitude was just an analogy for following the rules aboard ship?! I did! I totally did! So Lindsay is actually terrible still.

Chapter 1: Section 1: Page 9: Line 91

 He stood blinking, as if expecting comment.

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Randolph really, really thinks Chick is thick! "Was that too much information for the dopey lad?" worried Randolph Street Cosmo. "Does he understand 'north' and 'up'?! I hope he asks questions if he doesn't quite understand what I'm saying. What if he's never been north? How could he understand it gets colder by going up if he doesn't know it gets colder by going north?! I should probably have dumbed it down even further! 'Up! Sky! Brr!' would have been better, probably!"

Chapter 1: Section 1: Page 9: Line 90

 "Going up is like going north."

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Well, Randolph really does think Chick's thick, doesn't he? "Go north. Get cold! Go up. Get cold! Same-same! See?"

These are American kids speaking in American geographic terms so I won't bring up how, in the opposite situation below the Equator, going south is also like going up. You'd think going south would be like going down!

Oh, dammit! I brought it up. Anyway, Chick is smarter than anybody gives him credit for because he's got his own comments to Randolph's "Let's Make Science Easy for the Dumb Kid" statement.

Chapter 1: Section 1: Page 9: Line 89

 "Here it is in a nutshell," Randolph confided later.

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Lindsay, in creating an analogy to remind Chick to follow the rules, gave a long-winded answer to why Chick was so cold when in the air, and maybe Randolph thinks Lindsay used words Chick wouldn't have understood so Randolph decides to break it down in a clearer, shorter, and more common way. You can't assume the boy you picked up in the swamp being chased by members of the KKK after his father rooked the local populace and fled to be well educated.

Randolph shows his wisdom as leader, as well, by taking Chick aside later where they can speak alone so as not to expose Chick's ignorance in front of the others, and to save him some embarrassment.

Chapter 1: Section 1: Page 9: Line 86-88

 "Do not imagine," Lindsay instructed, "that in coming aboard Inconvenience you have escaped into any realm of the counterfactual. There may not be mangrove swamps or lynch law up here, but we must nonetheless live with the constraints of the given world, notable among them the decrease in temperature with altitude. Eventually your sensitivities in that regard should moderate, and in the meantime"—tossing him a foul-weather cloak of black Japanese goatskin with C. OF C. PROPERTY stenciled in bright yellow on the back—"this is to be considered as a transitional garment only, until such time as you adapt to these altitudes and, if fortunate, learn the lessons of unpremeditated habitude among them."

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In other words, this isn't The Twilight Zone, bub. Things may seem fantastic or supranormal flying up in the sky but it's still the same world as that which occurs below and in the rest of the book. This may be a warning not just to Chick but to the reader. Pynchon is noting that while things are definitely different than the world of the reader, they aren't different in a fantastical, higgledy-piggledy way. Yes, there were almost certainly not battalions of young boys flying airships about the world having adventures. But at least they're not riding dragons! And while some of their adventures might push the boundaries of what we know as fact, they retain their believability of the 1893 world and the lower limits of the knowledge and the upper limits of the imagination of the people of the time.

Also, Lindsay might just be making small talk about his favorite thing in the world: rules. "Don't get it into your head that we're up here to engage in raw hedonism above the clouds, ignoring the basic and decent societal laws of mankind! We follow rules too!"

Or maybe Lindsay just figures Chick is an idiot. "Natural law same, you understand. Same-same down below as up above. Different but same!"

Lindsay is a jerk.

Whoops! That was what I had to say on just Line 86 before I remembered that I'm grouping all lines which appear in the same quotations as one blog entry! So let's dive into the rest of Lindsay's rant!

It seems like Lindsay is just using the temperatures decrease with altitude constraint of the world as a metaphor for all the other rules Lindsay expects Chick to learn to habitude among. The Japanese coat (does the C. OF C. PROPERTY label the coat or the boy in the coat?) is an example of Chick's provisional status among the boys. They will allow some leeway for Chick's ignorance of the rules, as the coat gives him some leeway to remain comfortable in large temperature shifts, but he must, at some point, be able to perform his duties sans jacket and sans managerial oversight.

Plus he might just be informing Chick about how cold it gets. Although does it make much sense to indicate that the Chums of Chance should do their duty in the sky without jackets to protect from the cold? That's why it must be a metaphor! I'm sure the lads wear jackets all the time, as needed!