Despite the sorry history of rapid transit in the city, the corporate neglect and high likelihood of collision, injury, and death, the weekday-morning overture blared along as usual.
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"corporate neglect"
Can you even use the term "neglect" when corporations pay for studies to determine which would cost them more, improving the safety of their product or paying off civil suits to those harmed by them? That's not even "willful neglect." That's just capitalism.
"the weekday-morning overture blared along as usual"
There's no medley of numbers from a play about weekday mornings happening here. At least I don't think there is. Sometimes Pynchon pulls weird shit like that and suddenly a Pavlovian researcher is involved in an intricate dance number with a bunch of mice and rats. But here it's just a metaphor for all the daily, mundane things the riders of the city's rapid transit are involved in on their way to work or school. Daily rituals that consume their attention even though simply riding the rapid transit is a dangerous affair. Perhaps more-so consumed by their activities as a form of denial of death's all-too-possible possibility. So Pynchon is simply comparing this cacophonic group of disparate activities to the mixing and combining of musical numbers of a staged production.
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