"Lately he's been keeping those ideas pretty much to himself, like he's finally learned how much they might be worth. Seen that happen enough, Lord knows. This big parade of modern inventions, all spirited march tunes, public going ooh and aah, but someplace lurking just out of sight is always some lawyer or accountant, beating the 2/4 like clockwork and runnin the show."
* * * * * * * * * *
"like he's finally learned how much they might be worth"
See?! Loss of innocence! I knew S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders wouldn't steer me wrong! It's as if the Professor had found this new type of game that used cards which you purchased in packs with random cards inside. And when you play a game, you bet one of your cards against one of your opponent's cards. Whoever wins gets to keep both cards. And nobody even considered that maybe some of these cards might actually be worth more money than the entire pack was purchased for so nobody really cared much about losing this card or winning that one. But then some jerk whom you thought was your friend suddenly showed up with a magazine whose main reason for being published was to list the different values of all of these cards. And now suddenly Cheryl doesn't want to play for ante because she might lose her Shivan Dragon. Well la dee fucking dah, Cheryl! I guess we'll all just stop having fun then! And thanks a lot, Stephen, for bringing that stupid magazine into our midst! I haven't enjoyed anything since that day in the early 90s! Why even bother going on?! Nothing gold can stay!
"Seen that happen enough, Lord knows"
Me too! Remember that story I've told before and then just now about how fucking Stephen ruined Magic the Gathering for us?!
"This big parade of modern inventions"
This is one of the themes of this book! Look at how all of these modern inventions changed the landscape of our lives at the end of the 19th century! See how we reacted to them! See how they foreshadow the ultimate invention of the 20th century which isn't Magic the Gathering but nuclear weapons!
Another theme is "See how, by trying to center the story around themselves, Europeans destabilized the center, bringing the entire world into themselves and changing themselves drastically while trying to outwardly control the rest of the world." The imperialist drive to control and dominate the world simply caused soldiers, refugees, and immigrants to bring back to the homeland all of the cultures the imperialists were trying to control and make more British (or whatever, depending on the European country. It's just easy to speak of Britain since they were the empire on which the sun never set or whatever) thus irrevocably changing British life forever, many times in the ways the imperialism was initially meant to prevent. The dumbies.
"beating the 2/4"
This means a beat of two quarter notes per bar. A quarter note is also known as a crotchet. The alternate definition for crotchet is "a perverse or unfounded belief or notion." I first learned that word from Gravity's Rainbow. It, along with Tristram Shandy's "hobbyhorse" are two of my favorite words to describe other people's arguments and motivations.
"like clockwork"
Clockwork plays a large part in Mason & Dixon! So think up something intellectual that compares the two novels here, email it to me, and I'll replace this sentence with that, taking full credit for it.
