Chapter 1: Section 6: Pages 53-54: Lines 156-160 (949-953)

 "The frontier ends and disconnection begins. Cause and effect? How the dickens do I know? I spent my earlier hob-raising years out where you're headed, Denver and Cripple Creek and Colorado Springs, while there was still a frontier, you always knew where it was and how to get there, and it wasn't always just between natives and strangers or Anglos and Mexicans or cavalry and Indians. But you could feel it, unmistakeably, like a divide, where you knew you could stand and piss would flow two ways at once."

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"The frontier ends and disconnection begins."
The Professor is discussing a liminal space. Perhaps the liminal space that matters in Against the Day. I can't say for certain, having not read this book previously (and, yes, I can see how reading it first and then doing this project would be far more informative). If the frontier is the boundary to the unknown then it is also a boundary to the known, depending on which side you arrive at it. Like pissing at the top of the Rockies, which Heino is making reference to here, things flow from this space into (and out from) two distinct places: "civilization" and "nature." When discussing being "disconnected," Heino must mean disconnected from the natural, chaotic side of the frontier, perhaps obvious in that civilization (and, in the context of what Pynchon has written so far, white society) is being centered. The object of civilization (and white society!) is to destroy the boundary by forcing the center to become the whole. Frederick Turner's essay claimed that taming nature and pushing the frontier was part of the ambitious drive which characterizes Americans. I disagreed with that in many ways but, yes, in a lot of ways, usually after the first pioneers desperate enough to brave the frontier, people followed with ideas of exploitation (who also didn't have to do the work of taming the frontier and so are "disconnected" from the entire experience and idea of it. They never see the boundary).

"you always knew where it was and how to get there"
Heino explains how the frontier wasn't a place that needed to be recognized by sight or by the types of people on either side of it: the frontier was an idea, although one that was nearly tangible, which the mind could simply recognize. Like walking from a warm room to a cool one. You just knew where the boundary was and could probably tell on a daily basis how much it was moving.

"between natives and strangers or Anglos and Mexicans or cavalry and Indians"
Just in case the reader wasn't making the connection of some of the main ways the frontier divided people, by race and culture, Heino makes it plain while stating "These weren't the only ways to tell though! Something more mystic about it!" But it lends credence to the theme of centering white society and how one side of each of those pairs would continue to exist basically unchanged even after "the frontier" disappeared while the other half, having been decentered and disconnected from the wild side of the frontier, would have to completely change to cope with their new white world.

Chapter 1: Section 6: Page 53: Line 155 (948)

 "That's about it," the Professor nodded.

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The meat of Frederick Turner's Frontier Thesis was that the American character was built by their struggle to survive on the frontier. In other words, connectedness. Disconnect people from the act of living and they stop caring about those things taken care of by other people. Get a burger by talking to a plastic clown and you never consider what it took to make that burger. Better yet, being that it's 2022, type your order into a phone and have it delivered directly to your door. How more disconnected can you get than not even having to stop whatever you're doing to satisfy your hunger? Stomach growls, type on the phone, doorbell rings, stomach satiated. You never even need to contemplate any point along the chain of how that food wound up on your doorstep. Now imagine being so immersed in the disconnected traditions you were raised to accept as normal that you can walk into a slaughterhouse and watch the entire process without once having the revelation that you are part of that process, that the cow's suffering, it's horrendous cries of pain and loneliness, was partially on you.

Chapter 1: Section 6: Page 53: Line 154 (947)

 "Don't think I'll give up steaks just yet," Lew said, "but it does make a man wonder how disconnected those folks down there'd have to be."

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"disconnected"
That's sort of the Heino's point, I think. That the American Cowboy was far more connected to the rearing and slaughter of cattle than any consumer of beef will be again. The cattle are othered and so drained of any semblance of life in this new process that sightseers can tour the killing floors and be blind to the pain and suffering within. They simply see the place where their delicious hamburgers come from. It'll take writers and documentary film makers to reinvigorate the spirit of the animals so that audiences can see it for themselves, far better than seeing it in person. Sure, not for everybody! But you definitely have to cultivate a certain level of "disconnected" to continue to eat meat. Lew imagines what's going on inside the Stockyards but doesn't see it and, so, he can remain disconnected enough to not give up steaks. But he wonders aloud how anybody can look upon, smell, and hear the things he just imagined were happening in the slaughterhouse and still find a steak mouthwatering.

Chapter 1: Section 6: Page 53: Line 153 (946)

 At the exit the visitors would find a souvenir-shop, where they could purchase stereopticon slides, picture-postcards, and cans of "Top Gourmet Grade" souvenir luncheon meat, known to include fingers and other body parts from incautious workmen.

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Who invented the whole "exit through the gift shop" dynamic of touring terribly boring business places (and, I guess, non-boring places too, if I must acknowledge that some people think "museums" aren't boring)?

"Top Gourmet Grade"
Do the fingers and other body parts make this souvenir top grade? Are the batches of meat involved in horrific accidents which maim workers set aside to be sold in the gift shop?! I suppose that's better than just shifting it all out into the open market. Although, I suspect, that's not the case. I suspect, being quite the amateur Sherlock Holmes, that the case is hundreds if not thousands of people in the 1800s were inadvertent cannibals. Fuck it. Why am I leaving the 20th Century out of that?! Every single person who has ever eaten a can of Hormel's Chile con Carne is probably an inadvertent cannibal.

"incautious workmen"
This is Top Gourmet Grade victim blaming! "Incautious" really means "forced to work long hours in low light and unsafe working conditions." Lazy daydreaming twats!

Chapter 1: Section 6: Page 53: Line 152 (945)

 As the airship descended closer, Lew watched the open vehicle pull up inside the Halstead Street gate to discharge its passengers, and understood, with some perplexity, that it was an excursion group, in town for a tour among the killing-floors and sausage rooms, an instructive hour of throat-slashing, decapitation, skinning, gutting, and dismemberment—"Say, Mother, come have a look at these poor bastards!" following the stock in their sombre passage from arrival in rail cars, into the smells of shit and chemicals, old fat and tissue diseased, dying, and dead, and a rising background choir of animal terror and shouting in human languages few of them had heard before, till the moving chain brought in stately parade the hook-hung carcasses at last to the chilling-rooms.

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And here is "Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show on its head." The stark opposite of an outside performance of skill and mettle, man against beast; a wild display of life lived to its fullest and, although fictional, at least a semblance of a fair fight. The animals at least somewhat an active participant in its eventual demise (not in the fictional representation of past events which the show portrays, of course!). But inside the dark of the Stockyards, it's the 1890s version of going to see the latest Saw movie. Perhaps the Stockyard is simply more truthful and to the point: this is how it ends so why bother with all the spectacle and theater? Although what's the point of life without spectacle and theater? Even for a cow? We need "Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show" so that we aren't overwhelmed by existence's taint of shit and chemicals, full of disease and cries of animal terror as we're all railroaded down an ever narrowing chute to be paraded out in front of family and friends for one last look before the dirt rains down upon our bodies, erasing us from all human memory in one or two generations.