He parked the wagon out on a vacant patch in Murray Hill and set in to study the mysteries of light-portraiture as then understood, gathering information dip-fingered and without shame from everyplace he could, from Roswell Bounce to the Cleveland Library, which as Merle soon discovered had taken the revolutionary step some ten years before of opening up its stacks, so anybody could walk in and spend all day reading what they needed to know for whatever it was they had in mind to do.
* * * * * * * * * *
"He parked the wagon out on a vacant patch in Murray Hill"
Merle's isolating because what he's up to often gets one thrown into the local nuthatchery. The people the cops currently hate most in Cleveland are people who disrespect them, people who witness them doing crime, people super interested in science and light, loiterers, and foreigners. Merle fits into most of those categories so he needs to be careful. Especially since he's the guy who breaks everybody out of Newburgh. If he gets picked up, who's going to rescue him?
"study the mysteries of light-portraiture as then understood"
The year was 1887 or thereabouts so if you want to know exactly how well "light-portraiture" was understood, get thee to a set of Encyclopedia Britannica, I guess. Or just the L Volume? What was the last year Encyclopedia Britannica published an actual update to their set? How out of date must the final version of their encyclopedias be at this time? And how terrible are they online now? I bet they've incorporated AI into their site so you can't trust a thing it says. The thing about LLMs and AI as they're currently trained is they aggregate information from online sources. And a lot of them just scour any old thing. So you've got to assume the smartest an "AI" can be is of median intelligence. And anybody who's spent any time with more than themselves knows that other people are stupid idiots.
Wait, what was I talking about? I suppose I could look up all that information on Encyclopedia Britannica but it sounds like boring research. It's not like I have a report due on the exploration of space.
"gathering information dip-fingered"
Stealing when he must! Although who's going to have information about light-portraiture in the area? Is Pynchon suggesting that Merle was ripping of Roswell Bounce?! Oh, yeah, he goes on to say that exactly. From Roswell and the Library!
"the Cleveland Library"
Merle states the Cleveland Library had just opened its stacks in the late 1870s and being that Pynchon wrote it, I'll take his word for it. Maybe Merle just doesn't know the local history. Maybe by "opening up its stacks", it means something more specific than just opening to the public and letting them wander around looking at the books on loan. Apparently public libraries were a fairly new idea for the 19th century! Before that, it was all private libraries and colleges and weird uncles driven to madness by strange, flesh-covered books from the Middle East.
"taken the revolutionary step some ten years before of opening up its stacks, so anybody could walk in and spend all day reading what they needed to know for whatever it was they had in mind to do"
Did Pynchon accept money from the Public Library lobby to insert this into his book? Sounds like he's trying to sell me on libraries! Ew!
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