Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 64: Lines 173-176 (1155-1158)

 "It's a negative. When we print this, it'll all flip back to normal. First we have to fix it. Reach me that bottle of hypo there."

* * * * * * * *

"It's a negative"
Yeah, Merle already figured that out. It's evil! It's the opposite! It's light's dark side! Oh, wait, yeah, um, so Merle just learned the technical term. Right. Okay.

"flip back to normal"
As if it's so easy for those trapped in their madness to return to "normality". There's a reason why this first photograph that Merle lays his eyes on is of the Northern Ohio Insane Asylum. It's one of those metaphors or analogies. While Merle has physically been helping inmates escape (presumably because they didn't actually belong there and were just dumped their by lazy and/or angry cops), the truth is that it's much harder, impossible even. How do you flip a lunatic back to sanity? Perhaps Pynchon hints, through the taking of a photograph of these inmates, that the way to help them back, to flip them to normal, is to actually see them. To listen to them. To understand them. Simply locking them away for the good of "decent citizens" who don't want to be irritated or annoyed, who don't want to pay the high cost of caring, as Pynchon once said in another book. Insane asylums are a symptom of a society that only has room enough for a narrow scope of thinking.

"First we have to fix it"
I guess this is photography lingo for developing a photo but we know Pynchon's actually talking about society. First we must see the problem. Then we can fix the problem.

"Reach me that bottle of hypo"
Or we can drug it into senselessness so we don't have to think about it at all.

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 64: Line 164 (1146)

 Come in out of the pale Invisible, down into this otherwise explainable world, clearer than real.

* * * * * * * * * *

Sometimes I can't help thinking of Pynchon's other works where reading a line from, well, any other of Pynchon's works. That's why I'm sad that can't read everything by him after first reading everything by him. I mean, I can but not in the way I want. I don't want to have to read everything twice! That's ludicrous! The point I want to make which needed me to preface it with the preceding sentences was that this line reminded me of a V-2 rocket. And even though the ghosts of all of my college teachers are screaming, "Expand your thought!", into my head right now, I won't.

Merle's experience of developing photographs speaks of something beyond what can be known (again, more Gravity's Rainbow shouting in my brain with all that stuff with the medium and speaking with the dead). As if the photo developing on the plate weren't a scientific process that can be understood and replicated and instead is simple magic produced by the correct ritual movements and ingredients.

This section that seems to concern Merle having a pseudo-religious experience concerning light (especially when he's just spent the last few months living with, speaking with, and drinking with light worshipers) had me thinking about one of the basic reasons (among myriad reasons) that I cannot believe in God. It simply comes down to adding another link to a chain of the unknowable. I do not understand why matter exists. In my head, I can think of the universe as beginning at the Big Bang and then, well, I don't know. Unknowable. A question mark. What I don't need to do is add another link to that chain by saying, "Before the Big Bang, God. He created it. But where did God come from? Unknowable." See? How does adding God to that chain clarify anything? Sure, for some reason, people seem to accept God as infinite. But if you have to accept something as infinite to explain reality, why do you have to invent the God step? God is an anomaly in the system. You can explain it all right up to the moment before the Big Bang and then suddenly you're going to introduce something unexplainable which doesn't even play by the universe's rules? I just don't see the point. God can climb back into the pale Invisible and stay there for all I care. "Down into this otherwise explainable world" writes Pynchon. Otherwise explainable. As if the unexplained is something that will remain unexplained for all time. The reason postmodernism exists is because too many questions were answered (and also too many atrocities were committed by answering so many questions!) and the answer, "God," just stopped cutting even the blandest mustard.

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 63: Line 133 (1115)

 Somehow this escalated into a general free-for-all, in which furniture and glassware didn't come out much better than the human participants, a rare sort of behavior among Ætherists, but everybody had been feeling at loose ends lately.

* * * * * * * * * *

Being Pynchon, I'm surprised the eruption of a barroom brawl was handled so succinctly. I expected a tray of cream pies to have been rolled into the room just as somebody emptied a bin of banana peels onto the floor. Pynchon's never above a popular trope that modern audiences can easily recognize to regain their attention after wading through paragraphs of high-falutin' philosophical and scientific talk.

Here, we have rational, scientific-minded thinkers breaking into complete and utter violence. It could be commentary on how scientific disputes aren't usually as logical as we common people might think. Passions can erupt when some super smart ass jerk comes along and changes the whole rules of the game so eloquently that it can't be denied. What else can you do but bust them over the head with a whisky bottle?

This could also be one of Thomas Pynchon scant allusions to nuclear proliferation. I wouldn't bet on it but it could be there if you remember how Gravity's Rainbow was all about technology screwing over the masses so eloquently that they could be killed by it before they even knew they were in danger and yet the novel has exactly one scant mention of the atomic bomb. Just a mostly obliterated headling about Hiroshima being bombed. Mostly it's about how plastics got us here and not nuclear fission! That took place during World War II so this bit of Against the Day taking place in the late 19th Century, maybe the only way to allude to nuclear bombs is a barroom brawl between science-minded philosophers and the use of the word "escalated".

"everybody had been feeling at loose ends lately"
Here we return to the idea of loss of faith or, in general, simply loss itself. The peak elation of the people who gathered in Cleveland for the experiment that would prove the existence of Æther has dropped beyond the zero to the trough of disappointment. What they had come for had not been delivered and now they don't know what to do. The end of the world, so to speak, did not come about and now they had to pick up the pieces and find a new path. Loose ends. Feeling lost. A foundational belief about the way the universe worked has been destroyed. Here in the late 19th Century, these cracks and failing are beginning to happen more and more rapidly. Æther has just crashed out and burned. The Frontier's waning. Imperialism is turning back in on itself as the nationals of oppressed nations emigrate to their oppressor's homelands.
    Modern readers in the 21st Century can easily identify with the rapid collapse of seemingly foundational institutions. Feeling at loose ends no longer qualifies as a brief disruption in a long stretch of stability; it has become the stability itself.

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 62: Line 114 (1096)

 For word was circulating that Michelson and Morley had found no difference in the speed of light coming, going, or sideways relative to the Earth speeding along in its orbit.

* * * * * * * * * *

This is one of those nice "Science Without Math" statements that we can all use from time to most-of-the-time. It simply sums up the experiment without getting in the weeds of the details (although the details are what make this whole Blinky Morgan and Edward Morley are the same person theory interesting). What was the experiment about? It was about measuring the speed of light in several different directions to see if the movement of the Earth changed the speed. A change would indicate that the light was moving through something which was also traveling at those speeds. It should be faster going in the direction of the Earth while slowing down going perpendicular to that direction (or against it, obvs!). Who needs to know how it's done? How the light from one source is split into different beams and bounced in different directions to eventually arrive at the same destination? And how arriving at the same destination in phase (since light was suspected to be simply a wave as sound (which is why is was suspected that it needed a medium to travel through)) would indicate that direction didn't hamper its speed. Only if each beam arrived out of phase would there be an indication that the movement and inertia of the Earth would be affecting it. And that out-of-phase bit was what made Merle's theory into a lengthy philosophical sidebar that Pynchon has spent an awful lot of time on. Which he doesn't do with all of his strange little tales so it must have been especially important to the overall themes of the novel. I suspect it backs up the idea that Lew has been split from another Earth to find himself on one where he has become a pariah among those he once knew and loved. But then I could be biased because that was my initial impression of my first reading of the Lew Basnight sections.

Maybe as Mark Z. Danielewski says in his new novel, Tom's Crossing, in the section where the mortician does the autopsy on Russell's body, I need to uninstall my initial bias of Lew's possible dimension hopping. Or, if I want to remain loyal to Thomas Pynchon here, I need to get beyond the zero to rid myself of not just the bias but the idea of the bias too. I think. Remember how not smart I am? I still have trouble with the idea of "Beyond the Zero"!

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 61: Line 93 (1075)

 That if Blinky were ever caught, there would also turn out to be no Æther.

* * * * * * * * * *

Being that I'm writing this in 2025, I can say that Merle was correct. Blinky was caught (and hanged) and there was no Æther. Now, that doesn't mean he was correct that these two events were somehow entangled. But was he?

Within the reality of Pynchon's novel, Æther currently exists. Reality actually changes as scientists discover more and more secrets of the physical universe. There's an almost magical realist air to the book, as in Mason & Dixon. I don't know if this is a general theme in Pynchon's work or not. Gravity's Rainbow feels like it's more grounded and the weird, fantastical bits all make sense in the perception of the characters or simply Pynchon's use of other medium through his text (like scenes devolving into musicals or spinning newspapers to shout headlines or comic books). But Gravity's Rainbow also deals quite a bit with the investigation of the supernatural so maybe? One thing I'm really noticing on my current re-read of Gravity's Rainbow (as well as Mason & Dixon. Don't forget that book!) is how much he alludes to predestination (the Elect vs the Preterite, in particular) versus free will.

But back to this sentence, Merle sees these two events as entangled so perhaps they are? Perhaps Merle's belief actually destroys Æther when Blinky Morgan is captured and hanged. The experiment itself doesn't prove the existence of Ætheric drift which begins the decline in people's belief in it. But what if that wasn't what killed it? What if Merle did?

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 61: Line 85 (1067)

 "Escaped!"

* * * * * * * * * *

I believe, cheating and looking ahead at the next few lines, this was said by Ed Addle who Merle just recently helped escape Newburgh. I did not skip any lines, I assure you, no matter how much it seems like I skipped some lines. It's just how Pynchon writes! He'll be writing some bit of linear mundanity that you've convinced yourself you're following like a grade-A Mensa member (although your anxiety keeps piping up insisting that if it seems so easy to understand, you must be missing something) and then BLAMMO! Pynchon switches camera angles while spinning you around five times and kicking you in the nethers. At that point, you stagger forward trying to piece together the narrative to the best of your ability. He does this so well in Gravity's Rainbow that I had to re-read pages and pages of text once I realized the narrative had returned to the present while I thought we were still in a flashback. And being a reasonable person who wants to make sure the time I spent reading something while I could have been having sex wasn't entirely wasted, and even though I understood everything I read, I would have to go back and re-read the entire passage until I understood where I missed the move from flashback back to the present. Or from hallucination to reality. Or from story about a sentient light bulb to the light bulb not being sentient anymore.
    This bit in Against the Day isn't exactly that. It's just Pynchon writing, "Sometimes Merle had to help inmates escape. Now I'll just go into an example of the aftermath of Merle having helped somebody escape. And it would be boring to explain what I'm doing so I'll just do it and the reader can figure it out themselves. Or not. What do I care? They already paid for my fat-ass book!"

Getting ahead of this line a bit, as I noted, Ed Addle says it. But I don't know if it's Ed who has escaped or if Ed is exclaiming, "Escaped!", because Merle just brought an escapee into the Oil Well Saloon, or, even, if it matters at all. Reading a few lines further ahead, I'm sure it's Ed. Besides, Ed's name is "Addle" which means "confused". Seems the type to get thrown into Newburgh!

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 59: Line 45 (1027)

 Chief Schmitt's bravos in blue were detaining and subjecting to lengthy and mostly aimless questioning anybody whose looks they didn't care much for, which took in a wide piece of the population, including Merle, who was stopped on Rockville Street as he was heading out toward the Case Institute.

**********

Oh, forgive me my last entry. Part of my belief was that the swagger of the police extended in some part to regular civilians hating them a little bit less out of sympathy for the grief of their slain comrade. But the swagger was simply because they had a little more justification to be the ruthless authoritarian pricks that cops have always been and who have always been treated as such until the late 20th Century and early 21st Century when, thanks to sympathetic executive producers of cop television shows and one major terrorist attack which somehow lumped cops into the heroic category of "first responders," brainwashed a huge swathe of the American populace into believing police were not the corrupt assholes everybody always knew they were. Thomas Pynchon, and most other writers of great literature, have never been fooled. Feels like a good time for a Gravity's Rainbow quote, the one where the German cops bust up the Black Market!

"No wonder. The cops go at busting these proceedings the way they must've handled anti-Nazi street actions before the War, moving in, mmm ja, with these flexible clubs, eyes turned to the finest possibilities of threat, smelling of leather, of the wool-armpit rankness of their own fear, jumping little kids three-on-one, shaking down girls, old people, making them take off and shake out even boots and underwear, jabbing and battering in with tireless truncheonwork among the crying kids and screaming women. Beneath the efficiency and glee is nostalgia for the old days. The War must've been lean times for crowd control, murder and mopery was the best you could do, one suspect at a time. But now, with the White Market to be protected, here again are whole streets full of bodies eager for that erste Abreibung, and you can bet the heat are happy with it."

And don't read that and think, "Whatever. Pynchon is just describing Nazis and German police!" Au contraire, mein Freund! This next passage is about American military police and it goes just as hard!

"American voices, country voices, high-pitched and without mercy. He lies freezing, wondering if the bedsprings will give him away. For possibly the first time he is hearing America as it must sound to a non-American. Later he will recall that what surprised him most was the fanaticism, the reliance not just on flat force but on the rightness of what they planned to do . . . he'd been told long ago to expect that sort of thing from Nazis, and especially from Japs—we were the ones who always played fair—but this pair outside the door now are as demoralizing as a close-up of John Wayne (the angle emphasizing how slanted his eyes are, funny you never noticed before) screaming 'BANZAI!'"

I'm not sure about all that John Wayne stuff at the end but then I'm not reading Gravity's Rainbow one line at a time so I'm going to ignore it!

Anyway, as we see here, Pynchon, like all the other intelligent people in America, understands how cops just love to abuse their power!

"Case Institute"
Pynchon meant to write "Case School of Applied Science" but didn't for some reason. Probably due to lack of research ability, the poor sap!

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 58: Line 30 (1012)

 Sir Oliver Lodge defined it as 'one continuous substance filling all space, which can vibrate light . . . be sheared into positive and negative electricity,' and so on in a lengthy list, almost like the Apostle's Creed.

**********

"Sir Oliver Lodge"
Vanderjuice probably found this quote in Modern Views of Electricity from 1889 but I'm not going to read that book just to verify it. Sir Oliver Lodge also wrote a book in 1925 called Ether and Reality in which he defends his definition of Æther even though it was already a scientific relic of the last century. His need to believe in an invisible substance with a major effect on reality probably stemmed from his deep conviction in the afterlife, having been convinced by several mediums that he could speak with his son Raymond who had died in the First World War. His belief in spiritualism was seen as quite a flaw in the scientific community because Sir Oliver Lodge had pushed the knowledge of electricity and electromagnetic fields forward by some distance. He even received a patent used in radio which Marconi ultimately had to pay him to use. And spark plugs! His family sold spark plugs!

"one continuous substance filling all space"
For some reason, this brings to my mind this quote from Gravity's Rainbow: “If there is something comforting - religious, if you want - about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.” It's as if Lodge's view of Æther is that of the paranoiac: the connection of everything to everything else via some invisible substance gives comfort. It is all connected. There's a strong meaning to be found in having things connected.

"which can vibrate light"
I suppose the vibrations of the Æther is what supposedly propagates the waves of light.

"be sheared into positive and negative electricity"
Is that how we get electricity? Shine light into a razor sharp angle so that it is split into positive and negative charges? It doesn't seem right but then it also kind of seems right in that static electricity is pretty much the shearing off of electrons onto something that isn't particularly capable of holding strongly onto those electrons and, as such, you shock the face of your cat and it gets pissed at you.

"Apostle's Creed"
First off, Mr. Pynchon, it is "Apostles' Creed." Normally I would put this blame on Vanderjuice, the speaker, but since there's no audible difference between the versions, I'm going to have to blame Pynchon, the colossal hack writer. Anyway, I only know that because being raised an areligious person, I had to look up what the hell the Apostles' Creed was. It's just a litany of "I believe" statements. I guess, in religion, that's how you argue logically. You just keep restating to yourself, again and again, that you believe in nonsense because if you ever stop declaring you believe it, you might actually think about it and see the pure nonsense yourself. So what Vanderjuice is saying is that Lodge's writing about Æther pretty much just amounts to a bunch of "I believe" statements without seeing any need to back them up with evidence. The colossal hack!

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 58: Line 26 (1008)

 They strolled among the elm-shadows, eating sandwiches and apples out of paper bags, "a peripatetic picnic," as the Professor called it, slipping thereupon into his lecture-hall style.

**********

"elm-shadows"
Elm trees create plenty of shade and are one of the most popular trees to be used in public landscaping, often planted as boundary markers for paths, creating tunnel-like effects when planted to either side of a path. The elm is both a symbol of pastoral peace and death. Perhaps Heino and Merle are walking in the shadows of these border trees because they are, technologically speaking, crossing from a time of pastoral peace, where technology has begun to make impacts in our lives and seen as improving them, toward a time when technology will begin its decent from the peak of improvement, hurtling toward the ground as it becomes destructive and deadly, until it finally crashes beyond the zero into nuclear annihilation.
    Or maybe its just a bit of descriptive tat.

"eating sandwiches and apples"
Apples being the symbolic fruit of which Eve partook. Yeah, I know the fruit is never actually described but instead of being a pedantic nerd on the Internet, how about understanding the cultural symbols all around you. There's a reason the Apple logo is that of an apple with one bite taken out of it. And it's not because it's the mark of the beast and an indication of man's inability to resist temptation! It's about gaining knowledge! Maybe those are the same things though. See my comments on "elm-shadows."

"out of paper bags"
They didn't have plastic bags yet! If you want to learn more about the history of plastics, Pynchon covers that topic in Gravity's Rainbow.

"a peripatetic picnic"
This is a pun. The Professor is commenting on how the picnic is a traveling picnic but also it's a picnic where they discuss philosophical matters as they eat. So peripatetic as the adjective in that they're traveling but also as in The Peripatetic school founded by Aristotle, as we see Heino begins to lecture Merle as they walk.

Chapter 1: Section 6: Page 52: Line 131 (925)

 In the short time he'd been riding with them, he'd almost come to feel more at home up in the Inconvenience than he did at the Agency.

* * * * * * * * * *

Well of course Lew did! The Chums are right good fellows who must be a lot of fun to pal around with (excepting Lindsay, of course). And who is there to joke around with back at the Agency?! Nate? Rewind? The dozens of nameless coworkers Lew named who would have been better suited for the Denver transfer? The ones who, daily, tried to convince Lew that Anarchists were around every corner blowing things up and destroying America? Why would Lew ever feel at home at the Agency? Why would Lew ever feel at home anywhere since he obviously isn't even in his proper timeline! I say "obviously" because it seems obvious to me but I guess it's just theory and speculation. But what do you expect from somebody whose formative years were spent watching In Search Of which begins with "This series presents information based in part in theory and conjecture." I was five years old when I began watching that show! My whole world became based in theory and conjecture!

"come to feel more at home up in the Inconvenience"
Lew has begun the transformation into a ballooner, more comfortable in the heavens than on the Earth. Already on the Earth, he had begun to see things in ways he couldn't unsee: weird hidden districts, labyrinthine hotels, union workers as human beings, chaotic and violent rulers. He was learning inconvenient truths which were edging him out of the comfort of the status quo. The Agency was where one believes what those in power want you to believe, grounded and sure; the Inconvenience is where one can see the true scope of things, throwing a wrench in the comfort of life trying not to care too much about anything but themselves. As Pynchon so starkly stated in Gravity's Rainbow, the "inconvenience of caring" was a thing so abhorred by so many that they would contort their world view and beliefs into pretzels of logic to continue to ignore it.

Chapter 1: Section 6: Page 50: Line 103 (897)

 Lew understood that this business would not end with him walking out the door tonight and over to the El and on to some next assignment.

* * * * * * * * * *

I'm reading this sentence in two ways. First, once Lew walks out of this meeting to go about his other business, nothing will have changed. The people in the meeting still need to fight for their rights. They will continue to strike and to bomb factories and to make as much of a ruckus as they can so that their plight can no longer be ignored by the dumb, content masses. Lew couldn't stop it if he wanted to.
    But the other way to read this—the more important way, I suppose—is that Lew can never go back to the life where he could say he didn't know or care about these kinds of issues. They have broken his heart with their music and their need, with their humanness and Americanness, and it is "unmendable." This business is now his business and he can't ignore it anymore. He'll leave the meeting and he'll go back to White City Investigations and he'll do his assignments. But he can't go back to simply thinking that his assignments do no harm. He'll no longer be able to simply follow orders. He once lived a life where he was able to keep himself from caring. But that life is no more. He can't not care now. He's seen the way things are and he, unlike many other Americans, cannot pretend it's different so that he doesn't have to pay the price of caring.

This experience Lew just had reminds me of Franz Pökler's realization in Gravity's Rainbow about how he allowed himself to not see or care about the concentration camps in Germany:

"Pökler helped with his own blindness. He knew about Nordhausen, and the Dora camp: he could see—the starved bodies, the eyes of the foreign prisoners being marched to work at four in the morning in the freezing cold and darkness, the shuffling thousands in their striped uniforms. He had known too, all along, that Ilse was living in a re-education camp. But it wasn't till August, when the furlough arrived as usual in its blank kraft envelope, and Pökler rode northward through the gray kilometers of a Germany he no longer recognized, bombed and burned, the wartime villages and rainy purple heath, and found her at last waiting in the hotel lobby at Zwölfkinder with the same darkness in her eyes (how had he missed it till now? such swimming orbits of pain) that he could finally put the two data together. For months, while her father across the wire or walls did his dutiful hackwork, she had been prisoner only a few meters away from him, beaten, perhaps violated. . . . If he must curse Weissmann, then he must also curse himself. Weissmann's cruelty was no less resourceful than Pökler's own engineering skill, the gift of Daedalus that allowed him to put as much labyrinth as required between himself and the inconveniences of caring. They had sold him convenience, so much of it, all on credit, and now They were collecting."

"The inconvenience of caring." That's what Nate and his coworkers and his clients are all selling. But Lew, having experienced the songs and the meeting and Moss Gatlin's words, has now, and forever after, been inconvenienced.

* * * * * * * * * *

P.S. the First:
To see the truth, to observe the way things are, to be moved by others' plights, is to be inconvenienced. This is why Pynchon calls the Chums' ship the Inconvenience. They observe those beneath them. They see their plight. They help them overcome.

Chapter 1: Section 6: Page 49: Line 87 (881)

 At first Lew took it for a church—something about the echoes, the smell—though in fact, on weekends anyway, it was a small variety theater.

* * * * * * * * * *

"the smell"
Here's Pynchon writing about the smells of a church in Gravity's Rainbow:

"The old church smells of spilled wine, American sweat, and recently burned cordite, but these are raw newer intrusions that haven't done away with the prevailing Catholic odor—incense, wax, centuries of mild bleating from the lips of the flock."

"took it for a church" "in fact . . . it was a small variety theater"
What is a church except a place to perform acts of faith in front of your neighbors to convince them that you're a holy and righteous person? What is a theater but a place to worship and venerate the human condition? Both contain at least one actor performing for an audience. Both require a strong willingness to suspend disbelief to work (yes, I'm saying that "faith" is a synonym for "suspension of disbelief"). Both are also a place of strong convictions and grand ideas being communicated to the masses. Both perfect places to educate workers on what their rights should be within a capitalist system that purports to believe everybody is free and equal.

Chapter 1: Section 6: Page 47: Line 48 (842)

 One night when it seemed Franz Ferdinand had dropped off the map of greater Chicago, Khäutsch got on the telephone and began calling around town, eventually reaching White City Investigations.

* * * * * * * * * *

It's sometimes difficult to follow Pynchon's narrative, at least in a linear manner. So far, Against the Day is easier to follow than Gravity's Rainbow because it has, so far, confined itself to reality (or near enough to reality). Without warning, Gravity's Rainbow would skew into somebody's fantasy or dream or the narrative would sidestep through time or be taken over by an outside perspective of the book as seen through some other medium, like a musical or comic book or news reel. Then you'd have to re-read that section two or three times to figure it out. I imagine some people, being against re-reading the same book they're currently reading, just powered through until they felt they understood it again. Maybe that's a good recommendation to feel you've gotten a foothold on the narrative but I'm completely against it. Don't move on until you feel you've got a grasp on what just happened! Except that bit where Slothrop climbs into the toilet and winds up in some world where there's only one of everything and some cowboy with his sidekick. That was weird.

What I'm getting at is that this line feels like Max is remembering how he came to be dealing with White City Investigations even though it just pops up as if it's a recent story that goes along with Max's revelation of being too clever to keep an eye on the stupid Archduke. This just seems like the beginning of the origin story of how Max and Lew began working together. Although that theory will probably get blown apart by the next line where Lew covers the call to Max and we already know that Lew learned about the Archduke job when he was given the Austro-Hungarian dossier.
    What this sentence reveals, I think, is Max's hesitancy to admit that he's failed at his only job. Only after he realizes that he's getting nowhere, he calls up his "opposite number" at White City Investigations in the hopes that his familiarity with Chicago will get the job done.

Chapter 1: Section 5: Page 42: Line 160 (742)

 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.

* * * * * * * * * *

"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.

Chapter 1: Section 5: Page 41: Lines 144-145 (726-727)

 "Going off my trolley. And you're trying to help me get back to the way most people live, 's that it?"

* * * * * * * * * *

"Going off my trolley"
This means going mad. So this is another interpretation of what's happening to Lew. Has he simply gone insane? In a way, can't that be seen as losing one's path to their destiny? If we assume madness as some kind of outside affliction, couldn't it be seen as the cause of derailing so many people's destinies, causing them to miss out on the life they were supposed to lead had they kept their sanity? This is a philosophical argument because we can just as easily believe that insanity was their destiny and there was no way to avoid it.
    In Mason & Dixon, Reverend Cherrycoke is banished from England after being declared insane to rebuke him for his leaflets proclaiming certain personages in authority as criminals and miscreants. Being declared mad is a punishment for not keeping your trolley on the track expected of you. Cherrycoke realizes that his name, the thing that is almost interchangeable with his actual identity, never belonged to him. Names are labels for bureaucratic use by authoritarians to keep watch on and to punish those who bounce from their intended rails. Lew is suffering much the same problem. Lew doesn't remember sinning but he's paying the price for somebody using his name (presumably him but, well, he doesn't remember it) which is now tied to the horrible reputation. His name is the signifier for others to treat him punitively.
    I suppose Tyrone Slothrop also goes mad in quite a number of ways in Gravity's Rainbow but I can't quite pluck out any specific scenes from my memory right now. But as for names, he does, in a relatively close space to the center of the book, become dubbed Rocketman. With his new name, he accomplishes things Slothrop probably wouldn't have had the nerve to accomplish and finds himself in places he almost certainly would never have found himself as Slothrop. Like a rocket blasting free from Earth's gravitational pull, Slothrop frees himself by shedding the name that doesn't actually belong to him and taking up an anonymous superhero moniker.

"you're trying to help me get back to the way most people live"
I don't know if Drave is trying to do that, exactly. At this point, I'm not sure what Drave's interest in Lew is. Unless Drave is the devil and he's trying to grab up another soul. Otherwise what does Drave have to gain in this matter? Unless this is some kind of Scientology scheme and he's trying to get Dave back out in the real world to become a success and to owe that success to Drave's weird community, kicking back monthly payments to Drave.

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 "Presbyterian."

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Shrug emoji. All Christian denominations are the same thing to me! This probably indicates something to somebody who grew up in the Midwest or the South. But I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area in California. I'm a fucking heathen. Nobody ever taught me what all the differences to all the denominations were!
    The extent of my "religion" was being baptized when I was born (my mother is, technically, Catholic. My father is one of those other ones) and being forced to go to one Sunday School class when I was about six during a trip to visit my uncle's wife's family in Salina, Kansas.

So I did the most minimal research possible on Presbyterianism (which means I read the Wikipedia article until I found something that ties it in to Pynchon's themes across various novels). I learned Presbyterianism was greatly influenced by John Calvin who believed in predestination. He said, "All are not created on equal terms, but some are preordained to eternal life, others to eternal damnation; and, accordingly, as each has been created for one or other of these ends, we say that he has been predestinated to life or to death." Pynchon seems fascinated with the idea of predestination, mostly in the idea that if one believes in it, one must hold in their hearts the belief that most people, including themselves, can do nothing to attain God's grace. They are damned at birth. The only hope is that they aren't damned at birth (which seems like a pretty major narcissistic hope). In Gravity's Rainbow, he uses the term "Preterite" to describe those destined for death. Here, he brings it up with one mere word. In Mason & Dixon, he brings it up in line 38, page 9, when he invokes the names of Wesley and Whitefield, the founders of the Methodists who had a falling out between them regarding predestination. I can't speak for his other books having either not read them or read them over twenty years ago (The Crying of Lot 49).

That's probably more than enough to write on one word.

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 All through their long discussion they had been walking, walkers in the urban unmappable, and had reached a remote and unfamiliar part of the city—in fact, an enormous district whose existence neither, till now, had even suspected.

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This is like a one sentence distillation of Chapter Three of Gravity's Rainbow, "In the Zone." The landscape becomes an analogy of the mental state of the person/people traversing it. It also sounds like an elevator pitch for a Nick Hornby novel.

This highlights my main problem in college. I feel like those three sentences are enough and the people interested in this topic would get it. But my professor would invariably send the paper back with the middle line underlined and a big red "EXPLAIN" scrawled across the margin. And I'd think, "Who are you, Professor Dumb? Explain that!" And then I'd refuse to explain because I was fine with getting a C grade.

But I guess if I had to explain because I doubt the ability of other people to understand the most simple observations, I'd probably say that the dissolution of a long time loving relationship feels like wandering into an enormous district heretofore unknown to either participant. The world, as a couple, had been mapped out in a very rigid and well-defined way. But now they were "walkers in the urban unmappable," meaning they were in a space within civilization (urban) unaccounted for by anybody up until that moment. A break-up is unthinkable because if you're thinking of breaking up, you're already broken up. In a situation where both parties are seemingly taken by surprise (Lew by not knowing anything about the reason for the break up and Troth upended by rumor, speculation, and gossip), the drama of the break-up is wild virgin jungle being hacked through by the two of them.

Now see? That explanation also takes care of the whole Nick Hornby elevator pitch part! As for the Gravity's Rainbow comparison, if you've read it, you get it. If you haven't, how the fuck am I going to explain it in one blog post when it takes Pynchon himself four hundred pages to do it?!

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 The experts he went to for advice had little to tell him.

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Maybe this Lew Basnight sin is an analogy! Maybe this is actually referencing Pynchon and his critics! Pynchon is all, "What have I done wrong?! Why do people think I'm some unreadable academic wanna-be intellectual?" Except all the critics seem to love him and his sins (i.e. books) according to the blurbs on all of this books. Like this one:

"Heller. Barth. Vonnegut. And now Thomas Pynchon. Catch-22. The Sotweed Factor. Slaughterhouse-Five. And now Gravity's Rainbow."

Talk about a boring book blurb! Maybe that was just the publishing company's back cover copy. "You guys have all heard how great these books are, right?! Well now add this one to the list!" What intrigues me about this list is that I've owned The Sotweed Factor for as long as I've owned Gravity's Rainbow. I just read Gravity's Rainbow last year and it became one of my favorite books alongside Catch-22 and The Grapes of Wrath (I know it would have made more sense to add "and Slaughterhouse-Five" there but I just couldn't do it. I love all of Vonnegut but in a general miasma that includes all of his works in a giant cloud of vapor in my brain which doesn't distinguish his individual novels, essays, or stories). So I suppose I should get to reading The Sotweed Factor already, right?! I mean, it can't be any harder to read than Giles Goat-Boy?

I suspect Giles Goat-Boy was particularly difficult to read because I never attempted post-graduate academic work and that book seems to be all, "Hey? Remember all that shit we went through in graduate school?! Wasn't that silly but also super important because it was our entire universe and our lives depended on it?!" As a non-academic, the only part of Giles Goat-Boy I remember is when the woman bent over the desk in the summer dress.

"The experts"
What experts do you go to when your reputation has been ruined and you don't know why? It's not like they had ways of scrubbing the Internet of that racist photo you took with the other cheerleaders. Oh no! Unless "scrubbing the Internet" in 1893 was just murdering everybody who knew the horrible story?! Maybe that's how Lew stumbles into the detective business!

Chapter 1: Section 5: Page 37: Line 25 (607)

 As to the specifics of this lapse, well, good luck.

* * * * * * * * * *

What?! How dare you, Thomas Pynchon! Finally a hint at an adult revelation and you give us the old "Well, you're not going to hear it from me, you horny goat!" First you have the kids pass by a Reindeer Show, then you have Chick and Darby go backstage at a hoochie coochie show but only off-panel and now you hint at some committed sin and refuse to describe it! I'm getting pretty sick of you not titillating me!

I mean, Gravity's Rainbow had boners blasting off higgledy-piggledy and smashing vaginal craters all over London not to mention that disgusting stuff Pudding was into! So I pick up Against the Day thinking, "Pynchon loves sexual metaphor! This is going to be great!" And then it's all Boy's Adventure Novel shenanigans!

I haven't been this blue-balled since reading The Everlasting Story of Nory by Nicholson Baker!

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 "Although the longer a fellow's name has been in the magazines, the harder it is to tell fiction from non-fiction."

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Okay, maybe Randolph does understand the ambiguity of comparing the Chums to Wyatt Earp.

I'm sure Pynchon loved the idea of suggesting the difficulty of telling fiction from non-fiction since he puts so much effort into the historical accuracy of his books while also seeding them with wildly unbelievable scenes and confusing but imaginative flights of fancy. Just think about Byron the Bulb in Gravity's Rainbow! Nobody's going to mistake that for non-fiction but it's the kind of whimsical strangeness that he loves to sprinkle into texts full of painstakingly accurate details. So you know Pynchon will vacillate wildly from one extreme to the other so that when you're reading a bit that sounds historically accurate, you can't know for sure that it's not. Or what about that scene in Gravity's Rainbow where Slothrop is being cajoled into eating all the wine jellies and it's so funny that you figure it's all got to be made up but then you accidentally find an old advertisement on the Internet for a Meggezone and your head explodes and you decide, "I'm just going to believe everything Pynchon writes is true until somebody disproves it for me."

So right now, I believe young lads flew around the world in airships, dogs could talk and read, and Laszlo Jamf once conditioned a baby to get unprovoked boners. Which, while obviously being silly in a shocking way, is based on the Pavlovian "Little Albert" experiment by John Watson and Rosalie Rayner in which they conditioned a small child to be afraid of small animals. Famously in this experiment, like in Slothrop's case, Little Albert was never deconditioned, let alone brought back to "beyond the zero."