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 The state of reduced attention into which he seemed then to have drifted was broken soon enough by Lindsay, advising, biliously, "As I am sure it has not escaped your attention, Blundell's ineptness with the Main Valve, grown I fear habitual, has increased the speed of our descent to a notable, if not in fact, alarming, degree."

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I'm certain Pynchon meant for "biliously" to work in both of its definitions here, meaning Lindsay was spiteful because he's Lindsay the Vulcan Hall Monitor and also "nauseated" because the airship is now plummeting too quickly to the ground. He's so smart, that Pynchon!

According to Lindsay's prolonged observations about Blundell's lack of skills as a crewman, Lindsay would rather be proven right about his observations that Blundell is inept than prevent the Inconvenience from someday plummeting to the ground in a fiery explosion. He probably noticed Blundell's careless attitude with the Main Valve over time and waited for the exact moment when he realized Blundell had failed just enough to create a dangerous situation but not one from which they could not extract themselves. Simply so he could get a nice smug moment in.

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 Close to sundown, south of the city, as the Inconvenience bobbed in fitful breezes above a sweeping stretch of prairie which was to be the site this week of the great international gathering of aeronauts being held in conjunction with the World's Fair, "Professor" St. Cosmo, spying at length a clear patch of meadow among the vast population of airships already berthed below, had given the order, "Prepare to descend."

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When do we get the entertaining Three's Company-esque misunderstanding that garnered Cosmo the nickname of "Professor"? If you're not familiar with Three's Company because you're young, it was a sitcom in which the premise of every joke was that the landlord only let the guy live with the two gals because he thought the guy was gay but then every time he eavesdropped on the guy and the gals talking, he would think they were talking about fucking and he'd get super upset until he found out they were really just talking about baking a cake or something and then he'd wipe the sweat from his brow and say, "I knew Jack was totally gay the whole time!" Then the audience would laugh and Chrissy's nipples would show through her shirt.

Chrissy's nipples probably accounted for 40 percent of the audience.

I'm not sure it's relevant or, if it is, how but we get a lot of "declining" imagery in this sentence: "sundown," "south," "descend." Maybe it's all a metaphor for the balloons landing at their aeronaut Comic-con.

During the first chapter, the reader may have thought the Chums of Chance were a unique occurrence in Pynchon's 1893. But now we see it's a huge hobby with a "vast population." The world must be filled with fictional books of all of their exploits, right? I wonder if there's another crew called the Lads of Law who travel with a cat who writes poetry?

I bet Cosmo's statement, "Prepare to descend," has a greater meaning than just landing the balloon. The Chums of Chance are not just going terrestrial in the sense that they're leaving the sky and hitting the ground; they're probably also descending into a more vulgar world, filled with vice and intrigue and earthly lusts. They are very much descending from a kind of wondrous and pure heaven into a lawless and (hopefully) sexy world full of sinners!

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 From this height it was as if the Chums, who, out on adventures past, had often witnessed the vast herds of cattle adrift in ever-changing cloudlike patterns across the Western plains, here saw that unshaped freedom being rationalized into movement only in straight lines and at right angles and a progressive reduction of choices, until the final turn through the final gate that led to the killing floor.

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Sure, we get a depressing look at the meatpacking industry here. But we also get a nice metaphor for people moving from rural life into the city.

I wrote this in my recent Gravity's Rainbow entry but since it concerned this line, I'm just going to copy and paste it here too!

In postmodern writing, you encounter a lot of images and metaphors of the Labyrinth. In these two passages [This was the other passage: "Something was done to him, and it may be that Katje knows what. Hasn't he, in her "futureless look," found some link to his own past, something that connects them closely as lovers? He sees her standing at the end of a passage in her life, without any next step to take—all her bets are in, she has only the tedium now of being knocked from one room to the next, a sequence of numbered rooms whose numbers do not matter, till inertia brings her to the last. That's all."], you get the exact opposite. You have people (and cows! But I think the cows really represent the immigrants of Chicago here! (hell, they really just represent us all and the aging process)) whose lives, while starting out full of freedom and choices, have come to that point where the previous choices made have cut off opportunities for further choice, winnowing their lives down to a single path which they can only follow helplessly until death. The cows have been forced into this kind of life just like the people of Chicago (earlier, the city had been described as being a Cartesian grid which the right angles and straight lines of the cow's Stockyard enclosure echo); life on the plains was a kind of freedom while life in the city a trudging journey along a single corridor maze to the killing room floor. Katje has sort of arrived at the same kind of place even though she's still young. But her choices have narrowed her chances at new opportunities faster than most: Blicero's sex slave, Allied spy, obligation to Prentice for rescuing her, Pointsman's tool, and now Slothrop's keeper. Not much choice for her in most of that. Just a roulette ball skipping about from number to number on a circular path, the number where it will eventually come to rest having no real meaning to the journey.

So here Pynchon uses the Chicago Stockyard as a metaphor for life, especially that of the industrial revolution's effect on rural life and the mass immigration to urban centers. In Gravity's Rainbow, he uses the Roulette ball bouncing around a roulette wheel as the metaphor. Apparently anything that describes movement without purpose can be used as a metaphor for life. Like a pinwheel in a graveyard!

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 Indeed, the backs of cattle far outnumbered the tops of human hats.

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In some ways, I've come to believe that Pynchon simply retains every bit of trivia about history and society and cows and phalluses and eras and decades because he always manages to casually write sentences that convince me of it. Maybe I'm just naïve and every author who writes a book that takes place in a past era researches it to such a degree that they also would never make the mistake of saying "the backs of cattle far outnumbered the tops of human heads" in an era where everybody wore hats constantly.

Because in other ways, it's also possible Thomas Pynchon makes tons and tons of mistakes and the magic is how he's convinced me that every single thing he writes is accurate. It's much the same way in that I believe everything he writes about actually happened, historically, until somebody tells me otherwise. So until I see a documentary that expressly states that child aeronauts were not flying airships around the world in 1893, I'm going to go on believing that's the historical part of this novel and not the fiction part.

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 "The Great Bovine City of the World," breathed Lindsay in wonder.

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Sure, Lindsay's talking about the amount of cows he can see in the Stockyards but we know the subtext, right? Right?!

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 Beneath the rubbernecking Chums of Chance wheeled streets and alleyways in a Cartesian grid, sketched in sepia, mile on mile.

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Can you get a better mental image than this in such succinct language? Basically, the kids are looking down at an old map of Chicago. But it also evokes how gray the entire place is. Four lines into the second section and I'm fucking depressed. But at least the Chums are excited! So much to look at! And that's just the terrible, disgusting, poverty-filled streets of Chicago! Wait until they get to the World's Fair and they get to see some beautiful things!

I've always thought of American cities as Cartesian grids and European cities as random fucking scribbles. But I never really thought about East Coast cities much. Some of the older ones are probably labyrinths, right?!

I grew up in California so the amount I know about the East Coast is less than the amount I know about everything else which is almost nothing. But I know all about surfing!

That's not true. I spent all of my youth playing Warhammer.

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 In the Stockyards, workers coming off shift, overwhelmingly of the Roman faith, able to detach from earth and blood for a few precious seconds, looked up at the airship in wonder, imagining a detachment of not necessarily helpful angels.

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There's a lot to un(meat)pack in this one! Ha ha!

I grew up areligious so I've always had a tough time distinguishing the differences of all the various types of Christianity. So labeling the workers "of the Roman faith" probably expresses something that my non-religious upbringing and ignorance of various faiths occludes from my view. But it seems to me it's just part of the pessimism of these poor workers. It's also probably a means to describe them, from an oblique angle, as immigrants.

So here we have some workers leaving the blood and the stench and the mud and the mortality of the Stockyards gaining a moment to look up at a truly wonderous sight and then thinking, "Oh fuck. What now?" Instead of, you know, marveling at the glory of this passing airship.

At first I thought maybe it was something in Roman Catholicism that makes them think these descending angels were not beneficent. But then I talked over the ramifications of nationality and Victorian era Chicago and Roman Catholicism and the working class with the Non-Certified Spouse and came to the conclusion that all of this contributes to creating a person who would not assume a positive outcome in any situation.

Also maybe they just figured, "Whelp. Everything sucks and now it's Revelations time! I fucking knew it!"