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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."

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 "No more than Wyatt Earp or Nellie Bly," Randolph supposed.

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Wyatt Earp and Nellie Bly are famously regarded as real people and not storybook characters.

"Wyatt Earp"
The mention of Wyatt Earp is probably meant to tie in to the picture of Doc Holliday in Nate Privett's office. But he's also a living person made famous by his exploits hunting down the Cowboys in Tombstone, Arizona. Unbeknownst to Randolph, he's a nicely ambiguous choice for modern readers because what we know of Wyatt Earp is almost certainly highly fictionalized from Hollywood movies. So Randolph isn't exactly clearing up the question as to whether the Chums are storybook characters or not.

"Nellie Bly"
Randolph probably chooses to compare the Chums of Chance to Nellie Bly because of her trip around the world, alone, in 72 days. Not that she was alone the whole way, steering empty steam ships and acting as the conductor on international trains! She just wasn't chaperoned and didn't have any friends. It was quite sad.
    Nellie Bly also infiltrated an insane asylum, inventing gonzo journalism. Unless she just invented investigative journalism. Maybe if she'd done more drugs and had more sex while in the asylum, she could have invented gonzo journalism.

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 "Wild West, African explorers, the usual adventure stuff. But you boys—you're not storybook characters." He had a thought. "Are you?"

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Thanks for asking at least one tough question, Lew! Here are some others you might consider: What are these kids?! Who's publishing their stories?! How do they have a dog that can read, talk (incomprehensibly to most but the Chums seem to understand him), and loves to fight?! Where are their parents? Does Randolph St. Cosmo think I'm cute? What organization do they work for that basically operates under the "Prime Directive" from Star Trek?

Obviously we, the readers, know they're storybook characters. Even Lew is a storybook character so it's odd that he's asking other storybook characters if they're storybook characters. It's like when I'm in a dream and I ask another person in the dream if they're a dream but, even in the dream, I still hold onto the belief that I'm real. It's also like when I'm not in a dream and I ask another person if they're a dream while I'm still holding onto the belief that I'm real.

I am real. Aren't I?

"He had a thought. 'Are you?'"
How insane does Lew Basnight have to be to seriously think these kids are storybook characters? I mean they are storybook characters so I guess Lew is actually having a major epiphany here and isn't insane at all. He's the only one suddenly seeing clearly! But if I suspend my disbelief and try to forget that this is a storybook I'm reading then Lew totally seems to have lost his mind, right?

I'm so confused.

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 Lew obligingly tried to remember.

* * * * * * * * * *

Lew's old enough to have a hard time remembering what books he read as a youth. How long have the Chums of Chance been around?! That's a rhetorical question because I know the answer is "eternity," what with being angels and all.

* * * * * * * * * *

Postscript: We'll find out later that Lew has a bit of an issue with his memories. The version of me that's on Page 48 of the book is writing this so we might find out, eventually, what that's all about. My main theory is that he somehow slipped from one timeline to this one. And the timeline Lew came from is the real version of this book's storybook version. So he's, in some way, more real than the other characters.

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 "But every boy knows the Chums of Chance," declared Lindsay Noseworth perplexedly. "What could you've been reading, as a youth?"

* * * * * * * * * *

Either Lew is pretty near the same age as the Chums of Chance or Lindsay has just declared the Chums of Chance are either a long standing club with rotating members or the Chums of Chance have always been the current roster, for years and years, because they're either ghosts or angels. You know which one I believe! Although maybe you don't if you haven't been reading my hundreds of blog posts on this book. I believe they're angels! And not just any angels! Randolph St. Cosmo, the captain, is the embodiment of Orc from William Blake's America a Prophecy.

I guess we're also learning that the Chums of Chance books were huge nationwide hits that every American boy proudly read (and every American girl secretly). And that means Lew Basnight isn't American! Or if he is American, he isn't cool and if he's not cool, he isn't American! Or he's from a different dimension which is my favorite theory which I'll definitely have you believing once we get to the Lew Basnight section.

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 Lew Basnight seemed a sociable enough young man, though it soon became obvious that he had not, until now, so much as heard of the Chums of Chance.

* * * * * * * * * *

If you're hanging out with the Chums of Chance and they realize you don't know who they are, the best they can describe you as is "sociable enough." That's more forgiving than how I'd think of him if he hadn't heard of Grunion Guy. I mean, how can you not have heard of Grunion Guy? The author of "A Really Scary Story" which was once read by Daniel Justice before a large crowd of science fiction nerds that included Connie Willis?

Speaking of Daniel, I'll be playing in a Zoom D&D campaign that he's Dungeon Mastering soon (if it doesn't all fall apart). I'm going to be playing my Dryad Paladin named Preterite Chastain. I'm super nervous since I haven't played D&D for years and I've never played in a game that wasn't just all of my long time high school friends! What if I embarrass myself by making Preterite too sexy?!

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 "Broke these in on the Ferris wheel," he said, "but couldn't figure out how to compensate for the movement. Gets blurry and so forth."

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"Ferris wheel"
The Ferris wheel was introduced at the Chicago World's Fair. Apparently it wasn't the first "sit on a wheel and go up in the air" amusement ride. But it was inarguably something completely different based on the size and scale.

The Chicago World's Fair Ferris wheel was 264 feet high. Each compartment could hold up to sixty people. And the ride took 10-20 minutes. I don't know why there's such a huge difference in the estimated time for a ride! Did the wheel have different settings to speed it up or slow it down depending on how many people were waiting to spend their fifty cents on it? Apparently, according to Lew here (the "spotter"), it moved fast enough so that his telescope constantly lost focus of the area he was observing. It's sort of the same principle as to why you can't write an accurate book about the entire 19th century. You have to focus on a smaller area and then spend 1000 pages detailing what you see. Because the movement of history makes things blurry and so forth.

"couldn't figure out how to compensate for the movement"
Imagine all the people who read this line and just move quickly past it. Imagine how blurry the entire text becomes when the reader moves past every line at the same speed. How do you compensate for that as an author?! You probably begin your novel with the line, "Now single up all lines!"
    That wasn't what I was going to say about this. I really wanted to talk about movement and telescopes. I had a backyard telescope that I used often in my late teens and early twenties. It was powerful enough to see some of the moons of Jupiter (as dots and shadows on the planet! Not in great detail!). I wasn't on a Ferris wheel but I, too, had to compensate for movement of the Earth (but not for focus, of course. You know how Lew could have compensated for movement that wouldn't have caused what he was looking at to go blurry? Look out of the side window of the Ferris wheel and not the window that aligns with the wheel's movement!). The telescope had a flexible tube sticking out of it with a dial on it that you would twist as you were observing some far off celestial object so that it wouldn't disappear from your view as the Earth rotated. It's hard to keep something so far away in such a small frame!
    The difficulty of observation in these cases is that both the observer and the observed are in constant motion. History can be viewed in the same way if we realize that our beliefs and attitudes, ethics and moralities, change drastically across time. So a historian of the 1890s writing in the 1940s would come to drastically different conclusions because their focus would be completely different. And the further we get away from the 1890s in time, the less detail we can make out. But we're also observing it with totally different instruments (i.e. our modern perceptions).