Against the Day

[FanboyStranger]

I didn't really want to start his thread because I didn't want to expend any effort beyond

hey, has anyone been reading this book besides me?

but after posting a few of my thoughts about it on the Best Opening Line thread, I almost needed to know

hey, has anyone been reading this book besides me?

Personally, I feel it's the most accessable of Pynchon's major novels (more managable amount of characters, for starters), and it would seem to be a lock amongst posters on a comic book site as it features some very pulp characters in the Chums of Chance as well as one of history's great mysteries in the Tunguska Blast. (Granted, I read Vertigo comics.) It's Pynchon, so it's got the density and the sense of humor (finally, the true origin of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer-- take that, Mark Waid), but once you get passed those cork-screw, endless sentences, it's almost a page-turner. And the time period involved-- the late 19th century through WWI-- seems so short-shifted in recent literature compared to the build-up to WWII (let alone the actual war!), despite the fact that it informs so many of the world's current conflicts.

I highly recommend it, although if you already dislike Pynchon, I doubt you'll be won over. (Fence-straddlers might come over to the right side, however.)

Looking foward to any discussion that might develop.:o

(Which is a weak way of saying that I'm too tired to write a good post to foster discussion.)

[Roquefort Raider]

I haven't read it, but your funny opening post makes me wish that I had, if only to contribute something useful to the thread. As it is, I'll try to see if our public library has a copy.

One can't get enough of the Tunguska blast.

[Doodle Bob]

I haven't read it...

I'm in the same boat. I just re-read GR and loved it so much that I suddenly thought that I might just go through all of them before hitting upon Against the Day.

I don't know if I can hold out though, since apparently one of the many esoteric topics he covers is the invention of quaternions, which forms a big chunk of my research.

[FanboyStranger]

I'm in the same boat. I just re-read GR and loved it so much that I suddenly thought that I might just go through all of them before hitting upon Against the Day.

I don't know if I can hold out though, since apparently one of the many esoteric topics he covers is the invention of quaternions, which forms a big chunk of my research.

Quarterions, vectorism, and mathematical arguments as belief systems like unto religion (academics turn into crusaders) are major plot points, particularly for one of the central characters. As is a secret occult society similar to the Order of the Golden Dawn which holds that Pythagoras knew the secret of the universe. To be frank, the quarterion vs. vectorism plot is the one area that I was fairly ignorant about. Is there any introduction on those topics that even a humanities guy like myself can read to get up to speed?

[Doodle Bob]

To be frank, the quarterion vs. vectorism plot is the one area that I was fairly ignorant about. Is there any introduction on those topics that even a humanities guy like myself can read to get up to speed?

Actually, that's a good question... This was one of the sticking points that Louis Menand complained about in his screed of a review of this book in the New Yorker. (Somehow I think he didn't actually read the book so much as skim it)

The quaternions are a 4-dimensional number system that Hamilton invented in 1843. It's always slightly unclear as to *why* he was bent on doing this, but it seems that he was mostly motivated in trying to find a higher-dimensional analogue of the 2-dimensional complex number system (you remember from high school: those "imaginary" numbers). Later in that century, researchers found that they could use quaternions to elegantly represent such diverse things as transformations in 3-space (rotations, translations, etc.) and Maxwell's Equations of Electromagnetism.

At the same time though other mathematicians/physicists were coming up with *different* representations of the same phenomena -- the so-called vector algebra. This involves matrices, determinants, and all that.

As strange as it may seem, the nastiness between advocates for either system got to be quite intense sometimes. In fact, it was never really resolved so much as people moved *beyond* the debate and learned to use both representations, depending on the situation.

If you have any further questions, feel free to ask me. Wikipedia's entries on these things are fairly accurate. Just look up "quaternion" and follow the threads.