User:Trialsanderrors/List of references in Against the Day

Abstruse topics in Against the Day, a novel released in 2006 by Thomas Pynchon, are numerous.

Historical events
Steven Moore, in a Washington Post book review, suggests, "A good warm-up exercise for reading this is the 'Robber Barons and Rebels' chapter in Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States; Pynchon shares Zinn's populist viewpoint."


 * Macedonian Question
 * World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893
 * World War I

U.S. labor history
See also: Labor unions in the United States, for a history of U.S. labor relations in the period


 * Coeur d'Alene
 * Cripple Creek strike (1894)
 * Haymarket bombing (May 4, 1886)


 * Homestead Strike (1892)
 * Ludlow massacre (1914)
 * Mother Jones

Mexican Revolution

 * Mexican Revolution
 * Venustiano Carranza
 * Porfirio Diaz
 * Victoriano Huerta


 * Francisco Madero
 * Álvaro Obregón
 * Pancho Villa
 * Emiliano Zapata

Years of the narrative
As a work of historical fiction, the book often refers to events no longer widely known. These Wikipedia pages mention and link to events the narrative may mention (the book is unclear as to when the narrative actually ends; most reviewers say it ends not long after World War I):

Geography
One of the underlying and intermingled themes of Against the Day is the irrelevancy of time and of place. Likewise, John Clute notes that Pynchon "conveys sense of place with such astonishing intensity that his Chicago and New York and London and Venice and places east seem too dense for one world to hold them, for his descriptions of cities read like descriptions of their absolute 'eternal' substance." Events that occur within the book regularly relate to events a world away, or events in imaginary space, and a significant amount of the action occurs in the air, in balloons floating above and looking over places in time. Relevant locations include:

North America
 * Chicago, 1893
 * Cleveland, Ohio
 * Colorado
 * Telluride
 * Colorado Springs
 * Denver
 * Leadville


 * Hollywood
 * New Haven, Connecticut
 * New York City
 * Mexico
 * Tenochtitlan


 * Greenland

Non-existent Europe and Asia
 * The Hollow Earth
 * Shambhala
 * Jeshimon, Utah (Biblically, Jeshimon is a wasteland south of the dead sea; Num. 21:20; 23:28)
 * Iceland
 * Norway
 * London
 * Chipping Sodbury
 * Paris
 * Göttingen, Germany
 * University of Göttingen
 * Vienna

Asia Africa Other
 * Macedonia
 * Constantinople (Istanbul)
 * Croatia
 * Trieste
 * Venice, 1902†
 * Franz Josef Land
 * Siberia
 * Johannesburg
 * Transvaal
 * Agadir
 * North Polar Region
 * Antarctica

† (with speculation about 1902's relationship to other times)

Abstruse subjects
Stuart Kelly, in Scotland on Sunday writes that Pynchon's use of false scientific ideas of the 1893-1920 period has a thematic purpose:


 * Pynchon has a lot of mordant fun with the scientific theories of the day. [...] [T]he red herrings and hopeless optimism of a bygone era are used to throw the coming darkness into stark relief.


 * Pynchon ransacks popular literature [...] not to parody it, but to contrast the happy endings and averted catastrophes with the historical reality.

Roger Gathman, in the Austin American-Statesman warns, "Be prepared for talk of eigenvalues and Hermittian [sic] operators, which you won't understand and aren't expected to."

Science and mathematics

 * Charles Bonnet syndrome
 * Brownian movements
 * eigenvalues
 * Leonhard Euler
 * Willard Gibbs
 * Sir William Rowan Hamilton
 * Oliver Heaviside
 * Hermitian operator
 * Heinrich Rudolf Hertz
 * David Hilbert
 * imaginary numbers
 * Felix Klein
 * the physics of light
 * Cesare Lombroso
 * Maxwell field equations
 * Vacuum
 * Aether, a term that has several meanings
 * Explorer's Club


 * Hermann Minkowski
 * Fridtjof Nansen
 * Peter Ouspensky
 * Marco Polo
 * Quaternion theory
 * double refraction
 * perfect mirrors
 * Pythagoreans
 * Bernhard Riemann
 * Nikola Tesla
 * multidimensional vector-space
 * Wave functions
 * Karl Weierstrass
 * lateral world-sets
 * zeta-function
 * Hollow earth theory

Explosives and explosive events
There is a wide range of discussion in the book about the use and science of explosives. This includes discussion set in the Western landscapes where individual members of the Traverse family each have differing relationships to and use of explosives to the landmines and incendiary devices that beset the Chums of Chance on their travels.


 * Landmines
 * Dynamite
 * TNT
 * Nitroglycerine
 * Kieselguhr


 * Mayonnaise
 * Haymarket bombing (May 4, 1886)
 * mysterious collapse of St Mark's Campanile
 * in the Piazza San Marco, Venice, 1902


 * Tunguska Event, in 1908

The mystical and the mythical

 * Bilocation
 * Buddhism
 * Eternal return
 * Kabbalistic Tarot
 * Manicheans


 * Turn-of-the-century Parapsychology
 * Niflheim
 * Shambhala, the Buddhist utopian myth
 * Tommyknockers
 * Ynglingsaga
 * Tatzelwurm

Other

 * Futurism
 * Kanuni Lekë Dukagjinit,
 * Albanian honor code


 * Allan Pinkerton
 * Poison gas
 * Oscar Wilde
 * Tetris, Popular video game

Abstruse words
In this book and others, Pynchon often uses words that would send nearly every reader to a dictionary, although many of these words are not in typical dictionaries:


 * absquatulate &mdash; v: run away; usually implies taking something or somebody along
 * cataplexy &mdash; n : sudden loss of muscle power following a strong emotional stimulus
 * embonpoint &mdash; n: the plump or fleshy part of a person's body (page 25)
 * fulgurescence &mdash; n : an emission in flashes or sparks, like lightning
 * gamomania &mdash; n: extreme desire to be married (page 432)
 * gynecophobia &mdash; n: fear of women (page 501)
 * mephitically &mdash; adv: resembling a mephitis &mdash; an offensive smell or stench; poisonous or foul-smelling gas emitted from the earth (page 129)
 * mouchard &mdash; n: police spy (page 560)
 * mousmée &mdash; a type of hydrangea flower (page 560)
 * xanthochroid &mdash; adj: blonde, blonde hair - a Greek neologism