600+ pages into it now - it's really good.
Two bits in particular have been outstanding:
Painting:
Dally in Venice with the painter, Hunter, who is painting the same street corner day after day, trying to capture the light right. It's quite close to some reading/writing I've done around smog in london "causing" Impressionism in the 1890s, cos of what it did to the light.
So Monet and Whistler there, who he mentions.
But interestingly, Pynchon latches onto the fog in Venice and makes this genius connection with all his maths talk:
"In Venice we have a couple of thousand words for fog: Nebbia, Nebbieta, Foschia, Caligo, Sfumato. And the speed of sound being a function of the density is different in each.
In Venice, space and time, being more dependent on hearing than sight, are actually modulated by fog."
I was inspired to think about the effects of smog cos I was going to loads of gigs, particularly at the white hotel but also Dean Blunt ones, where the room is just filled with smoke, so full it's disorienting. A lot of red light:
And I thought about how it would concentrate your attention on the music, but I love what Pynchon says about it actually affecting sound, and had not thought that before.
And he's got a lovely poetry when talking about the "noise" in the sky which affects the light, the "sky scatter".
I love this from him as well:
"It's as if these Venetian painters saw things we can't see anymore"
in reference to Dally and Hunter looking at this painting by Tintoretto.
It reminds me of when Levi-Strauss is in the Amazon jungle and the tribe are pointing out Sirius to him, and he can't see it. But they can, their eyes are attuned to it, whereas his aren't.
And then a bit later on, they are talking to this other painter, Tancredi:
"To reveal the future, we must get around the inertia of paint. Paint wishes to remain as it is. We desire transformation. So this not so much a painting as a dialectical argument."
I looked up Tancredi, he's real, but from the 50s. So he's come back in time I think, cos it's the early 1900s at latest, is before WW1.
And it seems to be based on what he was actually doing, using splatters and then working them up.
Gas:
"Connected by gas for emotional reasons"
There's this character Replevin, who is using gas as a means of communication. He gets investigated cos there's a suspicion he knows the secret location of Shambhala, which is one of the subplots.
So this guy goes over on a pretence of selling him some insurance and finds him hanging upside with his head in an oven - gas mask on.
And Replevin says:
"Via the medium of gas a carefully modulated set of waves travels from the emissions facility to us through the appropriate hoses to the receiving mask you have seen, which one must of course wear over ears, nose and mouth."
And also:
"Smell can be a medium for the most exquisite poetry."
It gets better - he goes onto explain how in India, there are temples where empty space is worshipped. Pure "Akasa" which can be thought of as "Ether" is the 5th element.
So he talks about how this "nothing" contains "everything" - "Atman".
But then explains that from the Sanskrit "Akasa", the Greeks derived "Chaos", which then becomes "Gas" because the alchemist working on it was Dutch, so the Greek "Ch" gets rendered as "Gas".
"
Our own modern chaos, our bearer of sound and light, the akasa flowing from our sacred spring, the local gasworks. Do you wonder that for some the gas oven is worshipped at, as a sort of shrine".
Genius stuff.