User:Nicdafis

Nic's Reading Notes

...or, a record of my ignorance.

I like big books, and I like using readers' guides to help navigate my way through the choppier of their seas. Some authors have fanbases which tend to the nerdier, and have produced wiki-like sites: I've used several of the guides on the Pynchon wiki and would have been completely overwhelmed by the howling fantods while reading Infinite Jest without the good work of the contributers to the Wallace wiki. There are also excellent resouces available for readers of Anthony Powell's 12-volume epic, A Dance to the Music of Time (thanks to the Anthony Powell Society), and Dorothy Richardson's 13-volume modernist classic, Pilgrimage is being explored and explicated by Reading Pilgrimage, still an ongoing project as I write this in April 2022. The more populist and/or "genre" novelists I enjoy have been particularly well-served, of course. A Wiki of Ice and Fire is always there if I ever have reason to return to Westeros, and I'm sure there a million Tolkien sites out there.

Anyway, I thought I'd make a contribution. As a Reader of Very Little Brain, I won't be adding much to the scholarly understanding of anything that I post about on this page (or wherever it ends up if and when I move it to a URL of its own). Everything you see below will have been cut and pasted from articles on Wikipedia, Wiktionary or Wikiquote, lightly edited to suit my own tastes and prejudices (nothing serious, just things like removing redundant measurements where the article shows miles and km, overly specific dates of birth for historical characters, etc).

Of course, this being Wikipedia, anyone can edit this page, so if you happen to find yourself here while tackling one of these doorstops, feel free to jump in. My criteria, not that you need to stick to them, are to make an entry for any textual reference that would either cause me to pause reading and look up online, or (far more commonly, and the main reason I'm trying this) I would normally just glide over, and miss out out on a bit of the book's potential richness. I won't post spoilers for the plot (there'll be a link to a synopsis, if I can find one), just work my way through the book as I normally would. As a quick example: I've heard of Prince Edward Island in Canada, but I wouldn't have been able to tell you which coast it was off, and I certainly didn't know it is the smallest and most densely populated of the Canadian Provinces. So that gets a gloss, and any Canadian readers get to tut at me. Tasmania and Greenland, in that same early paragraph, don't get glosses, because, well, I'm not stupid.

Shut up, Canada.

(If I do add any of my own comments, they'll be in italics.)

If this goes well with Foucault's Pendulum, I might do a Welsh language book next, but that will for different reasons (it's my second language, and my vocabulary is still shamefully shallow), and probably have a more limited potential utility for anyone else, other than Welsh learners. If that ever happens, I'll use my User page on the Welsh language Wicipedia.

Foucault’s Pendulum - Umberto Eco

Resources and Links

• Plot summary (here be spoilers!)
• Penguin Books (current UK Publisher)

Titel

A Print of the Foucault Pendulum, 1895

The Foucault pendulum or Foucault's pendulum is a device named after French physicist Léon Foucault, conceived as an experiment to demonstrate the Earth's rotation. The pendulum was introduced in 1851 and was the first experiment to give simple, direct evidence of the Earth's rotation. Foucault pendulums today are popular displays in science museums and universities.

Epigraphs

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486 – 1535) was a German polymath, physician, legal scholar, soldier, theologian, and occult writer. Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy published in 1533 drew heavily upon Kabbalah, Hermeticism, and neo-Platonism. His book was widely influential among occultists of the early modern period, and was condemned as heretical by the inquisitor of Cologne.

Raymond Merrill Smullyan (/ˈsmʌliən/; 1919 – 2017) was an American mathematician, magician, concert pianist, logician, Taoist, and philosopher.

KETER (section 1)

1

Keter (Hebrew: כֶּתֶר‎ (help·info), keṯer "crown") also known as Kether, is the topmost of the sephirot of the Tree of Life in Kabbalah. Since its meaning is "crown", it is interpreted as both the "topmost" of the Sephirot and the "regal crown" of the Sephirot.

Chapter 1 (pp 3-9)

[3] - epigraph

"When the Light of the Endless was drawn in the form of a straight line in the Void... it was not drawn and extended immediately downwards, indeed it extended slowly — that is to say, at first the Line of Light began to extend and at the very start of its extension in the secret of the Line it was drawn and shaped into a wheel, perfectly circular all around." (Wikiquote)

[4]

pentaculum - Latinised version of pentacle (a talisman of parchment, sheet metal, or other substance, marked with a magic symbol or symbols, used in magical evocation) - compare pentagram

Mu is a mystical lost continent introduced by Augustus Le Plongeon, who used the "Land of Mu" as an alternative name for Atlantis.

Prince Edward Island (PEI) is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada. It is the smallest province in terms of land area and population, but the most densely populated. It is located in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, about 120 miles north of Halifax and 370 miles east of Quebec City.

Novaya Zemlya (Russian: Но́вая Земля́, IPA: [ˈnovəjə zʲɪmˈlʲa], lit. 'New Land') is an archipelago in the northern part of Russia. It is situated in the Arctic Ocean, in the extreme northeast of Europe. It houses the easternmost point of Europe: Cape Flissingsky on the Northern island.

Solomon's Temple, was the first Temple in Jerusalem, according to the Hebrew Bible. It was built during Solomon's reign over the United Kingdom of Israel and was fully constructed by c. 957 BCE. It stood for almost four centuries until its destruction in 587/586 BCE by the Neo-Babylonian Empire under the second Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar II.

Saint-Martin-des-Champs was an influential monastery established in what is now the city of Paris, France. Its surviving buildings are considered treasures of Medieval architecture in the city. The original Foucault Pendulum was housed there from 1855 until it was irreparably damaged in 2010.

[5]

Only Fixed Point in the universe - presumably central to the plot, if not to the actual Universe: The center of the Universe is a concept that lacks a coherent definition in modern astronomy; according to standard cosmological theories on the shape of the universe, it has no center.

Observatoire de Paris, a research institution of the Paris Sciences et Lettres University was founded in 1667, and is the foremost astronomical observatory of France, and one of the largest astronomical centers in the world. Its historic building is on the Left Bank of the Seine in central Paris, but most of the staff work on a satellite campus in Meudon, a suburb southwest of Paris.

The Panthéon is a monument in the 5th arrondissement of Paris, France. It stands in the Latin Quarter, atop the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, in the centre of the Place du Panthéon, which was named after it.

[6]

"Panta rhei, or 'everything flows' is probably the most familiar of Heraclitus' sayings, yet few modern scholars think he said it." Jonathan Barnes observes that although the exact phrase is not ascribed to Heraclitus until the 6th century by Simplicius of Cilicia, a similar saying representing the same theory, panta chorei, or "everything moves" is ascribed to Heraclitus by Plato in the Cratylus.

Ein Sof (Hebrew: אֵין סוֹף‎ ʾēyn sōf; "infinite", lit. "without end"), in Kabbalah, is understood as God prior to any self-manifestation in the production of any spiritual realm.

the Plan, the Universal Plot - first mention of Belbo's "Plan"

Numinous is a term derived from the Latin numen, meaning "arousing spiritual or religious emotion; mysterious or awe-inspiring." The term was given its present sense by the German theologian and philosopher Rudolf Otto in his influential 1917 German book The Idea of the Holy. He also used the phrase mysterium tremendum as another description for the phenomenon. Otto's concept of the numinous influenced thinkers including Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, and C. S. Lewis. It has been applied to theology, psychology, religious studies, literary analysis, and descriptions of psychedelic experiences.

An ogive (OH-jive) is the roundly tapered end of a two-dimensional or three-dimensional object. Ogive curves and surfaces are used in engineering, architecture and woodworking.

[7]

angry archons - in Gnostic religious traditions, the term archon generally refers to a group of seven supernatural beings, associated with the seven classical planets and considered to be responsible for the creation of the physical world.

Louis Charles Breguet (1880-1955) was a French aircraft designer and builder, one of the early aviation pioneers. Sported a fabulous moustache.

Louis Charles Joseph Blériot (1872-1936) was a French aviator, inventor, and engineer. Another magnificent 'tache.

Robert Albert Charles Esnault-Pelterie (1881-1957) was a French aircraft designer and spaceflight theorist, one of the founders of modern rocketry and astronautics. I think we have a winner.

Dufaux helicopter (1905). Musée des Arts et Métiers, Paris.

Armand Dufaux (1883–1941) was a Swiss aviation pioneer who became famous for flying the length of Lake Geneva in 1910.

Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi (1834-1904) was a French sculptor and painter who is best known for designing Liberty Enlightening the World, commonly known as the Statue of Liberty. Respectable full beard and 'tache combo.

Blaise Pascal (1623-62) was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, philosopher, writer, and Catholic theologian. Disappointingly clean-shaven.

chelae - plural of chela (/ˈkiːlə/) – also called a claw, nipper, or pincer – is a pincer-like organ at the end of certain limbs of some arthropods. Legs bearing a chela are called chelipeds.

proglottides - individual segments of a tapeworm body.

Chaldea was a small country that existed between the late 10th or early 9th and mid-6th centuries BC, after which the country and its people were absorbed and assimilated into the indigenous population of Babylonia.

Baal or Baʽal, was a title and honorific meaning "owner", "lord" in the Northwest Semitic languages spoken in the Levant during antiquity. From its use among people, it came to be applied to gods. Scholars previously associated the theonym with solar cults and with a variety of unrelated patron deities but inscriptions have shown that the name Ba'al was particularly associated with the storm and fertility god Hadad and his local manifestations.

Nuremberg maidens - the most famous iron maiden that popularized the design was that of Nuremberg, first displayed possibly as far back as 1802. The original was lost in the Allied bombing of Nuremberg in 1945.

Saint-Denis is a commune in the northern suburbs of Paris, France. It is located 5.8 mi from the centre of Paris.

Chapter 2 (pp 10-18)

[10]

Legion of Honour is the highest French order of merit, both military and civil. Established in 1802 by Napoleon Bonaparte, it has been retained (and slightly altered) by all later French governments and régimes.

Hispano-Suiza ('Spanish-Swiss') is a Spanish automotive–engineering company. It was founded in 1904 as an automobile manufacturer and eventually had several factories in Spain and France that produced luxury cars, aircraft engines, trucks and weapons.

A Norfolk jacket is a loose, belted, single-breasted tweed jacket with box pleats on the back and front, with a belt or half-belt. It was originally designed as a shooting coat that did not bind when the elbow was raised to fire.

Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot (1725-1804) was a French inventor who built the world's first full-size and working self-propelled mechanical land-vehicle, the "'Fardier à vapeur'" – effectively the world's first automobile.

draisienne - or dandy horse, a derogatory term for what was first called a Laufmaschine (in German), then a vélocipède or draisienne (in French and then English), and then a pedestrian curricle or hobby-horse, is a human-powered vehicle that, being the first means of transport to make use of the two-wheeler principle, is regarded as the forerunner of the bicycle.

Bois de Boulogne ("Boulogne woodland") is a large public park located along the western edge of the 16th arrondissement of Paris, near the suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt and Neuilly-sur-Seine.

Panhard-Dynavia (1948)

Panhard Dynavia is a concept car built by Panhard in 1948. It was built as an experiment in aerodynamics. The date given in the text is 1945, three years before the car was produced. More details at Machines of Grace.

HOKHMAH (section 2)

Chapter 4

28 - epigraph

Michael Maier (1568–1622) was a German physician and counsellor to Rudolf II Habsburg. He was a learned alchemist, epigramist, and amateur composer.

29

Notarikon (Hebrew: נוטריקון Noṭriqōn) is a Kabbalistic method of deriving a word, by using each of its initial (Hebrew: ראשי תיבות‎) or final letters (סופי תיבות‎) to stand for another, to form a sentence or idea out of the words.

Gematria (/ɡəˈmeɪtriə/; Hebrew: גמטריא gimatria) is the practice of assigning a numerical value to a name, word or phrase according to an alphanumerical cipher.

Temurah (Hebrew: תְּמוּרָה) is the third of the three ancient methods used by Kabbalists to rearrange words and sentences in the Bible, and may be used to change letters in certain words to create a new meaning for a Biblical statement.

Sefer Yetzirah (Hebrew: סֵפֶר יְצִירָה‎ Sēp̄er Yəṣīrā, Book of Formation, or Book of Creation) is the title of the earliest extant book on Jewish mysticism, although some early commentators treated it as a treatise on mathematical and linguistic theory as opposed to Kabbalah.

Wikipedia:Babel

cy-3Fe all y defnyddiwr 'ma gyfrannu ar lefel uwchraddol y Gymraeg.

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