Status Updates From Against the Day

electrical technology and train networks as sign of a gilded-age breakthrough. what happens when the night is pushed back, and what happens to those left in the shadows

a father who is an old anarchist bomber disowns his son for taking an electrical engineering grant from a corporation, as if marrying the idea of youth with modernity, while those oldheads that have worked to make it a career option resent you for it

“‘But if you look at the history, modern chemistry only starts coming in to replace alchemy around the same time capitalism really gets going. Strange, eh?’ … ‘…instead of turning lead into gold, they could take poor people's sweat and turn it into greenbacks, and save that lead for enforcement purposes.’”

I love how every Pynchon novel has a part about how chemists are worse than Hitler