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Roy, in his call for lemmings to follow us, wrote:
YEH is mantis's shorthand for Year of the Egg Hunt; Golden Year refers to the year of the Gold Hunt with Lois, and of Den's dealings with the Gold family.
Technically speaking, I coined "Golden Year" for the supercluster "Den is President/Den is 50 (golden anniversary)/Pete on Island, 1963+/Sherry is 16/Lois & Gold affair" back when I thought that all these things happened within a 12 month period. A lightning transition from poor man to rich man: "Shazam!"
Then we sliced the cojoined twins apart, and the "Sherry is 16/Lois & Gold affair" became "Gold Hunt." (Because if Den doesn't get the "big payoff" of becoming president, then the episode is more sad than a wild goose chase.) The remaining bits didn't really get a nice name--maybe because they keep floating around in the soup.
Not that it matters much (who cares what goes in my internal monologs? "Who says they're internal--I'm shouting as I type!!")--then again, it does help (or might help) to reiterate in capsule form the evolutions involved.
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Roy also wrote:
Den made his astral visit (AV) to Dr. Black to a time when he was 4. There he saw a "Liberty" magazine, which began publishing in 1920. (153)
He means it began publishing in 1924, which, if valid, dates Den's birth year at 1920.
To trust or distrust that magazine? Well, Doctor V is unreal enough that we start to wonder: the TAT cards, that mirror thing (would a real general practitioner have all this stuff on hand?). And on the one visit to Dr. B, when Den sees the magazine, he also sees a picture of a doctor examining Margaret Lorn--we don't take =that= as being literal, but a dream fragment . . . at least, that's how I see it: I imagine a Norman Rockwell sort of drawing.
So the doctor visits might be, in general, less accurate/realistic than any other movements in the novel, even though at times they seem to be the bedrock from which the others emerge as phantasies, eiderdown, swamp gas.
=mantis=