<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small">Re Christy Burns' "Postmodern Historiography" (and looking forward to Mason's recollections of weavers vs, clothiers in the Golden Valley, 207 passim)</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small">Once again, in Burns' note 2, we see the Luddites' activities described as "the vehement workers' rebellion against the advance of machinery..." along with a reference to David Cowart, who (in TP and the Dark Passages of History) describes Pynchon's 1984 essay "Is It O.K. to be a Luddite?" as "a meditation on distrust of technology."</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small">And once again I wonder why, if  that's really what the essay says the Luddites were about in 1811-1816, Pynchon would clutter its exposition with distractions such as</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small">"...<span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:medium">much of the machinery that steam was coming to drive had already long been in place, having in fact been driven by water power since the Middle Ages..."</span></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:medium"><br></span></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:medium">"</span><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:medium">whenever a stocking-frame was found sabotaged - this had been going on, sez the Encyclopedia Britannica, since about 1710..."</span></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:medium"><br></span></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:medium">",,,the target even of the original assault </span><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:medium">[Ned Lud's]</span><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:medium"> </span><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:medium">of 1779, like many machines of the Industrial Revolution, was not a new piece of technology. The stocking-frame had been around since 1589... [and]</span><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:medium"> continued to be the only mechanical means of knitting for hundreds of years... </span><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:medium">And Ned Lud's anger was not directed at the machines, not exactly."</span></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:medium"><br></span></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:medium">"</span><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:medium">The knitting machines which provoked the first Luddite disturbances had been putting people out of work for well over two centuries."</span></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small">Golly, those Luddites must have been awfully stupid not to have noticed "the advance of machinery" for so long. Or maybe the Luddites' activities were not what Burns, Cowart, C.P. Snow, and so many others project upon them, but exactly what Pynchon calls them:  </div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:medium"><br></span></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:medium">"</span><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:medium">They also saw the machines coming more and more to be the property of men who did not work, only owned and hired... [they were] trade unionists ahead of their time... </span><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:medium">It was open-eyed class war."</span></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:medium"><br></span></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:medium"><br></span></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:medium"><br></span></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 10:16 AM, Becky Lindroos <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:bekker2@icloud.com" target="_blank">bekker2@icloud.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">Moving along -<br>
<br>
***Â p. 96 -Â "A Vector of Desire" -Â Â Lacan -<br>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_of_desire" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_of_desire</a><br>
<br>
<a href="http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/issue.903/14.1burns.html" target="_blank">http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/issue.903/14.1burns.html</a> (I’m sure this has been posted prior - it's<br>
"Postmodern Historiography: Politics and the Parallactic Method in Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon" by Christy L. Burns )<br>
<br>
“Celestial Trigonometry�<br>
Are we mapping the skies? Putting the solar system on a grid? Is that why Pynchon “started at the beginning?â€<br>
<br>
*<br>
“Somebody somewhere in the world, watching the Planet go dark against the Sun … (quotes) from Sappho’s Fragment 95…â€:<br>
“Oh Hesperus, - you bring back all that the dark night scatter’d, - you bring in the sheep, and the goat, - you bring the Child back to her mother.â€<br>
(Pynchon uses the H. T. Wharton translation):Â Â <a href="http://classicpersuasion.org/pw/sappho/sape08u.htm" target="_blank">http://classicpersuasion.org/pw/sappho/sape08u.htm</a><br>
<br>
So what’s Pynchon’s reasoning in having “someone†misread/misinterpret the Hesperus, the *evening Venus* as the Transit Venus of the morning? Showing the idea of misreading? Misinterpreting?<br>
<br>
Just prior to that quote there is the line that says this misread interruption is “…seeming to wreck the *Ob,*†- the “Ob"? -  Observation, of course, but which one? 1. It could be the observation of the Transit itself (perhaps as displayed in the orrery) or 2. it could be Cherrycoke’s observation about it with “Vector of Desire†and all being so appropriate. - The question is - are our #1 type observations also misinterpretations? What does that do to history and/or events?<br>
<br>
**<br>
“A sort of long black Filament yet connects her to the Limb of the Sun, tho’ she be moved will onto its Face…â€Â “This, or odd behavior like it, is going on all over the World all day long that fifth and sixth of June…â€<br>
<br>
“… as if the Creation’s Dark Engineer had purposedly arrang’d the Intervals thus, to provoke a certain Instruction, upon the limits to human grandeur by Mortality.â€<br>
<br>
Satan? Death? This is the first of the pair of Transits - 1761 and 1769 - then not again until 1874 and 1882 followed by 2004 and 2012 and then not again until 2117 / 2125.<br>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_of_Venus#History_of_observation" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_of_Venus#History_of_observation</a><br>
<br>
**<br>
And now back to Mason and Dixon at the Cape - where Cherrycoke is back to being our ** unreliable yet omniscient narrator**Â again - (sounds like an oxymoron but it certainly works) -<br>
<br>
**<br>
Extra credit resource:<br>
<br>
Mason and Dixon at the Cape - 4 pages -<br>
Title: Mason and Dixon at the Cape<br>
Authors: MacKenzie, T.<br>
Journal: Monthly Notes of the Astronomical Society of South Africa, Vol. 10, p. 99<br>
<a href="http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/1951MNSSA..10...99M/0000099.000.html" target="_blank">http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/1951MNSSA..10...99M/0000099.000.html</a><br>
The clocks and observatory are mentioned on page 100 but also see page 99 - they’re all kind of interesting.<br>
<br>
**************<br>
<br>
p. 97 -<br>
<br>
The Zeeman and Vroom households “speed about†getting ready for the Transit - the morning is foggy. This is likely the case as per the “Journal’s Monthly Notesâ€Â noted above - p. 99. (So no metaphor is necessarily intended, but the possibility should not be excluded.)<br>
<br>
“Dutch Ado about nothing.â€Â  - groan - lol -  The slaves seem somewhat amused by the behavior of “their owners.â€<br>
<br>
****************<br>
<br>
Please add, subtract, argue, define, categorize, compare, contrast, delineate, deconstruct, verify, obfuscate, clarify, etc. as you will -<br>
<br>
Becky -<br>
Pynchon-l / <a href="http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l" target="_blank">http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l</a><br>
</blockquote></div><br></div>