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Mason at the hangings in St. Helena makes me think of a novel from
the early 1980s which Pynchon perhaps knew when writing M&D, ---
"Cities of the Red Night" by William S. Burroughs. As a teenager I
read this in translation. It's not anymore on the level of "Naked
Lunch" or "Nova Express", but maybe Pynchon, whose satiric sound in
GR profited from Burroughs, had a look and/or wanted to place a nod.
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Thomas M. Disch, reviewing the novel for the newspaper of record,
was not exactly enthusiastic, though:<br>
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<small>> Cities of the Red Night'' is a book of limited but, for
its own happy few, intense appeal. Opium addicts who are sexually
aroused by witnessing and/or enacting garrotings and hangings will
find ''Cities'' a veritable gallows of delight. Admittedly, female
hanging-buffs and those of the heterosexual persuasion may feel
cheated of their due, for the Muse of Strangulation - ''Ix Tab''
William S. Burroughs calls her in his invocation -seems not to
extend her patronage to the fair sex. Guided by Ix Tab, a jealous
goddess, Mr. Burroughs has eliminated from his book everything
incidental to the central task of spinning and respinning the same
yarn - characterization, wit, stylistic graces, anything that
might detract from the erotic fascination of death by hanging.
Even the romance of heroin addiction, which offered an alternative
Universal Metaphor to interpreters of ''Naked Lunch,'' has
dwindled to a few rather pro forma evocations of his new drug of
preference, opium. In this book drugs are merely a means to an
end, and that end is the gallows. <Â <br>
</small><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/08/09/specials/disch-burrows.html">http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/08/09/specials/disch-burrows.html</a>Â Â
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