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[Steelhead]

The New York Observer of November 18 contains one of the most remarkable
book reviews ever penned. The piece is written by Ron Rosenbaum--who used
to write for the Village Voice when it cost real money to purchase and
was worth reading. Rosenbaum is a helluva writer. Check out his Travels
with Dr. Death for a taste of some fine writing. One of the more amazing
aspects of this review is that it discusses in some detail a book that
won't be published for months. Indeed, Rosenbaum hasn't even seen a copy of
the text that he explicates
so brilliantly. The book? Mason & Dixon.

Here are a few choice quotes. But you should really seek out a copy for
yourselves.

"Why Mason? Why Dixon? What is Mr. Pynchon really up to? Frankly, I'm not
willing to wait until April for the answer...I propose to dream up, to
dream upon the thematic heart of Thomas Pynchon's new novel without having
read it....I propose to do this without inside information about the
manuscript, going only by the title, by approximately a half-hour spent
with the Encyclopedia Britannica and, more importantly, by a lifetime's
devotion to Mr. Pynchon's work."

"Mason and Dixon are--metaphorically--a two-headed Maxwell's Demon...They
divided disputed territory into two states....the Mason Dixon line became a
metaphor between the divisions between North and South (a hot region and a
cooler region), between free and slave, the divide within the American
soul."

"The line Mason and Dixon drew could be seen as a signal zero zone: The
line is neither state, neither Maryland nor Pennsylvania, it's itself
informationless, yet it's the genesis of information..at the heart of Mason
and Dixon will be a mediatation on the Lineness of the Line Between states.
How something is created from informationless NOthing, the ultimate
metaphysical question."

"I made a startling discovery about the two surveyors that I feel must have
caught Mr. Pynchon's eye and may represent an even more fertile Pynchonian
resonance in the novel: the failed 1760 expedition to Sumatra to chart the
transit of Venus....You've heard of the transit of Venus: It's a phenomenon
whose ripe metaphorical resonance almost devours its astrophysical reality.
It is an eclipse-like phenomenon that occurs 'when Venus passes between the
Earth and the Sun. At such time, Venus appears as a small dark circular
disc projected on the brillant disc of the Sun."

"The one that Mason and Dixon set off for in Sumatra to observe in 1761
turned out to be an absolute stunner that revealed two 'remarkable
phenomenon'--one of radiant light, the other of mystical darkness....when
Venus just touched the Sun's limb on the inside there developed a little
black connection, the so-called black drop between Venus and the limb."

"Tell me Thomas Pynchon is not going to fall in love with that mysteriously
engenered "black drop" leaping to link Venus to the limb of the Sun. The
Black Drop as the cosmological illusion of a dark connection; the Black
Drop as a fictive dark zone, a black hole within a divide; the Black Drop
as the link between Venus and the Sun--the link between Eros and
Illumination we've all been looking for."

"I'll go further out on a limb to predict how the book will end. I see it
having something to do with the actual historical disappearance of Jeremiah
Dixon. Or, as the Britannica puts it, after the surveyors finished drawing
their famous line, "Nothing more is known of the life of Dixon other than
the year and place of his death."

"I feel Mr. Pynchon with his love of the Preterite, the quixotic,
passed-over visionary loser, will be attracted to the mystery of the Lost
Final Years of Jeremiah Dixon. I feel he will have come to imagine Dixon as
someone for whom the Line comes to mean nothing compared to that awestruck
visionary moment in 1761 when caught a partial glimpse of the transit of
Venus, the radiant aureole, and the Black Drop....He'll set out for the end
of the earth seek this transformative vision of the transit of Venus, or
V-ness....a vision of ultimate convergence."

Cheers,

Steely