Starbuck, Peet, & paranoia

[Henry M]

I had interpreted "major caffeine abuse" as perhaps being on the part 
of TRP.

> Date:          Fri, 10 Jan 1997 11:27:01 -0800
> From:          carroll at itp.ucsb.edu (Sean Carroll)
> To:            pynchon-l at waste.org
> Subject:       Starbuck, Peet, & paranoia

> : 
> :      How do we know caffiene plays an important part in Mason & Dixon?
> :      
> :      M.
> 
> It was mentioned in the blurb issued by Henry Holt and Co.:
> 
>   Charles Mason (1728-1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the 
>   British Surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between
>   Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. 
>   Here is their story as re-imagined by Thomas Pynchon, in an updated
>   eighteenth-century novel featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, 
>   ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, major 
>   caffeine abuse. We follow the mismatch'd pair--one rollicking, the other 
>   depressive; one Gothic, the other pre-romantic--from their first journey 
>   together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revolutionary America and back, 
>   through the strange yet redemptive turns of fortune in their later lives, 
>   on a grand tour of the Enlightenment's dark hemisphere, as they observe 
>   and participate in the many opportunities for insanity presented to them 
>   by the Age of Reason.
> 
> I think this has already been posted to the list, but I just pulled it
> from one of Tim Ware's web pages:
> 
>   http://www.hyperarts.com/mason-dixon/mason-dixon.html
> 
> Also on this page you can find more info about M&D, including the fact
> that they did a lot of travelling on long sea voyages.  This got me to
> wondering if my tongue-in-cheek suggestion might not have something
> going for it, in the form of allusions to Ahab and Starbuck in Melville's
> book.  Then the initials hit me...
> 
> Or am I just finding connections where they aren't really there?
> 
> Sean
> carroll at itp.ucsb.edu
> http://itp.ucsb.edu/~carroll
>  
> p.s. "Ahab", of course, has a colorful history.  In the 1st and 2nd
> books of Kings he is King of Israel, led astray by his wife Jezebel,
> who got people to worship Baal and Ashtoreth (an early version of
> the Slothropite Heresy, if you like).  After he died she was done 
> away with by defenestration, but not until after she managed to
> put on her best outfit.
> 
> 


My mother was of the sky... -- JL
My mother is the war...
Keep cool, but care. -- TRP
Moderation in moderation. -- Husky Mariner
Not having that, which having... :-|

http://www.nicom.com/~gravity