M&D - today's comments/questions (up to p. 362)

[still lookin 4 the face i had b4 the world was made]

(spoilers)













p. 226 - I am sadly lacking in knowledge of British history.  Can anyone
illuminate the events Dixon and Emerson are referring to in this passage?--

  "Young Vane was never a Regicide," Dixon insists.
  "O, thou Fool," needles Emerson, "he was treacherous as a Serpent."
  "Yet 'round Raby, most believe 'twas the baseness of the father, in
pursuing the detruction of Strafford, that caus'd the same fate to descend
upon the son."
  "'Twas your Vane Junior gave Pym the notes, for Heaven's sake," Emerson
grumbles.

p. 252 - Mason's words ring all too true:

  "...Charter'd Companies may indeed be the form the World has now
increasingly begun to take."

The historical notes at The East India Company's web site
(www.theeastindiacompany.com -- thanx to whoever found that one) shed
interesting light on what a large role in history the EIC played.  Of
course, the EIC in _M&D_ is just a symbol of its type.  There is I.G.
Farben in _GR_... 

That reminds me!  Speaking of long-lived corporate entities, David Lawday,
in an article on Berlin in the May issue of _The Atlantic Monthly_, notes
that 

  "the former chemicals giant...refuses to die.  It has been in liquidation
  for decades, in part to enable it to pay compensation to people it used
  for slave labor, but its officials, encouraged by shareholders, still 
  seek to retrieve a host of properties in the former East Germany....A
  series of court rulings have denied I.G. Farben's claims, but the 
  skeleton company bearing its name lives in hope."  

Creepy, eh?
 
p. 345 - A Mobius smoke ring!  :)

p. 350 - This could be TRP's own manifesto:

  "...Who claims Truth, Truth abandons.  History is hir'd, or coerc'd, only
in Interests that must ever prove base.  She is too innocent, to be left
within the reach of anyone in Power,-- who need but touch her, and all her
Creidt is in the instant vanish'd, as if it had never been.  She needs
rather to be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters,
Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev'ry Radius, Masters of Disguise to provide
her the Cosume, Toilette, annd Bearing, and Speech nimble enough to keep her
beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity, of Government..."

Max

 M a x i m u s  D a v i d  C l a r k e | The purpose of art is to lay bare
          http://www.afn.org/~traveler | the questions which have been
                 "Surrealist-At-Large" | hidden by the answers.
                      traveler at afn.org | --James Baldwin