Tristam Shandy and Thomas Jefferson

[Otto Sell]

It's surely a great book, much ahead of it's actual time (1760), compared to
Bunyan's "The Pilgrim's Progress" (1678) which is mentioned by Sterne in the
first chapter and alluded to by Pynchon in the fourth episode of GR.
You simply have to imagine what *bawdy* activity Sterne in his Puritan
England is *really* telling about right at the beginning that must have
delighted people like Jefferson and disgusted many other contemporaries.
I love this deep irony (and of course the language) and share Mr.
Jefferson's taste.

"I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were
in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they
begot me; had they duly consider'd how much depended upon what they were
then doing (...)"

Please give us some nice "snips" from the Halliday-book.

Y'r obd't s'v't
Otto

From: Dan Conley <danconley at pcc.net>
Sent: Sunday, February 11, 2001 3:40 AM

> Someone on the list today mentioned Laurence Sterne's "Tristam Shandy."  I
> just read in E.M. Halliday's "Understanding Thomas Jefferson" that
"Tristam
> Shandy" was our third President's favorite non-fiction book.  Jefferson
> would be such a wonderful subject for Pynchon -- his surprising taste for
> the bawdy, penchant for conspiracies and distaste for moneyed urban
America
> was right in TP's wheelhouse.
>
>