MDDM Ch. 30 Dolly

[Dave Monroe]

This reminds me ...

--- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> 
> I like the way that in this chapter Pynchon shows
> that Mason and Dixon are in fact mirrored in Dolly
> and Molly (M-D D-M).

>From J.L. Heilbron, Electricity in the 17th and 18th
Centuries: A Study in Early Modern Physics (New York:
Dover, 1999 [Berkeley: U of Cal P, 1979]), Ch. XIV,
"Benjamin Franklin," pp. 324-43 ...

"... two chraracteristic Franklinist principles, the
power of points and the doctrine of electricity plus
and minus ..." (p. 327)

Whta was that about "excluded middles" in The Crying
of Lot 49?  Something Manichean about that
polarization, no?  Ex-cellent ...

But also, from I. Bernard Cohen, Science and the
Foudning Fathers (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1995),
Ch. 4, "Science and Politics; Some Aspects of the
Thought and Career of John Adams," pp. 196-236 ...

Electrical Theory in Defense of a Bicameral
Legislature

   "Adams ... tried to use Franklin's own science
against him.  Franklin, he went on, 'might have
alluded to those angry assemblies in the heavens,
which so often overspread the city of Philadelphia,
fill the citizens with apprehension and terror,
threatening to set the world on fire, merely because
the powers within them are not sufficiently balanced.'
 That is, Franklin 'might have recollected, that a
pointed rod, a machine as simple as a wagoner, or a
monarch, or a governor, would be sufficient at any
time, silently and innocently, to disarm those
assemblies of all their terrors, by restoring between
them the balance of the powerful fluid, and thus
prevent the danger and destruction to the properties
and loves of men, which often happen for the want of
it.'
   "In this case Adams was hoping to use Franklin's
own discoveries to combat his political views. 
Unfortunately, he did not remeber perfectly the
electrical theory ...." (p. 231)

Cciting John Adams, Defence of the Constitutions of
Government of the United States of America (1788). 
Point is, perhaps something politically charged here
as well.  Apparently, at least, there was, at least at
the concurrent juncture ...

  

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