Martha my dear

[Terrance]

Ah, Learned Dog, do you know Martha my dear? 

Martha my dear...

When you find yourself in the thick of it
help yourself to a bit of what is all around you. 
Martha my dear....


I can't quite make out why we are spending so much time on George
Washington and Gershom, but I guess there is a common interest in what
appears to be a Pynchonian (by which I mean all what that TRP has
written and
all that has been written about what he has published) fetish for 
master/slave relationships. Of course, as Karen K. pointed out long ago,
the ongoing
S&M relationship here on Pynchon-L is almost amusing when it slides down
the rabbit's hole and roles off humpty-dumpty's back.   



Very little has been said about Martha
Washington (no more or less a minor character than either her husband or
Gershom). Why? If the history of George is what Pynchon is pointing his
finger at (although as one critic has pointed out, one can read Pynchon
as broken finger pointing postmodern American satire, sort of pointing
everywhere and nowhere at all), could he avoid Martha our dear
first-first-lady"  Historically speaking, she has quite an interesting
story
(i.e., George was not her first husband)  and so I can't imagine why, if
the text does not, why  we have neglected to discuss her. 

The text foregrounds the master/slave relationship of
marriage (be it the marriage of English ladies and lords, Dutch
colonialists, American farmers, Mason and Dixon).  

And, Martha's brief comments about the domestic power of woman can be
read back into the previous chapters. 

In any event, it's clear that Pynchon's texts include obscured
his/her stories, arcane theories, ironic conflations of time/space. 


So, I think  Otto is making a lot of good points. 
The Dog & Gershom, for example. 

SA and USA. 

These are big topics. Perhaps they can't be discussed with any degree of
success here. But, in terms of time and space, we might consider the
America and South Africa. 



Institutionalized racial inequality has decisively influenced the
politics, culture, and economy of both the United States and South
Africa. In recent years, historians and social scientists have devoted
considerable attention to comparing the historical experiences of these
seemingly “race based” societies.  Slavery and emancipation; the
significance of the frontier; the impact of settler colonialism; the
role of the state in capitalist development; the relationship between
segregation and economic
growth; the fragmentation of the working class along racial and ethnic
lines all have attracted scholarly investigation.  


http://www.utoronto.ca/csus/seg.htm

Also, anyone familiar with Cohen's Defense of Marxism? 
  

How about Branston's Gods of the North? 

Seems Stig has read it.