MDDM Ch. 76 The Weavery

[Dave Monroe]

   "Mason will go back to waking day after day in
Sapperton, piecing together odd cash jobs for the
Royal Society, reductions for Maskelyne's Almanack,--
small children everywhere, a neat Observatory out in
the Garden, a reputation in the Golden Valley as a
Sorcerer, a Sorcerer's Apprentice, who once climb'd
that strange eminence at Greenwich, up into another
level of Power, sail'd to all parts of the Globe, but
came back down among them again,-- they will be easy
with him, call him Charlie, at last.  Another
small-town eccentric absorb'd back into the Weavery,
keeping a work-space fitted out someplace in the back
of some long Cotswold house, down a chain of rooms
back from the lane and out into the crooked Looming of
those hillside fields.'" (M&D, Ch. 76, p. 748)


"odd cash jobs"

Mason was employed by the Royal Society during six
months in 1769 on an astronomical mission at Cavan in
Ireland. He observed the second transit of Venus on 3
June, partial solar eclipse of 4 June, the phenomona
of Jupiter's satellites, and in August and September
the famous comet which signalised the birth year of
Napoleon Bonaparte. After a tour of the highlands of
Scotland under the same auspices in the summer of
1773, he recommended Schiehallion as the subject of
Maskelyne's experiments on gravity. A catalogue of 387
stars, calculated by Mason from Bradley's
observations, was annexed to the Nautical Almanac for
1773, and he corrected Mayer's 'Lunar Tables', on
behalf of the Board of Longitude (Maskelyne as serving
head), in 1772, 78, and 80. Results of his comparisons
with 1220 of Bradley's places of the moon were given
in the 'Nautical Almanac' for 1774, and finally
revised 'Tables', printed in London in 1787, continued
long to be the best extant. Payment of 1,000 pound for
the work fell far short, according to Lalande, of
Mason's expectations.... 

http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/mason-dixon/extra/mason_bio.html


"a Sorcerer's Apprentice"

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorcerer's Apprentice
(1779) ...

http://www.fln.vcu.edu/goethe/zauber_e3.html

http://www.fln.vcu.edu/goethe/zauber.html

http://www.webitcreations.com/galvestonsymphony/composers/Dukas_Sorcerer.html

http://www.arkworld.com/ascii/disney/sorcer2.htm


"Maskelyne's Almanack"

1767: The Nautical Almanac
Almost a century was to elapse between the founding of
the R[oyal ]G[reenwich ]O[bservatory (1675)] and the
first edition of The Nautical Almanac under the fifth
Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne. This almanac
contained tabulations of the distances of the Moon's
centre from the Sun and from the bright stars for
every three hours, so that the navigator could
determine Greenwich time and hence his longitude from
observations of such lunar distances. 

http://www.nao.rl.ac.uk/nao/history/

http://www.nao.rl.ac.uk/

The Nautical Almanac was Maskelyne's greatest work,
and it must be remembered that he carried it on from
this time up to the day of his death -- truly a
formidable addition to the routine labours of an
Astronomer Royal who had but a single assistant on his
staff. The Nautical Almanac was, however, in the main
not computed at the Observatory; the calculations were
effected by computers living in different parts of the
country, the work being done in duplicate, on the
principle which Flamsteed had inaugurated in the
preparation of his Historia Coelestis.

http://atschool.eduweb.co.uk/bookman/library/ROG/ROG03.HTM#P92

http://www.rog.nmm.ac.uk/leaflets/chronology/chronology.html

>From Patricia Fara, Sympathetic Attractions: Magnetic
Practices, Beliefs, and Symbolism in Eighteenth-
Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
UP, 1996), Ch. 5, "Measuring Power: Patterns in
Experimental Natural Philosophy," pp. 118-45 ...

"... maritime practitioners used their own texts to
protest about ... innovations by natural
philosophers.... they resented natural philosophers
for intruding on their territory with instruments
unsuitable for 'a moveable observatory such as a
ship.'  Nautical men regarding themselves as experts
challenged the wisdom of displacing traditional skills
by methods based on mensuration and trigonometrical
manipulation.  James Fergusson, an instrument maker
... argued that the printed tables were treacherously
unreliable ....  In his practical manual for officers,
the Liverpool dock-master, william Hutchinson,
complained that the qualifying examinations demanded
by the Board of Longitude eliminated many of the most
accomplished navigators who had acquired their
expertise at sea.  Experienced mariners questioned the
appropriateness of mathematical methods in an
environment where unpredictable fluctuations in tides,
winds, and magnetic variation could render carefully
calculated values wholy inaccurate.  Such techniques
could be positively dangerous ....
   "At a time when other rebellious groups were
seceding from the monopolizing Banksian lerned empire
at the Royal Society, Fergusson led a rearguard action
waged by mariners and instrument makers....  Naval
experts produced books specifically designed for their
seagoing colleagues ....  Hutchinson protested that
'MASKAYNES [Maskelyne's] Nautical Almanack' was
useless for skilled masters competent to sail round
the world but unable 'to understand the characters,
signs, and terms, &c.... which terms, &c. are in an
unkown tongue to one who is a mere english reader.'"
(p. 144)


"the Weavery"

Cf. ...

   "In Mexico City they somehow wandered into an
exhibition of paintings by the beautiful Spanish exile
Remedios Varo: in the central paintings of a triptych,
titled 'Bordando el Manto Terrestre,' were a number of
frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes,
spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a
circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which
spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking
hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other
buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and
forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry,
and the tapestry was the world." (Lot 49, Ch. 1, p.
11)

http://www.ottosell.de/pynchon/varo.htm

   "They have begun to move. They pass in line, out of
the main station, out of downtown, and begin pushing
into older and more desolate parts of the city. Is
this the way out? Faces turn to the windows, but no
one dares ask, not out loud. Rain comes down. No, this
is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive
knotting into -- they go in under archways, secret
entrances of rotted concrete that only looked like
loops of an underpass ..." (GR, Pt. I, p. 3)

http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/3928/pns3.html

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