Mason & Dixon II

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

There's a section of Mason & Dixon that moves me more than anything else Pynchon's written, but I know what you mean. Read it twice and still pick through it from time to time. Please understand that I love Pynchon's stuff, but more and more think of him and his work alongside Matt Groening's or the folks at Jay Ward Studio. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but his influence as a humorist will probablly be his true endowment to future generations (if any). Pynchon works a lot harder at embelishing his jokes than developing charecters. Though the moment Rebekah's "Potent Wings" brush against Dixon is one of the great sequences in Pynchon's novels, the work is strewn with as many deliberate anachronisms as Peabody's Wayback machine.
 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: Dave Monroe <monropolitan at yahoo.com>
> Have you read Mason & Dixon?
> 
> I haven't.
> 
> Well, not quite. I've read part of it, about 1/5 of
> it, and then I stopped. I just couldn't hack it
> Although I somehow found it in myself to get through
> all of V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow,
> and Vineland (which I happen to like), I finally drew
> the line (no pun intended) at Mason & Dixon.
> 
> Maybe Mason & Dixon is better than I thought, maybe I
> just wanted something small and straightforward ....
> 
> Or maybe after 4 Pynchon novels, I'd had about
> enough....
> 
> [...]
> 
> Which brings me back to Pynchon's new novel, Against
> the Day. I'd be a liar to say that I haven't wondered
> what Pynchon's been thinking all these years, these
> strange, screwed up years that probably compare none
> too favorably to the things he saw in the '60s and
> '70s. And part of me thinks that Pynchon must have the
> most amazing thoughts on Bush and the Internet and
> Prozac and Christian fundamentalists and terrorism and
> Osama bin Laden and all that.
> 
> But another part of me thinks that whatever is in this
> new novel, that stuff isn't it. It's just going to be
> more Pynchon--more schmeils and entropy and UFOs and
> thermodynamics. The memory of Mason & Dixon still
> haunts me....
> 
> [...]
> 
> ... Once upon a time, George Washington passing out
> hash was pretty funny shit, but now ... yeah, I've
> heard that joke. Stuff like that was part of the
> reason I put Mason & Dixon down and never picked it
> back up. If this is the Pynchon of Against the Day,
> then I'd have seen him go out on top years ago. I hope
> this isn't what we've got in store, but I'm not sure
> it isn't....
> 
> http://esposito.typepad.com/con_read/2006/08/friday_column_m.html
> 
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