dialectic-despair

[David Casseres]

On 11/13/06, David Brodeur <dbrodeur at verizon.net> wrote:
> I just finished a second reading of Mason & Dixon and found that the
> language was one of the great pleasures of the book. It's not, of course,
> really 18th century, but a unique voice that Pynchon created for this novel.
> He has a great deal of fun with the language, too, with amusing
> "translations" of modern idiom, subtle subversions of our expectations of
> 18th century language, and other games.

Viz, Amy the Goth Milk-Maid of Manhattan, on p. 400:

Amy is dress'd from Boots to Bonnet all in different Articles of
black, a curious choice of color for a milkmaid, it seems to Mason,
tho', as he has been instructed ever to remind himself, this is
New-York, where other customs prevail. "Oh, aye, at home they're on at
me about it without Mercy, she tells him, "I'm, as, but I _like_
black,"-- yet my Uncle, he's, as, 'Strangers will take you for I don't
know what,' hey-- I don't know what, either.  Do you?"

It goes on, one of my favorite passages.