animal vegetable mineral magnetism and maps with pictures on 'em

[mikebailey at speakeasy.net]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dave Monroe [mailto:monropolitan at yahoo.com]
> 
> http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0201&msg=64595

and its sublinks are fascinating. Thanks Dave! 
That book (Patricia Fara, Sympathetic Attractions: Magnetic Practices, Beliefs, and Symbolsim in Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1996) seems like it would be an interesting read, and be useful in a reread of M&D.
(something for me to consider next time up at the Interlibrary Loan desk) 
That Princeton University Press (PUP) stays pretty busy, doesn't it?
I like this excerpt: 
"People living in the eighteenth century did notdraw the modern distinction between animate andnonanimate matters. They adhered to older Neoplatonicand Aristotelian interpretations of the natural worldas a fixed continuous hierarchy linking human beingsdownwards through simple animals and plants to stones...." (Ch. 5, "Measuring Power: Patterns inExperimental Natural Philosophy," p. 138)--------- isn't this the mindset mystics and acidheads are always trying to replicate?
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