Noted in passing

[Monte Davis]

>From the splenetic but always entertaining Monsieur IOZ:

"Look, Don DeLillo. I will defend Underworld, which, although big and messy,
had the ambition to be big and messy . . . and none of the goddamn
19-year-old-on-mushrooms cutesy-patootsey naming conventions that make me
want to crucify Tom Pynchon on a cross made of the bones of Ken Kesey..."

http://whoisioz.blogspot.com/2010/05/omega-whats-point.html

---

>From the intimidatingly erudite Justin E. H. Smith:

In Thomas Pynchon's 1997 Mason & Dixon, Charles Mason Sr., the father of one
of the two great American explorers, claims to believe
  
"that bread is alive,-that the yeast Animalcula may unite into a single
purposeful individual,-that each Loaf is so organized, with the crust, for
example, serving as skin or Carapace,-the small cavities within exhibiting a
strange complexity, their pale Walls, to appearance smooth, proving, upon
magnification, to be made up of even smaller bubbles, and, one may presume,
so forth, down to the Limits of the Invisible. The Loaf, the indispensible
point of convergence upon every British table, the solid British Quartern
Loaf, is mostly, like the Soul, Emptiness." 

Is bread in fact like the soul? It is well known that our own word for the
biotic condition does not descend from the same distinguished Indo-European
lineage as bios, vita, vie, and so on. Instead life, along with the related
Germanic cognates such as Leben and leven, took the place of bios and its
variations thanks to the intervention of the humble loaf, which originally
had none of the connotation of the verb "to loaf," but had instead only to
do with bread. Indeed, loaf is a cognate of the Russian word for bread,
khleb, and also of the Gothic hlaif. At some point, then, and I really do
not know when, the ancient Germanic tribes started using the word for bread
to denote life itself, since, obviously, bread sustains life, is a condition
of life, and thus, in some primitive way of thinking into which it is not
all that hard to work one's way back, is life.  

It is quite likely that Mason Sr. is being made by Pynchon to paraphrase a
commonplace of what was often called "chemical philosophy" or "chymistry,"
but since the eighteenth century has been marginalized as mere alchemy...

http://www.jehsmith.com/1/2010/05/the-soul-is-a-trapped-gas.html

(As a PynchoGnostic, I find that one of the Bestest Blog Post Titles Evar)

-Monte