NP but an influence, Henry Adams

[Madeleine Maudlin]

I prefer Jewish geologists.  (I'm sure you'll know.)

I was thinking about Mason and Dixon, the book, and then the two humans,
for a moment, then it struck me to look what the Mason Dixon Line
encompasses.  Only four states, and way northerly, as it turns out.  I was
looking at the states, Maryland, that's creative, then Virginia, ouch, then
a West Virginia, who knew there was one right, then I wondered why Memphis
was in Tennessee , no wait, it has to do with the river it's on, being like
the Nile or something, fine, but who would think of Memphis, rather than
say, St. Petersberg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Petersburg), no
wait, we did that in Florida already, wicked, and then there's also
Atlanta, who did that one hey, may as well have just called it Plato,
Georgia, philosophy, Philadelphia, Delphi, right on, but the city of *
brotherly* love?  Wiki phila for half a second.  Sounds more like Chicago,
the second city?  Wait, why did I relate daughter to second there, the
second sex?

There was a reason I started all that, now I've forgotten why.  Jewish
geologists, that's right, I swallowed a bunch of white blotter before a
Heidegger class once.  Wasn't university, what there was of it, the order
of things, exciting?  Whatever happened to all the lsd in the world.
 Disappeared off the face of the earth fifteen years ago.  I'm going to ask
Alice, because...


On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 9:02 PM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com
> wrote:

> And wjhat had Oh Henry gainst the Jews, anyway? He wanted nothing.
> Needed nothing. His friend, the geologist had no irrational fear of
> the Other; he had a black wife and passed himself. I wonder what all
> that hate had to do with a fashion and nothing to do with the kind of
> hate we see uncorked in Europe now.
>
> On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 9:59 PM, alice wellintown
> <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> > And, as Eliot never did wear a newspaper hat, and as Pound, and as
> > Shylock, and as...are there any who didn't make of the Jews and
> > anti-race against the Christian one to heaven? I wonder how Wolfshiem
> > will be played in the new Gatsby...a rat with a nose you could stand
> > under in the rain, wrap the nose hairs about your shoulders to keep
> > warm...a man who wears human molars as cufflinks...and fixes baseball
> > games and deals in forged debentures...ah, the quality of mercy is not
> > found in fiction. the wells are not potable...the killers of
> > christ...converted even are profance bennys.
> >
> > On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 9:52 PM, alice wellintown
> > <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> I just wanted to say, he said. Ireland, they say, has the honour of
> >> being the only country which never persecuted the jews. Do you know
> >> that? No. And do you know why?
> >>  He frowned sternly on the bright air.
> >>  — Why, sir? Stephen asked, beginning to smile.
> >>  — Because she never let them in, Mr Deasy said solemnly.
> >>  A coughball of laughter leaped from his throat dragging after it a
> >> rattling chain of phlegm. He turned back quickly, coughing, laughing,
> >> his lifted arms waving to the air.
> >>  — She never let them in, he cried again through his laughter as he
> >> stamped on gaitered feet over the gravel of the path. That’s why.
> >>  On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung
> >> spangles, dancing coins.
> >>
> >> On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 8:45 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> >>> I was led to ask because a quick look at ole cranky Henry in
> >>> those HUGE Gale Publisher Lit Crit compendia that all good libraries
> >>> have, had some say that Henry's cranky yankee anti-semitism had
> >>> diminished his canonicity since his heyday.............
> >>>
> >>> Hey, day-lit.....
> >>>
> >>> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> >>> To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> >>> Sent: Tuesday, June 12, 2012 6:59 PM
> >>> Subject: Re: NP but an influence, Henry Adams
> >>>
> >>>> 1) Did Henry Adams' influence more writers back in the day--60s-- than
> >>>> lately?
> >>>
> >>> Well, if I take the cranky position, I would guess that Adams was read
> >>> by a select few and read deeper. Today, Adams is a best seller, a top
> >>> read, a modern library classic must read, number one on the list of
> >>> non-fiction, and, and, and, non-fiction is all the rage now, as
> >>> fiction fades away, and deeper readings of more chllanging texts
> >>> replace the cannon of spoon-fed young adult literature. I would say
> >>> that Adams, like Mumford, like Freud, like Sontag,  like so
> >>> many...because he had his finger on the pulse, on the zeitgeist, that
> >>> beat of a  moment moving magically under memory's mumbling insistance
> >>> in the moment when it ceased to matter much, will end up a footnote
> >>> from which we may find an allusion to Pynchon.
> >>>
> >>>
>
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