George Washington, the Revolutionary War, and Mason & Dixon

[alice malice]

Great stuff, thanks.

M&D is a global book, one that speaks to us, now, and one that looks
at America, Pynchon's focus, its Empire building, and the push and
pull on its values, culture, politics....etc. so how Africa is not a
helpless victim of American exploitation and hegemony, but a people
that make their own history, as Marx would say.

In any event, here is a fine essay worth considering as we head with
our D&M into Africa, the islands there, in flux, polar inversion
pulling and pushing and producing our worlds between our world here in
America and that world over there in Africa, a binary the book refuses
to draw a line through.

The Americanization of South Africa,” in Elaine Tyler May and Reinhold
Wagnleitner (eds.), Here, There and Everywhere:  The Foreign Politics
of American Popular Culture  (Hanover:  University Press of New
England, 2000).

On Thu, Dec 25, 2014 at 3:30 PM, gary webb <gwebb8686 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Greetings and Salutations,
>
> I am new to the group but have been quietly observing for some time. I am a
> great admirer of the work of Thomas Pynchon. 2014 has been quite a
> remarkable year. It does seem rather fitting that it would be the year in
> which he makes his debut on the silver screen. I have mixed emotions about
> it all, as I'm sure most fans do... I've noticed that there have been
> distinctive murmurings of a M&D reading, and I think aside from Gravity's
> Rainbow, M&D is equally brilliant... Maybe, like in the novel, Charles Mason
> and Jeremiah Dixon, are dual aspects of Mr. Pynchon... I don't know... Like
> Gravity's Rainbow and Against the Day, Pynchon intermingles fact with
> fiction, real historical figures with characters created with in his
> imagination... Like "Red" Malcolm and Slothrop thinking of JFK, his
> classmate at Harvard - Nalline writing Joe Kennedy- Slothrop and Mickey
> Rooney, etc. M&D are real historical figures, interpreted by both Rev'd
> Wicks Cherrycoke - Pynchon, that come into contact with other figures from
> history... Nevil Maskelyne, Dr. Bradley, the Peaches, Dixon's tutor
> Emerson... and most notably across the pond Benjamin Franklin, George
> Washington, and even a young Thomas Jefferson... I'm currently reading The
> Return of George Washington 1783 - 1789 by Edward J Larson... The American
> Revolution is an interesting bit of history, as well as Washington's role...
> it is interesting that another good history read that came out this year was
> Napoleon : A Life by Andrew Roberts, and Napoleon and Washington make
> interesting bedfellows... Both were swept by the that Revolutionary
> sentiment that swept continents at the time, i.e mid- to late 18th Century,
> with dramatic and different results... think Ethelmer and Wick's discussion
> of Plato's Republic concerning the change of music indicates a social
> revolution and the Anacreon Song,
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydAIdVKv84g, and Mason's discussion with a
> anachronistic Amy Fisher and Joey Buttafuoco, with their Sons of Liberty
> crew about the Virtual Represntation of Parliament.... All very
> interesting... Anyway, Happy Christmastide of '14...
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l