George Washington, the Revolutionary War, and Mason & Dixon

[alice malice]

the link

http://history.stanford.edu/campbell_james_t

On Sun, Dec 28, 2014 at 1:45 PM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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