M&D - Chap 10 - pgs 96-97

[Becky Lindroos]

Moving along - 

***  p. 96 -  "A Vector of Desire" -   Lacan -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_of_desire
  
http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/issue.903/14.1burns.html  (I’m sure this has been posted prior -  it's
"Postmodern Historiography: Politics and the Parallactic Method in Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon" by Christy L. Burns )

“Celestial Trigonometry”?  
Are we mapping the skies?  Putting the solar system on a grid? Is that why Pynchon “started at the beginning?”   

*
“Somebody somewhere in the world, watching the Planet go dark against the Sun … (quotes) from Sappho’s Fragment 95…”: 
“Oh Hesperus, - you bring back all that the dark night scatter’d, - you bring in the sheep, and the goat, - you bring the Child back to her mother.” 
(Pynchon uses the H. T. Wharton translation):   http://classicpersuasion.org/pw/sappho/sape08u.htm

So what’s Pynchon’s reasoning in having “someone” misread/misinterpret the Hesperus,  the *evening Venus*  as the Transit Venus of the morning?  Showing the idea of misreading?  Misinterpreting?  

Just prior to that quote there is the line that says this misread interruption is  “…seeming to wreck the *Ob,*” - the “Ob"? -   Observation, of course, but which one?  1.  It could be the observation of the Transit itself (perhaps as displayed in the orrery)  or 2.  it could be Cherrycoke’s observation about it with “Vector of Desire” and all being so appropriate.  - The question is - are our #1 type  observations also misinterpretations?  What does that do to history and/or events?  

**
“A sort of long black Filament yet connects her to the Limb of the Sun, tho’ she be moved will onto its Face…”  “This, or odd behavior like it, is going on all over the World all day long that fifth and sixth of June…”  

“… as if the Creation’s Dark Engineer had purposedly arrang’d the Intervals thus, to provoke a certain Instruction, upon the limits to human grandeur by Mortality.”  

Satan?  Death?  This is the first of the pair of Transits - 1761 and 1769 - then not again until 1874 and 1882 followed by 2004 and 2012 and then not again until 2117 / 2125.   
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_of_Venus#History_of_observation

**
And now back to Mason and Dixon at the Cape - where Cherrycoke is back to being our ** unreliable yet omniscient narrator**  again - (sounds like an oxymoron but it certainly works) - 

**
Extra credit resource: 

Mason and Dixon at the Cape - 4 pages - 
Title: Mason and Dixon at the Cape
Authors: MacKenzie, T.
Journal: Monthly Notes of the Astronomical Society of South Africa, Vol. 10, p. 99
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/1951MNSSA..10...99M/0000099.000.html
The  clocks and observatory are mentioned on page 100 but also see page 99 - they’re all kind of interesting. 

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p. 97 -  

The Zeeman and Vroom households “speed about” getting ready for the Transit - the morning is foggy.  This is likely the case as per the “Journal’s Monthly Notes”  noted above - p. 99. (So no metaphor is necessarily intended, but the possibility should not be excluded.)  

“Dutch Ado about nothing.”   -  groan - lol -   The slaves seem somewhat amused by the behavior of “their owners.”  

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Please add, subtract, argue, define, categorize, compare, contrast, delineate, deconstruct, verify,  obfuscate, clarify, etc. as you will - 

Becky -
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l