M&D - Chap 10 - pgs 96-97

[Monte Davis]

Re Christy Burns' "Postmodern Historiography" (and looking forward to
Mason's recollections of weavers vs, clothiers in the Golden Valley, 207
passim)

Once again, in Burns' note 2, we see the Luddites' activities described as
"the vehement workers' rebellion against the advance of machinery..." along
with a reference to David Cowart, who (in TP and the Dark Passages of
History) describes Pynchon's 1984 essay "Is It O.K. to be a Luddite?" as "a
meditation on distrust of technology."

And once again I wonder why, if  that's really what the essay says the
Luddites were about in 1811-1816, Pynchon would clutter its exposition with
distractions such as

"...much of the machinery that steam was coming to drive had already long
been in place, having in fact been driven by water power since the Middle
Ages..."

"whenever a stocking-frame was found sabotaged - this had been going on,
sez the Encyclopedia Britannica, since about 1710..."

",,,the target even of the original assault [Ned Lud's] of 1779, like many
machines of the Industrial Revolution, was not a new piece of technology.
The stocking-frame had been around since 1589... [and] continued to be the
only mechanical means of knitting for hundreds of years... And Ned Lud's
anger was not directed at the machines, not exactly."

"The knitting machines which provoked the first Luddite disturbances had
been putting people out of work for well over two centuries."

Golly, those Luddites must have been awfully stupid not to have noticed
"the advance of machinery" for so long. Or maybe the Luddites' activities
were not what Burns, Cowart, C.P. Snow, and so many others project upon
them, but exactly what Pynchon calls them:

"They also saw the machines coming more and more to be the property of men
who did not work, only owned and hired... [they were] trade unionists ahead
of their time... It was open-eyed class war."




On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 10:16 AM, Becky Lindroos <bekker2 at icloud.com> wrote:

> 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.
>
> **************
>
> 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.”
>
> ****************
>
> 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/?listpynchon-l
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20150216/b67d8dc1/attachment.html>