(In)Convenience

Thu Feb 19 20:17:48 CST 2015

The root meaning is simple. Convenience is that situation, or object, or
? which is easy, that which works without work.

Inconvenience would be therefore any obstacle to laziness.  A more active
or serious obstacle would warrant a harsher term.
*Convenience*Etymology

>From Middle English
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English_language> *convenient
<http://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/convenient#Middle_English>*, from Latin
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_language> *conveniens
<http://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/conveniens#Latin>* (“fit, suitable,
convenient”), present participle of *convenire
<http://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/convenire>* (“to come together, suit”);
see convene <http://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/convene> and compare covenant
<http://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/covenant>.
Pronunciation

   - Audio (US)
   (file <http://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/File:en-us-convenient.ogg>)

Adjective

*convenient* (*comparative
<http://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary#comparable>* *more
<http://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/more#English> convenient*, *superlative
<http://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary#comparable>* *most
<http://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/most#English> convenient*)

   1. Of or pertaining to convenience
   <http://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/convenience>; simple
   <http://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/simple>; easy
   <http://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/easy>; expedient
   <http://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/expedient>.*Fast food might
   be convenient, but it's also very unhealthy.*

Antonyms

   - inconvenient <http://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/inconvenient>

Related terms

   - convene <http://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/convene>
   - convenience <http://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/convenience>

Translations

On Thursday, February 19, 2015, Becky Lindroos <bekker2 at icloud.com> wrote:

> I’ve got 14 uses  of the word “inconvenience/ Inconvenience” within Mason
> & Dixon coming up - Page 28 is the ship HMS “Inconvenience,” which I think
> was mentioned prior.  The others may or may not have anything at all to do
> with AtD.
>
> Pages - 28,  53, 57,  103, 241, 325, 370, 395, 408, 585, 609, 628, 679 and
> 741.
>
>
>
> 53   - “… but for the inconvenience of it”
> 57   - “… though not without Inconvenience,” (italicized)  - this is the
> major one -
> 103  - “… T’was Inconvenience which provided the recurring Motrix…”
> 241  - “… inconvenienced”
> 325  - “… too soon will equal Inconvenience befall …
> 370  - “… to recite his Iliad of Inconvenience.”
>  395  - “… no longer minor Inconveniences”
> 408  - “… past the Inconveniences of New-York.”
> 585   - “… any pretext, any least scent of Inconvenience, will do.”
>  609  - “… the mildest of inconveniences - "
>  628  - “… in their early Careers an Inconvenience, ”
> 679  - “… and you are the minor inconvenience from which…
> 741 - “...fought with peril and inconvenience from armed bands of
> Vegetable …”
>
>
>
> > On Feb 18, 2015, at 12:51 PM, David Ewers <dsewers at comcast.net
> <javascript:;>> wrote:
> >
> > The Transit seems to me to be one of those occurrences (treated here
> almost like a very miniature Civil War, followed by a quick Reconstruction,
> etc...) of disturbance, like when a kicked anthill goes chaotic for a
> minute (the whole world of Gravity's Rainbow?).  The Colony soon enough
> finds its form, but it's never quite the same, somehow.
> >
> > I get the sense here of a White colonial world so suspended between
> science and religion that even the gradual supplanting of God by Science is
> seen in religious terms, as something grand and awesome to behold.  To see
> the light of Venus cast a shadow, so become corporeal like us, if only for
> a short time every long time... with one's own eyes, through the
> cooperative magic of Science... I think the same awe is there; it's being
> transferred (or Converted, yes! Like energy!) to Science.
> >
> > How's about the idea that the name Tenebrae, to a Christian of the
> period, familiar with the ritual extinguishing of candles during Holy Week,
> might imply a 'light-into-shadow' sort of thing?  A Venus, transitting...
> thing?
> >
> > Or (for something really insubstantial), did anyone else get the sense
> from the last paragraph of chapter 10 that we were being loosely visited by
> the skyship Inconvenience?  The subject matter (Aunt Euphrenia's saucy
> stories of harems among the Domes and Minarets); the fact that
> Inconvenience is mentioned by name, as an entity, as the substance of her
> exploits; and even the shape and tone of the thing (the whole Perils of
> Euphrenia thing feels way more 1900 than 1760 to me...)...
> >
> > As to the meditation, I don't think Mason ever gets anywhere near Quiet,
> and I think Dixon shows himself to be just a little full of sh*t in this
> regard, and not quite as spiritually groovy as he'd have us believe.  I
> think they both behave like Us.
> >
> >
> > On Feb 18, 2015, at 10:56 AM, Becky Lindroos wrote:
> >
> >> Again:
> >> Chapter 10 -
> >> P. 100  (in Kindle)
> >>
> >> ** After a few weeks to regroup from the “Catastrophe of the Passions”
> (p. 99) things go back to “normal” and some young writers show up at False
> Bay but without enough money to draw the interest of the Vroom sisters -
> but plenty to get Johanna’s attention for Austra (or someone).
> >> False Bay -  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_Bay
> >>
> >> ** Johanna is "Monomaniackal in her Pursuit” -  like Ahab seeking the
> Great White Whale?   And Austra along to help pick a “Sprig.”  (Like a
> sprig of thyme.)
> >> From
> http://www.masondixon.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Chapter_10:_94-104#Page_100
> >>
> >> **  Mason - “… had the Town undergone some Conversion?  Had I, without
> knowing it?"  and that reminds Dixon of John Wesley at New Castle. —
> >>
> >> **  John Wesley, founder of Methodism.   The scene on following page
> relates that Wesley tried to come up with a "method" to where anyone could
> understand and reach an experience providing them with the truth of his own
> religious experience and awakening.
> >>
> http://www.masondixon.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Chapter_10:_94-104#Page_100
> >>
> >> photos and text re Wesley’s New Castle:
> >> http://ukwells.org/locations/displaylocations/2116
> >>
> >> Dixon "remembers” that Harry Clasper out-keel’d the Lad from
> Hetton-le-Hole -
> >>
> http://www.masondixon.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Chapter_10:_94-104#Page_101
> >>
> >> Harry Clasper wasn’t even born when Dixon was relating this to Mason -
> nor when Cherrycoke is retelling it.  The question becomes:
> >>
> >> 1.   If the narrator is Cherrycoke  - how can Dixon or Cherrycoke
> remember or even know about something which does not even happen for maybe
> up to a century later?  It would be like Cherrycoke deciding to reminisce
> about the first time he saw an electric light bulb (patented in 1879).
> >>
> >> 2.   Is there yet another narrator - one existing after 1812 (when
> Clasper was born) ? -  But he’s having Dixon say this nonsense so it’s
> totally unreliable.  (Perhaps he’s from an ”other world.”  - next chapter).
> >>
> >> 3.   In any case,  this would be a truly “omniscient” narrator (lol)
> but still - he’s having Dixon say it so it’s not relevant how “omniscient”
> the narrator or the character is if the substance is inaccurate and
> therefore unreliable.
> >>
> >> Bottom line,  imo,  this anachronism was deliberately placed.  (*Unless
> TRP simply missed by a century and then it’s authorial error - which DOES
> happen,  but usually only in 1st editions.)  So as an anachronism why is it
> there?  -  To further underscore how history is a mess of an infinite
> number of tangled threads (lines?)  including some with unreliable
> narration as well as the reader (“Pynchon” - or model author -  making
> research errors) putting his own ideas into the subject and relating them.
> >>
> >> *********
> >> **  Then Dixon compares the changes brought by the Transit of Venus:
> >>
> >> “… this turning of the Soul, have tha felt it, - they’re beginning to
> talk to their Slaves?  Few, if any , beatings, - tho’ best to whisper, not
> jeopardize it too much.”  (a little superstition there - heh.)
> >>
> >> ** This strikes me as a good example of post-colonial lit!
> >> so I checked that idea out and found this at the Swarthmore site
> (bottom lines):
> >>
> http://www.swarthmore.edu/Humanities/pschmid1/essays/pynchon/mason2.html
> >>
> >> “… just as Gravity's Rainbow proved so stimulating in the late 1970s
> and 1980s to testing the full range of possibilities in deconstruction as a
> theory of reading, so will Mason and Dixon be one of the crucial texts for
> testing the resources and limitations of current "cultural studies" and
> "postcolonial" critical theories.”
> >>
> >>
> >> ***********************
> >> p. 101
> >> Mason and Dixon talking - Mason questioning Dixon about the spiritual
> experience of Quakers - “… but the fairly principal thing is to sit
> quietly…”  and wait for the great embodiment of the Quaker “Grace.”
> >>
> >> There’s a newish book out called" Pynchon and Philosophy: Wittgenstein,
> Foucault and Adorno” by Martin Paul Eve (2014) which is too expensive for
> me to mess with but there are little samples on GoogleBooks -
> >>
> >> Also of interest is Carl Ostrowski’s paper entitled "Conspiratorial
> jesuits in the Postmodern Novel Mason & Dixon.”  at: -
> http://tinyurl.com/p7sgjg7   or:
> >> <
> https://books.google.com/books?id=i5BlLrcWUe0C&pg=PA96&lpg=PA96&dq=carl+ostrowski+jesuits&source=bl&ots=H10lP_s8mr&sig=cIjxEnI64uoYxD4AGtaUfgDCnXk&hl=en&sa=X&ei=MdvkVIKzCNLHsQS_tYKwBA&ved=0CDUQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=mason&f=false
> >
> >>
> >> So Mason sits quietly, jumping up whenever he feels a momentary stir
> (or something) and finally falls asleep - whereupon Dixon steps out for a
> drinkie-poo.
> >>
> >> ** And the great change subsides  - the abuse of slaves resumes as does
> their own Bush tongue -
> >>
> >> *******************
> >> ** Finally the slaves return to their homes and
> >>
> >> "Riding in and out of Town now may often be observ’d White Horsemen,
> carrying long Rifles styl’d “Sterloops,” each with an inverted Silver Star
> upon the Cheek-Piece.”  (p. 101)
> >>
> >> I think for Americans this “White Horsemen with Rifles”  will have the
> resonance of the KKK,  and Pynchon is American and this is an American
> novel and I suspect this is deliberate -  so -  why is it there?
> >> https://www.pynchon.net/owap/article/view/77/165
> >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Inverted_pentacle.PNG
> >>
> >> This comes up again much later in the novel.
> >>
> >> **  Rifles:   “Something More Than a Rifle: Firearms in and around
> Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon“…
> >>
> >> “… while Freud says that sometimes a cigar is only a cigar, a rifle is
> always something more than a rifle." – William T. Vollmann."
> >> https://www.pynchon.net/owap/article/view/77/165
> >>
> >> ("Our investigation about firearms in M&D will show us how Pynchon may
> enforce the paradigms of realism while at the same time playing with the
> conventions of realism, achieving a condition of ontological uncertainty by
> putting two different stage-props on his narrative stage, but letting us
> believe that they are one, the same weapon appearing both in South Africa
> and in the American colonies. “)
> >>
> >> *******
> >> That’s my story for the day - do with it what you will - there is a
> WHOLE lot I can’t cover in under a couple years.
> >>
> >> Becky
> >>
> >>
> >> -
> >> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
> >
> > -
> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20150219/34363369/attachment.html>