M&D Chapter 12 - pages 118-119

Wed Feb 25 12:17:38 CST 2015

>Mason:  (but 30 is)  “… a Number divisible,- penetrable! - by 6 numbers!”
  (eeks?  why?  - numerology of some kind I guess.)<

You mean still Maskelyne, with the Apostrophes,and what he means with Prime
is a pun, or homonym, because 29 is a prime number (only divisible by 1 and
itself) and at the same time styled by him as "Prime of Life", while "the
dread Thirty" is a Number divisible by six others – three of them primes
themselves: 2, 3, 5 – and the others: 6, 10, 15. Quite a complaint by
someone who loves to calculate. (But perhaps you knew all this already ...
sorry, then.)

2015-02-25 18:27 GMT+01:00 Becky Lindroos <bekker2 at icloud.com>:

> Another day,  another couple pages:
>
> Maskalyne likens St. Helena to a gothic novel and says
>
> "Six months I’ve been here - too many idle Minutes soon pile up, topple
> and overwhelm the Healthiest Mind.”
>
> (A little foreshadowing there? -  Suspicions that Mason might go
> completely mad?  Pynchon doesn’t really go in for a lot of foreshadowing to
> keep up suspense or whatever - just as well,  it would take the whole thing
> overboard, overdone, too much.)
>
> ** “Sirius Business,” cackles the Proprietor. -  another groaner gag.
>
> This novel has some very serious themes, but told with a LOT of humor -
> not just humor to lighten the atmosphere -there’s actually a comic tone.
>
> "But I also noticed that the book’s  (M&D’s) humor was more thoroughly
> interwoven with melancholy and a sense of mortality than ever before in
> Pynchon's work."
> http://www.swarthmore.edu/Humanities/pschmid1/essays/pynchon/mason.html
>
> "Mason & Dixon represents an impulse to write history through the
> imaginary field, to crosshatch its narrative with a realization of
> culture's desire to find its identity in the realm of the imagination. It
> thus argues, implicitly, for the importance of artistic imagination
> alongside scientific and historical work. Pynchon rejects the harsh realism
> and more cynical parodies employed by many contemporary authors, using
> HUMOR (my caps)  and even magic as modes of transformation.[17] Talking
> dogs, sexually aroused mechanical ducks, and nighttime apparitions and
> ghosts haunt Mason and Dixon in America; perhaps the country that combines
> technical invention with capitalistic enterprise might be equallymythologic
> in Pynchon's ambivalent history."
> http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/issue.903/14.1burns.html
>
> Thoughts on the humor and how it adds to the mix of history, themes,
> story, whatever -  do you laugh? Why?
>
> **********
> And then, ta-da - it’s Maskelyne’s birthday - (which would tell us it’s
> October 6, 1761 and that he’s 29 years old - born Oct. 1732) and he makes a
> big deal of impending doom (age 30 is coming).
>
> The phrase "Stygian mists”  is from "To Chloris”  in "Madrigals and
> Epigrams” by William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585-1649) Scottish poet.   a
> little chunk of the poem -  http://www.bartleby.com/337/285.html
>
> Mason:  (but 30 is)  “… a Number divisible,- penetrable! - by 6 numbers!”
>   (eeks?  why?  - numerology of some kind I guess.)
>
> ***  Narrator:    “...dismal apostrophes...”    -
>  And in this case the word apostrophe means exclamations,  not the
> punctuation symbol.
>
> **** Now Dixon is leaving for South Africa to take care of Maskelyne’s
> "Sisson instrument”  which is probably a quadrant of some sort,  a device
> for measuring angles.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Sisson
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodolite
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrant_(instrument)
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mural_instrument
>
>         If the measurement device is off by a hair - then that slight
> error is multiplied exponentially and Maskelyne has invested more than time
> and his career in the instrument ($$?) .  Dixon is the field rep for Johnny
> Bird’s instruments?  -  lol - but …
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bird_(astronomer)
>
> Why are the various measurements of time and space inaccurate?   Errors in
> measurement - 1.  human error - the time of the Transit (because M&D
> started/ stopped at different places) and, 2.  device error (plumb line
> screwed up on quadrant).
> **********
> Is there really so little on these two pages?    Or is this “so little?”
>
> So here’s an added little morsel for the Learn’d Dogs amongst us - James
> Wood, in a now “classic” essay soundly criticized Zadie Smith’s White Teeth
> for it’s “hysterical realism” and lambasted a few others in the process
> (M&D, etc).
> http://www.newrepublic.com/article/61361/human-all-too-inhuman
>
> And this is a rather interesting little Wiki article on the subject:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysterical_realism
> (interesting little piece)
>
> Becky
> the humor bit reminded me of hysterical and that took me on the little
> semi-side trip to Wood and Wiki -
>
>
>
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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