M&D Chapter 12 - pages 118-119

Becky Lindroos bekker2 at icloud.com
Wed Feb 25 14:16:07 CST 2015


Omg!  How funny and interesting!  

Way back in the olden days,  when I was about to turn 30,  I decided to give myself a “last-day-of-29” party.  I loved the idea and probably would have done it had I considered that this was the last day of “prime” of life (at least until I was 31).  Alas,  my birthday is very shortly after New Year's and I was all partied out.    

Becky 

> On Feb 25, 2015, at 10:39 AM, kelber at mindspring.com wrote:
> 
> I absolutely love this passage, and it reminds me of another of my favorites, similarly anthropomorphizing math/science: Janff in GR, complaining that covalent bonds are too wimpy - they share elections, where ionic bonds seize them.
> 
> Laura
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> 
> From: jochen stremmel 
> 
> Sent: Feb 25, 2015 1:17 PM
> 
> To: Becky Lindroos 
> 
> Cc: pynchon -l 
> 
> Subject: Re: M&D Chapter 12 - pages 118-119
> 
> 
> 
>> 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.)
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> 2015-02-25 18:27 GMT+01:00 Becky Lindroos <bekker2 at icloud.com>:
> Another day,  another couple pages:
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> Maskalyne likens St. Helena to a gothic novel and says
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> "Six months I’ve been here - too many idle Minutes soon pile up, topple and overwhelm the Healthiest Mind.”
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> 
> (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.)
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> ** “Sirius Business,” cackles the Proprietor. -  another groaner gag.
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> 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.
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> "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."
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> http://www.swarthmore.edu/Humanities/pschmid1/essays/pynchon/mason.html
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> "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."
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> http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/issue.903/14.1burns.html
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> Thoughts on the humor and how it adds to the mix of history, themes, story, whatever -  do you laugh? Why?
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> **********
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> 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).
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> 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
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> Mason:  (but 30 is)  “… a Number divisible,- penetrable! - by 6 numbers!”    (eeks?  why?  - numerology of some kind I guess.)
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> ***  Narrator:    “...dismal apostrophes...”    -
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> And in this case the word apostrophe means exclamations,  not the punctuation symbol.
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> **** 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.
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> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Sisson
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> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodolite
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> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrant_(instrument)
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> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mural_instrument
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>        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)
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> 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).
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> **********
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> Is there really so little on these two pages?    Or is this “so little?”
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> 
> 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).
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> http://www.newrepublic.com/article/61361/human-all-too-inhuman
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> And this is a rather interesting little Wiki article on the subject:
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> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysterical_realism
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> (interesting little piece)
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> 
> Becky
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> the humor bit reminded me of hysterical and that took me on the little semi-side trip to Wood and Wiki -
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> -
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