M & D Deep Duck Read. Pop quiz

Tue Jan 6 09:55:59 CST 2015

MK>...but haven't we all felt that so much that happens in American
society, in its movies, etc. is........juvenile in its
appeal?

Yes, but at least some of that comes from seeing it all. This American
tends to see only the most acclaimed Swedish and Japanese movies, read only
the most acclaimed Nigerian and Pakistani books -- not the far more
numerous, run-of-the-mill offerings that are, I'm sure, the despair of
elite Swedish, Japanese, Nigerian and Pakistani cultural consumers.

The selection effect works in time as well as space. Many laments about
mass culture, about the decline of art and taste since [insert Golden Age
here], tell us only that educated people have encountered the classics
surviving -- by definition --  from earlier eras, not the clunkers everyone
has forgotten. As you know better than I, Mark, the best-seller lists --
and even the high-culture award lists -- of bygone times yield many WTF?!?
moments.

Maybe most of most cultures everywhere and everywhen is "juvenile" because
"mature" -- aka elite -- culture requires both the opportunity and the
desire to continue exploration, education (institutional or autodidactic),
and reflection beyond adolescence.

On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 7:25 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> Wonderfullll!....psychometrist, a devolution?--Pynchon's usual way
> with descendants--from storyteller of adolescent psychology.
>
> Which leads me to THIS: The Rev is telling this story to entertain three
> kids!
> (He must or they will stop him). So, an exciting plot-drive story.
> full of 'Crimes!" shout the boys.
> Wanting their Youthful conceptions---their
> stereotypes--"Frenchwomen!", their boyish, uneducated (much)
> desires and lusts.......slated.
>
> I, for one, have long thought America as a generalized sensibility, is
> adolescent in essence. (Real cultural commentators
> have made this point, from whom I've got it, of course, but haven't we
> all felt that so much that happens in
> American society, in its movies, etc. is........juvenile in its
> appeal?) I suggest TRP is putting that down as
> well.
>
>
> So, I am reminded of the adventure stories that are The Chums of
> Chance's adventures. Special Operations Executive...an
> echo---foreecho?--of the Special Operations of the Chums?
>
> On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 5:59 AM, Elisabeth Romberg <eromberg at mac.com>
> wrote:
> > According to Joakim Sigvardson <<(t)he Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke is
> possibly
> > a forefather of Ronald Cherrycoke (...) in (GR). The latter is a <<noted
> > psychometrist>> (p. 146), a spiritual medium employed by the
> Psychological
> > Intelligence Schemes for Expecting Surrender at the White Visitation,
> (...) on
> > the coast of Southern England. The White Visitation was formerly a mental
> > hospital but when Ronald Cherrycoke and PISCES inhabit it during the
> (WWII),
> > it is part of the Special Operations Executive."
> >
> > Source: Immanence and Trenscendence in Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon,
> > published by Stockholm University, 2002, p. 81.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Also, could the 'omnipresent narrator' be Tenebrae somehow?
> >
> >
> >
> > 6. jan. 2015 kl. 02.35 skrev John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com>:
> >
> > Ooops, reply all.
> >
> > ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> > From: John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com>
> > Date: Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 12:35 PM
> > Subject: Re: M & D Deep Duck Read. Pop quiz
> > To: Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
> >
> >
> > I always thought it was Roland. Huh.
> >
> > Shades of Ronald McDonald mixed in with Coca-Cola? Hardly positive
> > associations in a P novel.
> >
> > One is ostensibly a man of God, another a man of medicine, but unless
> > I'm mistaken neither is particularly faithful to their role. They're
> > both kind of hucksters, kind of woo woo, kind of jokers, right?
> >
> > Although inspired by the discussion of wood in the first chapter,
> > maybe the coke in Cherrycoke could be read as the combustible fuel
> > coke. So it's like cherry tree wood used for burning purposes. A slow
> > burning wood according to the great lord google.
> >
> > Goes with Wicks and also Tenebrae (and I swear I went down a
> > rabbit-hole during my first read regarding names and light-sources in
> > M&D).
> >
> > On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 12:23 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > what is the relation of Rev Cherrycoke to Ronald in GR?, that is why
> > did P echo the name? Cherrycoke, Ronald
> >
> > 125; psychometrist in Psi Section; 146; "undertakes. . .trips into
> > Nora Dodson-Truck's void, " 150; "in a Jesus Christ getup" 639
> >
> >
> >
> > On Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 4:36 PM,  <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hello back, David! That dovetails with my view that Cherrycoke is
> Pynchon's
> > stand-in - Pynchon once young, wayward and reclusive, now that nigh many
> > years have come and gone, drawn inward to the family hearth to tell
> stories.
> > Not that different from what he's doing (as omniscient narrator)in
> Inherent
> > Vice - telling stories of his youth from the new perspective of family
> man.
> >
> > Laura
> >
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> >
> > From: David Ewers <dsewers at comcast.net>
> > Sent: Jan 5, 2015 4:01 PM
> > To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> > Cc: Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
> > Subject: Re: M & D Deep Duck Read. Pop quiz
> >
> > Hello,
> > Thanks for setting up this group reading.  This will be my second
> reading of
> > M-&D- (my first was when it came out) but my first time publicly
> discussing
> > it (or any Pynchon book, for that matter...), so I beg your pardon in
> > advance for my hamfistedness.
> > I was wondering about the Cherrycoke frame as well.  Are there other
> Pynchon
> > books that start this way, looking back from a comfortable future?  I
> can't
> > think of one.
> > If  Cherrycoke is a stand-in for Mr. Pynchon, could the framing have
> > something to do with the idea I've read (eavesdropped) here, that Pynchon
> > started M-&D- many years earlier, set it aside to do other things
> > (Vineland?), and returned to it later from a different place in a
> different
> > America?  In M-&D-, there's the twenty year span from the tale (1766) to
> the
> > telling (1786).  It seems to me that those years fairly well match with
> the
> > twenty years Rip Van Winkle slept; also roughly the years from Gravity's
> > Rainbow to M-&D- (...when we all slept?).  I'm not sure how fruitful it
> is
> > to draw too many autobiographic connections, especially when there's so
> much
> > rich stuff to dig around in here, but I figure I'd throw it out there.
> >
> > On Jan 5, 2015, at 10:54 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:
> >
> > A + +
> >
> > Why did he not have Cherrycoke tell it all, ya think? and.... that old
> > modernist staple [started with The Good Soldier] of
> > ye unreliable narrator......wha?
> >
> > p. 8 "stoven, dismasted, imbecile with age---an untrustworthy
> > Remembrancer [see---all on the surface]
> > for whom the few events yet rattling within a broken mamory must
> > provide the only comfort no remaining to him,---
> >
> > On Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 1:27 PM,  <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
> >
> > All I see is the Omniscient Narrator handing off to Cherrycoke here. Are
> you
> > talking about the book as a whole, or just this section?
> >
> > Cherrycoke is a stand-in for Pynchon himself, perhaps? Family outcast,
> paid
> > money to keep away? Well, no. But famous reclusive, one-time writer of
> > something labeled "obscene," long-time bachelor, no real job other than
> > being a highly-paid (relative to most working drones) writer, now
> ensconced
> > solidly within a family setting and telling a tale.
> >
> > LK
> >
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> >
> > From: Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
> > Sent: Jan 5, 2015 1:00 PM
> > To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> > Subject: M & D Deep Duck Read. Pop quiz
> >
> > Who is narrating?, or should that be Who are narrating?
> >
> > And what does that imply, maybe, in various ways, about the tale?
> >
> > 25 words or fewer..
> > -
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