M & D Chapter 13

[Mark Kohut]

wide-set...a little contemporary urban slang? Was it around by 1997? Dunno.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=wideset

On Sun, Mar 15, 2015 at 2:06 PM, David Ewers <dsewers at comcast.net> wrote:
> a couple more noodles:
>
> p142 - Determining longitude = going against the earth's grain?  What's that
> got to do with Lines?
> p142 - Dr. Zhang discovered Pluto in the East?  What's with the greenish
> blue blur (p143)
> p143 - Susannah, Mason's crush with the wide-set eyes:  Does wide distance
> between eyes (besides suggesting prey rather than predator) have something
> to do with parallax?  Not the predator's laser-focused zeroing in, but a
> more inclusive, 'big-picture' view?
>
>
> Thanks for holding down the fort, Mark.
>
> There's tons of stuff in Chapter 13, but Here are a few of my "off" Obs:
>
> Riffing on the Crossroads references (the Yellow meets the Dog) and
> Hades/Pluto stuff, I get further impressions that St. Helena is a place for
> bad contracts and Faustian bargains.
> p127: Waddington and all his "all it says in my Contract is one Transit of
> Venus..."
> p140: Maskelyne, talking about his rather Mephistophelian bro-in-law, Clive
> of India:  "He's not yet ready to make use of me, that's all.  Someday he
> must...I've been paid for... it shan't cost him anything." .... Whatever his
> Bargain, he's not happy with it.  Mason, who as yet hasn't seen the terms of
> his own, is but apprehensive."
>
> The (infernal? Plutonic?) East India Company financed the Seven Years' War?
> What did that bargain entail? ' Waves of Ink incarnadine'? (great word,
> incarnadine!)
> All that Ink incarnadine caused the Crown to tax the American colonies?  How
> did the E.I.C. benefit from the war?  Was it by charging the Crown interest?
> (another bargain...)
>
> I also got a reminder here of the nexus/deal between Scientism and
> Corporatism.  How tightly are they bound?  Are they the same thing?
>
> A few more random bits:
>
> As to the bad instrument, do you suppose it's Lunar gravity that's effecting
> the plumb line (St. Helena a moon-ruled place, influenced by tides... tying
> in to the clocks from last chapter, moaning about what being on the water
> does to their mechanical sanity...)
> Or does the gravitational anomaly have something to do with the island being
> a Slumbering Creature? (p128)  St. Helena is described as an Incubus, an
> infernal creation of the E.I.C.?
> So, does the Company represent the birth of the modern (occult) death
> culture that will eventually bring us the Rocket (...the same machine that
> will take us, Charon's ferry-like, to the Moon... bringing the Contract full
> circle....  And what sort of Transit is that?)
>
>
> Miscellanea:
> p126 - James Town opens from the inside? ("Tho' small in secular
> Dimensions,...")
> p129  - The Moon depicted as a White Luminary with the face of a Woman of
> the Town (a contractor, of [a few] sorts?)
> p132 -The rain falling from Mason's tricorn hat: 3 plumb lines
>
>
> On Mar 15, 2015, at 3:48 AM have a nice day, violet wrote this message:),
> Mark Kohut wrote:
>
> p. 141....."many,--as had the elder Cabot upon his deathbed,---claimed
> to've been told the Secrets of th eLongitude by God (os, as some preferred,
> Thatwhchever Created Earth and her Rate of Spin)
>
> is that Cabot, one SEBASTION?
> https://books.google.com/books?id=GiESAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA302&lpg=PA302&dq=cabot+%2B+longitude&source=bl&ots=1suTbva96A&sig=o_lYAhr6VpKP4_KbbYhdCWJU9KI&hl=en&sa=X&ei=hV4FVdOULIiMNpnEg4AI&ved=0CDEQ6AEwBTgK#v=onepage&q=cabot%20%2B%20longitude&f=false
>
> And don't you just love the soft satirizing of religious talk, or
> maybe "philosophical theology" which
> finds abstract ways to say what a word used to say......and/or what
> might be meant by a vague word
> such as 'God"....
>
> Reminds me of what he seems to do in Against the Day.
>
> p.142   riff on Latitude vs. Longitude...in which it is said that Zero
> Meridian
> is based on a certain Himalayan Observatory, in Tibet..........
>
> ANOTHER throwing in of THIS nod to Tibetan centering of life.....
> Can we not help but think of the cover of Against the Day now that it
> is published?....
>
> Eastern 'religious' thought slides into the text like certain
> 'anarchist' notions slide into
> GR and AtD, yes?..the kind of Eastern 'religious' thought we might
> characterize as
> non-religious (in any Western sense)?...
>
> Tibetan Buddhism...a 'religion' without a hierarchy and without any
> scriptural must-interpret doctrine?
> a TRP 'ideal"?.....
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
>
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l