A melancholy yet darkly inspirational Tale

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Great circuitous route to an interesting book. Thanks, all!

Laura

Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4G LTE DROID

ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:

>Great stuff. Thanks.
>
>Just skimming through I ran into this excellent book for the M-D readers:
>
>http://www.wcml.org.uk/wcml/en/our-collections/activists/clr-james/
>
>see  Mariners, renegades and castaways: the story of Herman Melville
>and the world we live in (1985) - Shelfmark: Q36
>
>On Mon, Feb 1, 2016 at 7:49 PM, Mike Weaver <mike.weaver at zen.co.uk> wrote:
>> In the late 90s I was part of the cataloguing team at the Working Class
>> Movement Library. One book I catalogued was 'Agin the Governments' by Sir
>> Francis Fletcher Vane (published in 1929).
>> Dedicated to his dog Tox.
>> M&D read not long before, my curiosity was piqued -  Vane, dog, Tox - had I
>> stumbled on a odd corner of Pynchonian research?
>> It turned out that Sir Francis was a direct descendant of Sir Henry Vane the
>> Younger, whose 'melancholy yet darkly inspirational Tale' is referred to on
>> page 225.
>>
>> My enthusiasm for Pynchon's books had recently persuaded the WCML librarian
>> to read GR, so I shared my possible discovery with him.
>> "You know those boxes in the basement", he said, "marked  'Shields Papers',
>> they include an unfinished biography of Sir Francis."
>>
>> I had a look and, like Edward Shields and others before me, I became
>> interested in this oddball aristo. I had a new project!
>> I sorted the papers, created a web page on the man, his deeds and his
>> writings and over the next few years had various correspondences with others
>> who for one reason or another were interested in him, and along the way I
>> gathered more material to add to Shields' notes.
>>
>> Edward Shields had become interested in Vane when researching for a songbook
>> commemorating the 50th anniversary of the  Easter Uprising in Dublin.
>> Now, as a result of that, then the sheer chance that I, a Pynchon reader,
>> was the cataloguer of that particular book, it has come about that, as a
>> part of the 100th anniversary of the uprising, a photo of Vane from the
>> Shields collection has been used for one of the commemorative stamps just
>> issued by the Irish Post Office.
>>
>>
>>
>-
>Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
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