MD Read?

[ish mailian]

"... the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only
instrument used upon a book.”


> There are beautiful passages in GR and in AtD. M&D, though it is a
> reflection of and a commentary on the values of the day that produced it,
> is set when technology had not yet emerged as a hazardous concept (Leo
> Marx). It is set in the days of instruments, of measuring devices used
> to determine the present value of observations. We might use, as Mike
> suggests, and as Nabokov once advised, the old instrument for
> reading a book: our tingling spines.
>
> On Sat, Sep 30, 2017 at 7:33 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:
>> "To rule forever," continues the Chinaman, later, "it is necessary only to
>> create, among the people one would rule, what we call...Bad History. Nothing
>> will produce Bad History more directly nor brutally, than drawing a Line, in
>> particular a Right Line, the very Shape of Contempt, through the midst of a
>> People,--to create thus a Distinction betwixt 'em,--'tis the first
>> stroke.--All else will follow as if predestin'd, unto War and Devastation."
>>
>> [...]
>>
>> When it seems there's a Chance that someone may listen, Mason and Dixon both
>> try to explain about the new Planet,--but very few care. It breaks slowly
>> upon the Astronomers, that with no time available for gazing at anything,
>> this people's Indifference to the Night, and the Stars, must work no less
>> decisively than their devotion to the Day, and the Earth for whose sake
>> something far short of the Sky must ever claim them, a stove, a child, a
>> hen-house predator, a deer upwind, the price of Corn, a thrown shoe, an
>> early freeze.
>>
>> [...]
>>
>> There may be found, within the malodorous Grotto of the Selves, a conscious
>> Denial of all that Reason holds true. Something that knows, unarguably as it
>> knows Flesh is sooner or later Meat, that there are Beings who are not wise,
>> or spiritually advanced, or indeed capable of Human kindness, but ever and
>> implacably cruel, hiding, haunting, waiting,--known only to the
>> blood-scented deserts of the Night,--and any who see them out of Disguise
>> are instantly pursued,--and none escape, however long and fruitful be the
>> years till the Shadow creeps 'cross the Sill-plate, its Advent how mute.
>> Spheres of Darkness, Darkness impure,--Plexities of Honor and Sin we may
>> never clearly sight, for when we venture near they fall silent, Murdering
>> must be silent, by Potions and Spells, by summonings from beyond the
>> Horizons, of Spirits who dwell a little over the Line between the Day and
>> its annihilation, between the number'd and the unimagin'd,--between common
>> safety and Ruin ever solitary...
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l