MD Read?

[Monte Davis]

Drake: As far as the professional/public lives if M and D themselves are
concerned, it stays very close to documented fact. For the American setting
of the mid-1760s, I can't recommend highly enough Fred Anderson's _The
Crucible of War_, about the Seven Years' War (locally the French and Indian
War) as background and stimulus to the War of Independence. Reading it ties
M&D into history with as much immediacy as GR ties into WWII and the Cold
War, especially w/r/t the ceaseless push of settlement into what London and
colonial governments alike had promised would remain Native American lands.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Easton
https://www.amazon.com/Crucible-War-British-America-1754-1766/dp/0375706364


On Sun, Oct 15, 2017 at 10:04 AM, Drake Smith <drake.smith3 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Obviously much of M&D is a fabrication but does anyone know how correlated
> it is to the history of the line and people?
>
> On Sun, Oct 15, 2017 at 5:18 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> "... 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...
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>>
>
>
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