MD Read?

[bulb]

Charles Clerc stated in Mason & Dixon & Pynchon (U Press of America, Lanham, 2000) that the novel’s structure is “shaped in large measure by the course of actual historical events” (page 53). Three chapters are particularly interesting in this respect: Chapter 4 – Fact; 5 -Fact and Structure and 6 -Fact and Fiction.  This very readable study contains also excerpts from the Journal M&D kept for the Society back in London.

 

Michel.

 

From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf Of Monte Davis
Sent: zondag 15 oktober 2017 16:37
To: Drake Smith <drake.smith3 at gmail.com>
Cc: ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com>; Pynchon-l <Pynchon-l at waste.org>
Subject: Re: MD Read?

 

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 <mailto: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 <mailto: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 <mailto: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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