MD Read?

[Monte Davis]

Another really good background book is "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of
Land"
https://www.amazon.com/Life-Liberty-Pursuit-Daniel-Friedenberg/dp/0879757221

Before reading it, I hadn't understood just how large a part land
speculation played in the late colonial and early U.S. economy. No
"Atlantic" business -- not tobacco or cod or timber, not the
slave/molasses/rum "triangle trade," not the many and varied royal licenses
to import/export this or that -- made and lost fortunes even close to the
scale of "Let's bribe/cajole a charter from London (or Boston or Albany or
Philadelphia or Williamsburg or Charleston) for 500 square miles "out
there" and resell it by the township or acre at a tenfold mark-up."

That's what's behind the high/low comedy of M&D's visit to
soldier/surveyor/planter George Washington, who shows much more
enthusiastic interest in investment opportunities in the Ohio territory
than in whether or not the colonies might break with the UK. The former is
where the *real* action was.

On Sun, Oct 15, 2017 at 11:23 AM, bulb <bulb at vheissu.net> wrote:

> 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>
> 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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