M&D Ch 20

[Mark Kohut]

I once read some of Aries' classic history when I thought I needed a way to
judge being a father. But I would.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_childhood

On Thu, Feb 1, 2018 at 4:39 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> I was going to add some thoughts about Mason’s emotional distance from his
> children, one thought being how common this must have been in a seafaring
> culture with foreign wars. Another how this may be one of the inherent
> shadows  of empire. But the core thread of my thought is broken. Curious
> what others think about how P draws attention to this.
>
> My reaction to the emotional tone is similar to Smoke’s.
> > On Jan 31, 2018, at 5:22 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > A really complicated emotional chapter. Mason's inability to engage
> > with the love of his own children--one instinctively leaning away from
> > him, the other, in his innocence, somehow holding onto his memory of
> > his father the more.
> >
> > The unattractive love on offer from the spinster-to-hopefully-not-be
> Miss Quall.
> >
> > The difficult, occasionally brutal love of his own father.
> >
> > The insult to Mason's love for his chosen father (plus the uncertain
> > implications of Mason's and Bradley's final dealings/correspondence)
> >
> > Mason is one experience wiser as to the forces of enslavement in the
> > world. And now resistent to the idea of his children's future being
> > sold to his father on seven-year contracts. (The notion that destiny
> > is slavery, and Mason's special sensitivity to his children's
> > futureness; like in the chapter's first sentence: "[...]Doc has come
> > running, as he has done each time, at the sound of the Horse, his own
> > Motion far ahead of his earthly feet")
> >
> > On Wed, Jan 31, 2018 at 4:15 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Maybe Mason yearning for what he left behind below the equator, even
> >> amid the winds...
> >>
> >> “across the Lines and the Parade, all being reduced to Geometry and
> >> optical Illusion” (106)
> >>
> >> Deliverance from the flesh, from also the burden of a consciousness
> >> turned to face itself.
> >>
> >> On Wed, Jan 31, 2018 at 2:32 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> >>> Ch 20
> >>> Mason has come home to find Bradley’s family doesn’t want him around
> as  the family processes Bradley’s death, despite their close friendship.
> He tells his own  family he is being considered for work in America. Most
> oppose the idea. M’s father has plans to put Mason’s 2 sons to work milling
> or baking.
> >>>  The memory of bread making with his father and Mason’s divergent
> interest in the stars is moving and an odd mix of  the senior’s domineering
> emotional blackmail and fatherly love,   all mediated by a contemplation on
> bread-making which touches on science, the cycle of life and death, class,
> christianity, and the likeness of bread/dough to flesh, all of which which
> enters Mason’s dreams.
> >>>   There is  a passage about the holes  in bread and the spaces inside
> the spaces, leading to the conclusion that the whole is mostly space. But
> bread, like his family is full of human drama, farmed in soil light and air
> , cut down with steel sickles, ground to powder, wetted and oiled and
> yeasted, moist, hot, sticky, crusty, chewy and finally excremental. Mason
> seems to long for spaces and boundaries more geometric, less entangled with
> flesh,  points luminous and measurable in their relationships. -
> >>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
> > -
> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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