on movement in M & D

[Joseph Tracy]

The movement of astronomers accross the globe to measure Venus transit times to find the distance to the Sun and thus derive the planetary distances of the solar system, a new ocean to explore. Maskelyne testing the lunar distance method of finding longitude. The movement of snowballs, lawbreakers, sailors, slaves, rum, sugar, spice, guns,tea, religion, sheep, soap, textiles the movement of lines and creation of new lines.  
> On Jan 1, 2018, at 3:21 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I think you could open up a lot by noting the different forms of wind, vapor, movement, the march of history, human influence, etc. I’ve been marking a lot of them on this read and have been planning some correspondence that tries to single those lines. 
> 
> On Jan 1, 2018, at 7:01 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Focusing on this concept--movement--picked up from an essay
>> in Ms Hinds' collection of essays on M & D--cannot even
>> remember which essay it was a part of. 
>> 
>>  The novel is about movement in a major way. M & D
>> are in motion throughout. Global movement between a few countries and, of course,
>> the full on-the-road but slow movement of running the line. Which ends sorta finished, right?
>> a major visto scene looking West, right? That famous frontier thesis of American History embodied
>> in that part of the story.
>> 
>> America, where immigrants are always arriving and moving on in. 
>> 
>> Even the girls are vrooming, zooming around all the time. Restlessness. 
>> 
>> The 'so un-American' waiting in line, remarks the narrator of The Nix. America as a nation
>> of preferring speed, acting out speed; living and working faster and faster comes to mind. 
>> Not like much of settled Europe, self-stopped by rootedness. 
>> 
>> Movement so fast in P's influential Henry Adams' time and telling that he was always "unprepared' for the present. 
>> 
>> America as a nation always changing, never fixed. America as the nation where pragmatism 
>> could emerge as the national philosophy. Pragmatism meaning open-ended, tentative 'final' truths;
>> pragmatism meaning absolute fixed 'settled' truths have little foothold; pragmatism meaning that the meaning
>> is in the fluid forms of the historically contingent, never like Plato's Divine-like Forms. Pragmatism as 
>> a philosophy of movement.  
>> 
>> America always like the ending of The Crying of Lot 49. Unknown. 
>> Within patterns and light along the ranges. 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> PS.  Easter egg on constant movement: in 1939 the American family could not still still for television the NYT predicted: 
>> The New York Times, in 1939, on why this "television" thing would never catch on: "The average American family hasn't time for it.
>> 
>> PPS: Danielle Sepulveres
>> ‏Verified account @ellesep 12m12 minutes ago
>> More
>> New York is simultaneously the worst and best place for a breakup because nothing stops moving even for a minute. 
>> 
>> Of course, NYC was Philly then. 

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