on movement in M & D

[Mark Kohut]

wind and vapor esp......

On Mon, 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: D*anielle Sepulveres* <https://twitter.com/ellesep>
> ‏Verified account @ellesep <https://twitter.com/ellesep> 12m12 minutes ago
> <https://twitter.com/ellesep/status/947536634635083776>
> 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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