Re: M&D: Learnédness (vs. Bornness//as reason for hope?)

Wed Jan 3 12:17:42 CST 2018

I used to cite the 400 years of dispute/discussion over the 'ultimate'
meaning of 5 (five) lines in Shakespeare's
Timon of Athens!.....five lines!!

So, there is so much still to SEE and say about Mason & Dixon, in my
comparative optimism...
that we---all of us---are often so right in our varying emphases, our
various pointings out and perspectives...

Now, 20 years later, I am AMAZED there seems to be so little published on M
& D....(just know of a few books
and haven't looked up even the extent of scholarly articles--which might be
where the best stuff now lay (since
books on M &D would have had to be published in a very different publishing
climate from those on GR....)

On Wed, Jan 3, 2018 at 12:58 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> I did not mean what I said as a put down or even an address exclusively to
> you. We just see the novel differently. In many ways I wish I saw it more
> as you do, and I think you are making reasonable arguments for your POV. I
> just honestly don’t see it quite so clearly.
>
> > On Jan 3, 2018, at 12:38 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Per the great writer himself, the excluded middle is a crock.
> >
> > Of course, that overt and covert underbelly is there, and I have pointed
> out much of it and will continue to.
> >
> > Per your own words, I think you should have written to what I wrote
> about the text and not to me.
> > Reducing me to your narrow paraphrase is "not fun"--my
> granddaughter---and inaccurate.
> >
> > I think it is clear in the text that he begins and ends the book under
> the rubric of Comedy as a genre, even if massively ironic, as many great
> comedies are. This novel isNOT Gravity's Rainbow, nor even Lot 49....in
> shape and form.....
> > From the glorious snowballs--by English children not Americans-- to the
> End, ---"we'll get jobs...We'll fish".... his ambiguity is
> > ALWAYS there.......that this ending is as much about the wonder of
> America as its failure to live up to that wonder
> > does not negate the expressed beauty of that wonder...in resources--see
> DeTocqueville...and in ideals......(all thru).
> >
> > And who are the haunted (beyond Rebekah), which we haven't talked about
> yet? More of his genius about the founding of the country, imho.
> >
> > Mark
> >
> >
> >
> > On Wed, Jan 3, 2018 at 12:12 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> > Interesting that you see M&D that way and see it as such a celebration
> of America. I see lots of comedy and in fairly equal doses the same dark
> underbelly, that same whelming momentum of colonial control that runs
> through all of Ps work. Freedom is  a powerful idea and a powerful force
> but as we see throughout M&D some always build their 'freedom' on others'
> backs. The westward movement was annihilating some; this was not just
> ambiguity or the minor taint of humanness. It was murdereously  essential
> to the project. The connection between this dark thing that will play out
> to be a fatal flaw in a tragedy or the minor character flaws in a comedy is
> still with us and profoundly undecided.
> >  I agree with David Morris that P sets these dark tendencies against
> transcendent reversals. Hope is part of the mix. But for me there is an
> overly religious and unrealistic  faith in any euchatastrophic mindset.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > > On Jan 2, 2018, at 7:03 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > We can't forget that Mason & Dixon is a sustained full-length comedy
> in most of the major senses. Anyway, I can't.
> > >
> > > Check wikipedia on Comedy for the usual trot-through of everything
> important and more.
> > >
> > > George Meredith said that "One excellent test of the civilization of a
> country ... I take to be the flourishing of the Comic idea and Comedy; and
> the test of true Comedy is that it shall awaken thoughtful laughter.
> > >
> > > American literary theorist Kenneth Burke writes that the "comic frame"
> in rhetoric is "neither wholly euphemistic, nor wholly debunking--[that
> balance beam of ambiguity which makes TRP a great mental gymnast of ideas,
> imho]—hence it provides the charitable attitude towards people that is
> required for purposes of persuasion and co-operation, but at the same time
> maintains our shrewdness concerning the simplicities of ‘cashing in.’"
> (Burke 166).  Critical to the comic frame is an understanding that humanity
> is good, but flawed.
> > >
> > > The simplicities of 'cashing in' are what I try to avoid.
> > >
> > > Here's one answer to Ugly:
> > > "However, the characters portrayed in comedies were not worse than
> average in every way, only insofar as they are Ridiculous, which is a
> species of the Ugly."
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > On Sun, Dec 31, 2017 at 5:23 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > > Speaking of satire, as we were.
> > >
> > > Sometimes, as some say about today's America, as Roth said about it in
> 1963; sometimes it is very funny just by "imitating" reality.
> > >
> > > On Sun, Dec 31, 2017 at 5:20 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > > http://www.classicsandclass.info/product/169/
> > >
> > > On Sun, Dec 31, 2017 at 11:25 AM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > > Third time through this book, and I am struck (again) by just how
> early in the text the LED comes--as if there should be no question about
> how many questions there will be about the world of the book.
> > >
> > > But the learnedness is interesting to me. The LED is the most
> civilized member of most every group of talking mammals he encounters. The
> LED's learnedness is the most foregrounded part of his identity. His
> civility is acquired.
> > >
> > > And this, some time later, p. 92, amid the rainstorms, the young and
> learning Seductrices Vroom, pursuing their "malicious fun," trying to
> trigger what we might assume are at least somewhat born-in sexual responses
> from our Astronomers (mostly M, though even he may be a more acceptable
> substitute for the African boys ("Babies, rather," as Austra reminds and
> admonishes the V sisters) they might otherwise be exploiting) as they await
> the Transit ...
> > >
> > > "[Austra's] blond Procuresses all begin to expostulate at once, and
> Mason understands that the vocal assaults of the Vrom Poultry are not
> inborn, but rather learn'd in this World from their Owners."
> > >
> > > Does ugliness, just like civility or refinement, descend through great
> hierarchical chains of ownership?
> > >
> > > I think some version of this question underlays the book just like so
> much of the political philosophy that background the novel, the Hobbeses
> and Lockes and Hamiltons of what is, we are told, the Age of Reason. Isn't
> it?
> > >
> > >
> > >
> >
> > -
> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
> >
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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