Mason & Dixon Group Read (cont)

[Mark Kohut]

TRP alludes and plays wonderfully with Moby
Dick early.

Ishmael says he has a November melancholy of the soul
as he goes to sea and TRP has Mason allude to that action
as a cure for Grief.....Ishmael is warned of the dangers of
going to sea on Ahab's ship...and, in M & D, it is a wise
woman--Hepsie, says Mauve--'who has reckon'd your Odds
and found them long"...."She is Lloyd's of Portsmouth. Believe her".....

A woman who can predict as Eliot put into The Wasteland; women
on ship, an irreal 'mythic' touch; women oft-commented as
not a part of Moby Dick at all (and why it may NOT be the great American
novel) and then there is that other allusion, to the ending of The Great
Gatsby--
"beating away, unsatisfied once more, against the Wind"  coming after
"and then we'd slacken Sail, and come about, and the real Work would begin"
one gloss of which says it is on the land that the work that matters
begins---"it's about work--Alice W"--
and also, that beating back against the current, unsatisfied, as that great
novel of
the tragedy of the American Dream embodies,  goes back to the beginning of
the American Experiment
and is an embedded pattern, so to speak. Maybe?

In P's clever, curious way, I think the above might be his fictional way of
signifying that HIS M & D begins
after Moby Dick, after The Great Gatsby, with the American Experiment
always beginning anew.


"constant exertion demanded by the company of Sailors" which has kept her
from looking matronly...(!)
and what, exactly, is "the unconsider'd use of Printed Fabrics" ?...What
would Mike Jing need to keep in
mind if he translated THAT?
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