M & D Group Read (cont.)

[Smoke Teff]

-"If you must use [Indian Hemp], do not inhale.”

On Mon, Jan 22, 2018 at 4:59 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> Most/many of my "readings" and overall reading risk being more
> ahistoric than historic. I skew and may skew too much in the steady
> directional belief that M & D is willfully, yes winkingly, one of the
> most "contemporary" historical novels ever.I won't mention the most
> obvious examples here,--hemp, hemp anyone?-- known to all.
>
> Have we all read any reviewers/ lit crits who are always saying that
> the most realistic, faultlessly researched historical novels STILL
> ALWAYS reveal their tacit contemporary, cultural, historical
> perspectives?
>
> When I read the last one of those---on Mantel, I think--I inevitably
> thought that THIS was another 'truth' Pynchon decided to make almost a
> part of M &D, another longitude line; a line of metafiction about
> historical fiction, so to speak---in  order to show those constant
> American patterns that I have been seeing and trying to articulate
> THIS reading.
>
>
>
> On 1/21/18, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Just to check off the obvious: these readings for both "Chinaman" and
> > "Corsican" involve stark anachronisms. People of the 1760s or 1780s knew
> > nothing about (1) importation of Chinese labor to the American west or
> (2)
> > Napoleon -- Corsica was just another Mediterreanean isle of hot-headed
> > banditti like Sardinia or Crete.
> >
> > That doesn't mean they don't do the work you say, only that they do it
> > winkingly for us rather than the ostensible audience. "Jesuit," by
> > contrast, was good contemporary currency, with sinister attachment to
> >
> > - Jacobite risings in Great Britain (1689, 1715, 1719, 1745, and support
> > for a notional French invasion in 1759)
> > - Catholic (and Francophone) Quebecois, most of Canada's settler
> population
> > even after British victory in the Seven Years' War
> > - those sneaky Catholics in Maryland, who had lost toleration in 1692 and
> > did not regain it until after the War of Independence.
> >
> > On Sun, Jan 21, 2018 at 4:50 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> >> A Chinaman, a Jesuit and a Corsican....etc.
> >>
> >> Never finished. I offer this 'reading'.
> >>
> >> Jesuit. The spying network in M & D, as also the embodied conspiracy
> >> in American History notion, but also
> >> an invasion of privacy problem (at least) in history, in the history of
> >> America
> >> but also Jesuitical, the common stereotype of able to
> >> find rationalizations for whatever one argues, wants to believe, quite a
> >> pattern in the old and new world of religious freedom NOT, where
> >> justifying
> >> one's own against all other religions is always a reality.
> >>
> >> a Corsican. in M &D (and in the stereotype again), an adventurer. But
> >> also,
> >> having
> >> read part of an old (1962 Twayne's Authors (!)) trot through Churchill's
> >> writings, I learn
> >> what I think I learned here in a previous read but now know was
> extensive
> >> at one time.
> >>  Napoleon was called the Corsican in much common talk and in books. ( A
> >> hero of Churchill's, as one might expect, that :Hero
> >> of the Empire" himself).Take your Napoleon associations
> >> and apply them to America's adventurous spirit--America's self-chosen,
> >> self-justifying Empire
> >> "adventures", much later in history than M & D's American time but not,
> >> of
> >> course, England's.
> >>
> >> And a Chinaman. The word applied to the many immigrants who came and
> >> built
> >> the infrastructure of America with their
> >> hard exploited work. Also, as TRP does, another statement of the East's
> >> influence on the US.?
> >> -
> >> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
> >>
> >
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
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