M & D Group Read (cont.)

[Smoke Teff]

Would take some effort to prove (or even articulate, I say now as I read this over again) this but my sense of the two novels is that M&D is...closer to the human experience of its characters—perhaps because it goes deeply into fewer of them—and this correlates with a kind darker sense of the human tragedy that’s happening on the page in a way that also correlates with a...more slippery/smoky/ironic/winking with its prose and its linguistic fidelity to the moment. Time is weirder in M&D, and even the deviations from/steps outside it seem more nebulous in their logic, perhaps because that’s truer to the way the world felt to many at that moment in history (the Age of Reason being younger). Different projects, slightly different voices—both denser/more apparent contemporary prose mimicry and more overt anachronism in M&D

> On Jan 23, 2018, at 1:48 AM, bulb at vheissu.net wrote:
> 
> "Chinaman" in Against the Day; 3 occurences, all in an opium context:
> 
> - AD One 8.1: 82 (no - and his opium)
> - AD Two 16.1: 191 (Smoking opium with the -)
> - AD Three 36.7: 496 (opium products [...] -)
> 
> Michel.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>> On 2018-01-22 22:44, Jochen Stremmel wrote:
>> And as a bit of evidence that the resourceful wikipedians don't know
>> everything:
>> "In its original sense, Chinaman is almost entirely absent from
>> British English, and has been since before 1965."
>> The original sense obviously being: "a dealer of china". A British
>> English speaker in London in the 2nd half of the 18th century could
>> only mean that. (A new twist to the joak.)
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l