Pynchon's Mason and Dixon--Should I bother? Where's it stand in relation to his other stuff?

also dont get why he has dixon sing "a glass of wine with you sir" when its established pretty early on that mason is the wine-drinker

weird how pynchon's britishisms are more convincing than knopfler's

anyway, have you heard pat benatar's pynchon concept album

http://img.maniadb.com/images/album/165/165413_1_f.jpg

i have heard of it

i mean everyone knows what a huge pynchon fan benatar is

http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2013/05/2013-coopers-hill-cheese-rolling-and-wake/100521/

Finished it. Wonderful work, probably *just* behind ATD in my affection in that it often felt like a collection of really good bits than a single tectonic movement towards Truth, Beauty or othersuch (although it did of course have elements of this)

some of the individual bits are as good as anything I've read - Jenkin's Ear, the chapter where the duck is introduced, the chapter where Zhang is introduced, lots of the psychogeography and perhaps above all the parable of Hsi and Ho, which is possibly my favourite literary parable of all. and of course the ongoing badinage between our two heroes - the very book's soul. so much to love here.

didn't cry at the end - came close - it folds to an elegiac & superbly-weighted ending - the bits with SPOILER SORT OF Mason & his son especially

did not know that mark knopfler's "sailing to philadelphia" was inspired by this book

― max, Wednesday, October 5, 2011 7:47 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i had never consciously heard this song and i was in a grocery store during the "couplethree" weeks i was reading the book and it came on and i thought i was insane

like the guy in signs and symbols

Yeah, reread this over the summer. Loved the whole of part three, where the timeline gets really scrambled, and it seems as if noone is really sure what is going on. I want to write a(nother) paper on that part some day.

Yeah the bittiness is kind of the whole point. This is his best book, I think, although I do need to give it a re-read.

it's my favourite, but it's probably my favourite historical era

I love the discussion of the Black Hole of Calcutta and how it distorts history. It's a discussion of relativity in 18th century language.

He returned to quite a few themes in ATD - perhaps most memorably the hollow-earth theory - but I think they got fairly distinct treatments. ATD is rangier, more flippantly-written, more overtly psychedelic, more revolutionary in tone. M&D is very technical, subtly-detailed and elusive. It's almost an acknowledgement that America will always escape itself - that too much has been staked.

Oh - there were numerous astonishing sentences. Cherrycoke on History and its uses springs to mind (in fact, every Cherrycoke extract was incredible really, ditto Tox). There's one paragraph, spoken by an Indian to 'defecates-with-pigeons', that is one of the most haunting paragraphs I've read

You could not be the Giants of long ago, who would simply have wip'd us away, and for less

"Coprophagously-agrin" is the phrase that sticks in my head,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fart_Proudly

#pynchoninpublic remembering my favorite Pynchon in that special day pic.twitter.com/ME4YXKH9cP

— David Tena (@Davirutena79) May 8, 2022

(adding: dr vick's brother once played me "sailing to philadelphia" on the ukelele)

(attn real hedz: we larfed non-stop)