About this title: Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon were the British Surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here their story is re-imagined by Thomas Pynchon in an updated 18th-century novel featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, ...
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Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Henry Holt & Company
Date Published: 04/1997
ISBN-13:9780805037586ISBN:0805037586
Description: Good in good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. 784 p. Ex-Library expected imperfections. read more
Description: Fair. Dust Cover Missing. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Dust Cover Missing. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Acceptable. Former Library book. Shows definite wear, and perhaps considerable marking on inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Very Good. Great condition for a used book! Minimal wear. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Henry Holt & Company
Date Published: 1997
ISBN-13:9780805037586ISBN:0805037586
Description: Fine in fine dust jacket. Excellent Condtion with clear plastic over dust cover. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. 784 p. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
Date Published: 1998
ISBN-13:9780805058376ISBN:0805058370
Description: Good. A copy that has been read, but remains in clean condition. All pages are intact, and the cover is intact (including dustcover, if applicable). The spine may show signs of wear. Pages can include limited notes and highlighting, and the copy can include "from the library of" labels. read more
"Probably my favorite Pynchon that I've thus far read. Maybe it's because it's the most linear, tethering Mason and Dixon to a geographical/metaphysical line, but also because of its refreshing take on arbitrarity (it just sounds better than arbitrariness, doesn't it?) and the wielding of political power and the building of an American national identity. It reminds me of the power we have to build political alliances through small and often idiotic factions telling each other insane stories and following invisible ducks, yet create larger national identities of presumed common interest, belief, and desires, in response to the state and it's experts. In the case of Pynchon's Mason and Dixon, the astronomers do a fine job of carrying out their contract, yet he reminds us of the social, technological, and theoretical barriers to their business that amounts to placing a straight line on a map, yet eludes to the fact that these limitations and constraints aren't simply an artifact of 18th century colonialism, all while treating his characters with a warmth and heart (sounds awfully reviewery) not usually seen in Pynchon. To be able to cast doubt on our highest pre-, -, and postmodern institutions while still managing sympathy for those who live and act as agents of those institutions was refreshing."
"Starting a new Pynchon is like boarding a transcontinental flight to Tazmania. Settle in and enjoy the ride.
So here we go. Mason and Dixon is less intensely angry than Gravity's Rainbow and it goes by fast like a series of fantastic if not phantasmagorical episodes told by the Rev. Cherrycoke to assorted company in Philadelphia years later. The plot is a pudding and the sub-characters come and go as they please. His technique I once heard compared to a tapestry, or an all-over Pollock painting. I'm sure there's some intricate scheme, but I'm too lazy to deal. You can always tear off whole chunks you are bound to like. Such as this gem:
"In any case," says Mason to Dixon, "both Pennsylvania and Maryland are Charter'd Companies as well, if it comes to that. Charter'd companies may indeed be the form the World has now increasingly begun to take."
"And I thought it was an oblate spheroid."
***
Or the visit of Mr. Zhang to look at the line:
"Terrible Feng-Shui here. Worst I ever saw. You two crazy?"
***
And there's lots of other fun stuff. The meetings with George Washington, drunk and possibly stoned as well, Dixon's suggestion of the "pursuit of happiness" to Thomas Jefferson, and the interview with Ben Franklin are laugh out loud funny as are all the jibes and take-downs in Mason and Dixon's ongoing friendship. Franklin is the quintessential American New Man (arriviste) in Weber's Protestant Ethic, one of Pynchon's main texts. MD is also Tocquevillian: social conditions already predetermine the realities later made official by the dating of events and drawing of the official lines, the artificial boundary points in History. I personally enjoyed the scenes of eighteenth century science and of Mason and Dixon working with their instruments. Pynchon uses Newton's word 'sensorium,' which once caused a nasty spat with Leibniz over the nature of space, while Pynchon reminds us that once it may have been an ordinary word for the theater of perception.
So anyway this is it, folks. The greatest American writer today takes on the American problem head on, or well, edge on, as he always does, reminding us that things did not have to be this way, as enclosure, control, order and rationalization (in the form of a comically razor-sharp line of latitude 39 deg. 43' drawn through the wilds) tame all the zany possibilities out there in the Aether, religious, metaphysical, magickal. The Age of Enlightenment was anything but a scientific or rationalistic age.
The baddies stay mostly out of sight. The Dutch East India Company, the five pointed star, the Masons, the Illuminati, the Royal Society, its French rivals, the diabolical Jesuits, the Conradian 'material interests' of Pennsylvania and Maryland. Space invaders?
Once upon a time America was a bit like the Zone in GR, a place where rationalization and disenchantment have not yet taken hold, although the lines of the future are already visible. Pynchon celebrates this Zone of extreme tall tales and weird outlying possibilities in his books, the very extreme tail ends of the bell curve not yet tamped down. We have talking dogs, giant cheeses, talking watches, Jenkin's pickled ear, ghostly visitations, were-Beavers, Vaucencon's mechanical supersonic duck and the natural philosopher William Emerson's perpetual motion clock which gains excess energy by mortgaging against the future.
And then there are the wacky misadventures of Mason and Dixon themselves, two nutsy fellows, one melancholic, one agoraphobic, who don't know who they are really working for, and who seem to find an awful lot of taverns. They are as confused and paranoid as Slothrop ever was, as they continue that fateful line that will eventually mark the divide between the Free North and the Slave South. Although this divide is already present between Maryland and Pennsylvania, before the Revolution or the Civil War even happen. (p. 615) In fact in the mythical last chapter of "America" the push westward is symbolized as a giant division between the future global North and South all around the globe.
Pynchon writes movingly about America before the Fall. When people are still having crazy revelations in the fields and seeing New Jerusalems on every hill. Mason and Dixon have their own fantastic explanations. But the best is the fresh view of Mason's two sons, arrivals in a new nation where "the Indians teach you their magic and the fish jump into your arms.""
"I found this one to be tough - not that I expected an easy read from Thomas Pynchon, but it didn't grab me like Gravity's Rainbow did. I thought that he was trying too hard during the first third of the book, like he wanted to show the weirdness too early (like a monster in a scary movie, keep some of the weirdness in the shadows at the beginning to tease the audience along). Then during the middle third, I thought it just kind of plodded along - almost intentionally trying to make a short story into an 800 page novel. But then, in the final third, he pulls it all together. Not in some clean, ridiculous manner like you might expect in an episode of Seinfeld where each odd story comes full circle to explain an ending. Rather, he brings you around to a realization of the morality play he's been building all along. He still continues to introduce you to some new characters and disrupt the linear flow during the latter part of the book, but he does so while strengthening the reason behind most of what has occurred previously. The final section of the book is one of the greatest depictions of age, friendship, loss and love that I've read in recent memory. Then, and after you think that he could have ended it many times prior, he concludes with a turn that brings pain and love to the surface unexpectedly and a great portion of everything that came before it now seems less fantastical and, as a result, hurts so much more."
"I was just about to pick this up and read it a long-delayed second time when Pynchon ruined my plans by publishing "Against the Day". So it's been a while, but having read all of Pynchon, most of the books several times, I'd say this is the most consistently entertaining. It's relatively easy to follow despite the thickets of pseudo-archaic language and syntax, anchored as it is in the friendship and adventures of its titular astronomer/ surveyors. Digressions abound, but unlike in "Gravity's Rainbow" and "Against the Day" there's a central thread that the reader can hang onto. Pynchon does a wonderfully imaginative job of rendering a world in which every theory of 18th-century science is operative. If you're not ready for "Gravity's Rainbow" but want to progress beyond "The Crying of Lot 49" into full fledged Pynchonland, this is a good choice."
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