Mason & Dixon Resources and Reading Group

[Anonymous No.14056648]

Firstly:
Seeking appropriate supplemental materials for reading Mason & Dixon. One hundred pages in already, and given that I've recently been reading a lot of the likes of Swift and Sterne, i.e. the era and genre he's primarily pastiching, the language hasn't been a source of struggle, but I worry that my reading thus far has been relatively surface level, and I want to ensure a deeper reading.

If any of you have epubs or pdfs of Mason & Dixon on hand, that'd also be appreciated because helpful in recruiting for my ensuing secondly.

Secondly:
I'm interested in starting a reading group for Mason & Dixon on Telegram. I've done the same for a few books over the past year or so; Moby-Dick's was very successful, Ulysses' very a flop. I know there'll be the typical bellyaching about using an app, but we all know that a weekly thread isn't actually tenable.

Would any of you have interest in such a reading group? Some may struggle with the style, but I would be glad to help, and the book's just hilarious.

In contrast to his earlier works, wherein he's straining himself til bulgingly forehead vein'd to produce something Academically Laudable, my feeling is that in Mason & Dixon he's just having virtuosic fun, having already established his authorly status. It's really a delight.

[Anonymous No.14056661]

>>14056648
>In contrast to his earlier works, wherein he's straining himself til bulgingly forehead vein'd to produce something Academically Laudable, my feeling is that in Mason & Dixon he's just having virtuosic fun, having already established his authorly status. It's really a delight.
god you are a complete fucking faggot

[Anonymous No.14056667]

>>14056648
Cheers, Lucretius.

[Anonymous No.14056673]

>>14056661
watch your tone

[Anonymous No.14056686]

>>14056661
I'm just giving you a Taste of the Styling of the Book! Verily,— if you respond with such Bilious Ire to such straightforward Linguistic Fun, this Book is not for you.

[Anonymous No.14056713]

[Anonymous No.14056752]

>>14056686
I've already read it. Your bullshit whining about him being a tryhard in his earlier books is irrecoverably gay. It's even rumored that he was writing M&D the entire time.

[Anonymous No.14056776]

>>14056752
Do you have any insights to share, then, Mssr. Well-Read?

[Anonymous No.14056784]

>>14056776
Yes, you're gay.

[Anonymous No.14056785]

I got this book in hardback for £4 Recently but I’m a Britbong and know near nothing about the Mason-Dixon Line or much at all about that time period in general. Could I still enjoy it?

[Anonymous No.14056798]

>>14056785
likewise

[Anonymous No.14056800]

>>14056785
That's okay, nobody in america knows what the mason dixon line is either. People in the south think its in like kentucky because muh stars and bars muh country songs

[Anonymous No.14056811]

>>14056785
The main characters are Brits first sent out by the Royal Society. They make fun of each other's accents at one point early on in getting to know each other and Mason shits on Dixon for being from Durham

[Anonymous No.14056910]

>Mason & Dixon was one of the most acclaimed novels of the 1990s. According to Harold Bloom, "Pynchon always has been wildly inventive, and gorgeously funny when he surpasses himself: the marvels of this book are extravagant and unexpected." Bloom has also called the novel "Pynchon’s late masterpiece."[2] John Fowles wrote: "As a fellow-novelist I could only envy it and the culture that permits the creation and success of such intricate masterpieces." In his review for The New York Times Book Review, T. Coraghessan Boyle wrote, "This is the old Pynchon, the true Pynchon, the best Pynchon of all. Mason & Dixon is a groundbreaking book, a book of heart and fire and genius, and there is nothing quite like it in our literature..."[3] New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani said, "It is a book that testifies to [Pynchon's] remarkable powers of invention and his sheer power as a storyteller, a storyteller who this time demonstrates that he can write a novel that is as moving as it is cerebral, as poignant as it is daring."[4]

>During a conversation with Leonard Pierce of the A.V. Club, Harold Bloom said, "I don't know what I would choose if I had to select a single work of sublime fiction from the last century... it would probably be Mason & Dixon, if it were a full-scale book, or if it were a short novel it would probably be The Crying Of Lot 49. Pynchon has the same relation to fiction, I think, that my friend John Ashbery has to poetry: he is beyond compare."[5]

[Anonymous No.14057246]

>>14056800
>nobody in america knows what the mason dixon line is either.
The idea of the dixie states has transcended the geography of the mason-dixon line

[Anonymous No.14057297]

>>14056752
OP is correct tho, even pynch said it himself. anyway go be a grouch elsewhere

[Anonymous No.14057316]

>>14057297
No he did not. He said he didn't like the crying of lot 49 in the introduction to his short stories he also didn't like in college. Stop playing chinese telephone you complete fucking idiot.

[Anonymous No.14057326]

>>14057316
not what was being alluded to, now you go back to your closet

[Anonymous No.14057329]

>>14057316
>in college
From*. Furthermore he didn't like the crying of lot 49 because it was barely a novella and immature (I'm paraphrasing here) which is the exact opposite of OP's immense gaylorditis.
>its 2011+8 and newdditors haven't read pynchon's oeuvre
ISHYGDDTS

[Anonymous No.14057335]

>>14057326
You have nothing to back this up samefag

[Anonymous No.14057357]

>>14057335
most certainly not going to enlighten you and you should learn what samefag means before trying to use the local linguo (or better don't and keep signaling that newfaggledness)

[Anonymous No.14057390]

>>14057357
I read your post as "not what he was alluding to" because your grammar is atrocious. In any case you are only digging your retard hold deeper and destroying your own/OPs thread which is fine with me and why I'm here.

[Anonymous No.14057418]

>>14056648
>I'm interested in starting a reading group for Mason & Dixon on Telegram.
I would be open to joining this, as long as whatever weekly reading goal you set is reasonable. The /lit/ BotNS reading group that someone started earlier this year died out because too few pages were assigned each week and people lost interest or read far ahead of the group.
I was thinking of reading Vineland next, after already finishing his first three books in publication order, but would be willing to skip ahead because of how interesting M&D's premise is.

[Anonymous No.14057435]

>>14057418
You can read vineland in a few days man.

[Anonymous No.14057440]

>>14057435
Maybe I'll do that first, then.
I saw a hardcover copy in a bookstore and it looked like a bigger book.

[Anonymous No.14057446]

>>14057440
Its a pretty standard length novel and has the least amount of characters and plotline fuckery for a pynchon book except that most of the book is a "flashback" but that doesn't really matter.

[Anonymous No.14057469]

>>14056648
>https://masondixon.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
is not bad if you missed it

[Anonymous No.14057857]

>>14057418
I haven't yet established a schedule or a good list of supplemental materials but I'm planning on starting a formal schedule by next weekend at latest. I'll be making a new thread once everything's shipshape but in the meantime if you're interested here's the Telegram link: https://t.me/joinchat/L-qr5lReCubhRltNJOo4-w

[Anonymous No.14057867]

>>14056713
I really need to re-read this. The fact that books like Mason & Dixon can be written is one of the few potentially redeemable parts of modern Western culture.

[Anonymous No.14058004]

>>14057867
You're damn right. If you've read it and you're up to reread it, I'd be ecstatic to have your aid in organizing the schedule etc.: https://t.me/joinchat/L-qr5lReCubhRltNJOo4-w

[Anonymous No.14058384]

[Anonymous No.14059572]

>>14056648
MD group reads will always peter out with people finding their own pace. Which is still fine, just don't be surprised

[Anonymous No.14059663]

>>14056785
It just separates the North from the South. This retard doesn’t know what he’s talking about >>14056800

t. family has lived in the South since the nation was founded.

[Anonymous No.14060400]

>The first electrifying difference about M&D is the astonishing voice of its narration. Pynchon has elected to write his new novel in an eighteenth-century English idiom. To say this is risky is to understate, and yet the voice here is not only elegiac and credible but also powerfully moving and unexpected, especially given the very contemporary language of the Pynchon novels that have preceded it.

>Eighteenth-century prose is the style because this is a historical novel about the famous surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon -- mappers of the border between Pennsylvania and Maryland that also made up part of the dividing line between slave states and free states before the Civil War, and globetrotters on a variety of scientific adventures in the later 1700s. More than simply a period voice telling a tall tale of these two anti-heroes, however, the narration is largely the first-person voice of a singular character, the Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke, who tells most of the story of M&D after dinner, for the entertainment of his family. Thus we have an oral narrative, like Conrad's Heart of Darkness -- the first such in Pynchon's output, and a form that recalls an earlier time in the development of the novel. (As far as conceptual continuity is concerned, the Reverend Cherrycoke seems to be related to a minor character from GR, a psychic called Ronald Cherrycoke -- and this perhaps accounts for the Reverend's ability to relate events at which he was not present.)

[Anonymous No.14060413]

>the section called "America" begins to indulge in the metaphysical, moral, and political struggles of the New World. For example, Mason and Dixon land first in Philadelphia, and Benjamin Franklin is among their initial acquaintances: "The Geometers have encounter'd the eminent Philadelphian quite by chance, in the pungent and dim back reaches of an Apothecary in Locust-Street" (wherein Dixon is about to buy a wagonload of laudanum for their journey). Franklin is of course given to quips: "'Strangers, heed my wise advice, -- Never pay the Retail Price.'" Not long after, George Washington is their host in Virginia: "If the Colonel serves not as a Focus of Sobriety, neither is he quite the incompetent Fool depicted in the London press."

[Anonymous No.14060418]

Pynchon is for tryhards nerds

[Anonymous No.14060420]

>>14056648
how fast would the pace be?

[Anonymous No.14060451]

>>14059663
It's fucking pennsylvania, Billybob.

[Anonymous No.14060463]

>If the action sounds picaresque, that's because it is. The 450 middle pages of Mason & Dixon most resemble the great picaresque novels of Fielding or the metaphysical comedy of Voltaire's Candide. What makes M&D modern (besides uncanny similarities between the Enlightenment and the millennium, besides sly references to contemporary culture -- to dope smoking, to popular music: "'Is it not the very Rhythm of the Engines, ... the Rock of the Oceans, the Roll of the drums in the Night'") is the tremendous intellection spun into its episodic action: Charles Mason's ambition (which is matched only by Dixon's refusal to be ambitious at all, except in womanizing, drinking, and fishing) is to understand the invisible forces behind the physical laws that make up his work during the Enlightenment.

[Anonymous No.14060574]

>>14060420
Fast
Join today if you want a say

[Anonymous No.14060583]

>>14060574
are we talking 25-50 pgs a day?
i dont see any link to join

[Anonymous No.14060610]

>>14060583
It's 800ish pages and not nearly as dense as the likes of GR so at least 100ish pages a week, probably formally "starting" next week(end) to give people time to acquire a copy (although we have an epub) and/or get a headstart; link here: https://t.me/joinchat/L-qr5lReCubhRltNJOo4-w

[Anonymous No.14060617]

>>14056910
Pulling out the Big Guns... The "Canon" as 'twere...

[Anonymous No.14061096]

>>14056785
>>14056798
>>14057418
>>14057867
>>14059572
>>14060420
The schedule has been formalized. I have made a new, terser thread to recruit more readers: >>14061083

[Anonymous No.14061106]

>>14056648
IT HAS A HECKIN' CUTE FLUFFIN' MECHANICAL PUPPER!

[Anonymous No.14061237]

>>14061096
Thanks for taking the time to reply to me anon, I was keeping my post open to check in