Quick Note for Norm

O...kay...

I've been laboring through Mason & Dixon lately, passed page 100 a few days ago...

I thought it was interesting to see another sailor-man named Bodine. In V. it's Pig Bodine, in Gravity's Rainbow it's Seaman Bodine, and I think there might be another appearance in some other book.

For any of my few readers who're unfamiliar with this banter between Norm and I, Mason & Dixon is one of Thomas Pynchon's long works, while fascinating and "fun" (quotes on purpose), it is written in the vernacular of the 1780s, complete with spelling things like o'er, ne'er, spoil'd, as well as capitalizing every important--though not necessarily proper--noun.

It's almost as difficult to read as Gravity's Rainbow...in one sense it could be harder, what with the anachronistic premise, but really it's a buddy story, while GR expects the reader to be on top of ten "main" characters, and two-hundred important characters, or something like that...

I was trying to explain to Marc, who had been reading The Crying of Lot 49, take the hardest sentence you've seen in that book, then translate the prose to 18th century vernacular, spelling, punctuation, and capitalization rules, and you're almost there. To get "there", as it were, nestle the sentence in 750 pages of the same thing.