Quick Literary Note

I've been writing here, in minor updates along with my other posts, about trudging through Mason & Dixon, Pynchon's classic from 1996 that he spent twenty years writing. I'm not quite done with it, but I just made it to the last section, around page 715, with about sixty to go.

I wrote here last week or the week before about Vauscanson's duck, which was a bizarre digression, and for those who are familiar with Pynchon's work, bizarre digressions are a staple of his "style."

Two more quick digressions I wanted to mention: one scene has a wood chopping contest between Stig, a non-Swede who's been masquerading as a Swede (the name of his actual homeland is never really mentioned) and a guy named Zepho. BFD, you'd be correct in saying, except that Zepho is a werebeaver...that's right, werewolves don't exist in Pynchon's 1760s America, rather, at the full moon guys stricken with kastoranthropy will grow furry with large paddle tails and scurry off into the forrest to chew trees. The contest, like most things in Pynchon's universe, doesn't work out like you'd guess.

The second digression is about a garden Mason and Dixon find, tended by what appear to be elves, of vegetables so large that one could build a home inside it...potatoes and beets the size of small mountains, a hemp plant (the real prize Dixon is after) so large it takes days to climb up, has limbs large enough to build villages upon, and the progress of climbers higher up gets bogged down when a village camp-fire gets a little too smoky...

I really just wanted to end this minor entry with a quote, one of Pynchon's sentences, just to let anyone reading this blog who's unfamiliar with the writing of TP know about it...

Mason and Dixon had just been arguing, and the head of the axmen crew calms them down, causing great merriment by asking which of the two is the husband...(the following reference to "Corn" here is about corn whiskey (the quotes are his, not mine))

"This is taken as high Hilarity, and the "Corn" continues to pass 'round, which Mason is oblig'd to drink,--the unglaz'd Rim unwipably wet from the loose-lipp'd Embraces of Mouths that may recently have been anywhere, not excluding,--from the look of the Company,--live elements of the Animal Kingdom."(page 642)

This sentence has most of Pynchon's staples from this novel; the punctuation, capitalization, and spelling anachronisms he uses, along with half joking comments about bizarre sexuality.