Tatar_Nobility

No one ever reads or watches what I recommend (that's a lie, one person does). I usually don't expect others to engage with my interests, I wouldn't hold a grudge if they don't. But it upsets me when this occurs in the event of exchanging recommendations with someone who ends up not reciprocating. This has happened on four separate occasions with different people. While I'd actually read the book, give my opinion and genuinely engage with them, they would postpone doing so and constantly make excuses until they think I've forgotten. One time I made a promise with a friend to watch a series of their choice and vice versa, guess who did and who didn't (“My internet connection is so bad” you're literally watching other shows as we speak...)

This begs the question: are my recommendations this bad? I'd like to put that to the test. Here are the recommendations in question:

• Avatar: The Last Airbender
• The Tatami Galaxy
• Parasite
• Azazeel by Youssef Ziedan

I noticed that I'm not receiving any new posts from Hexbear since last month. Did we defederate or something?

Mason & Dixon is classified as a “postmodernist” novel. I was intrigued by what the usage of the word here entailed. Postmodernism in literature refers to an abandonment of “absolute meaning” that is seen in modernist and realist literature and espousal of fragmentation, playfulness and incertitude, as well as the usage of literary methods such as metafiction and intertextuality.

This then makes of M&D a postmodernist literary work. The narrator, a certain Rev. Cherrycoke, who tells the adventures of two (historically real) astronomers, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, arouses one too many times the suspicion and doubt of his audience in regards to the veracity of what he is narrating. Throughout the novel, Cherrycoke's authority is put into question time after time, as he mixes historical accounts with speculation, fabrication or, indeed, mere fantasy. From talking animals to conversing clocks and a flying, mechanical (quasi-omnipotent) duck; fiction and reality intermingle. Pinchon/Cherrycoke takes liberty in designing actual historical figures as either he or the circumstances please. Another thing that caught my attention was the capitalisation of words mid sentence; as I found out, besides highlighting the importance of a words, it serves as reference to the practice of randomly capitalising words in old print.

As for the content itself, the novel critically presents several serious themes, some of which it demystifies. The two protagonists come to realize the grim reality of the colonial ventures and their exploitative consequences which they find themselves in the midst of:

Slaves. Ev’ry day at the Cape, we lived with Slavery in our faces,— more of it at St. Helena,— and now here we are again, in another Colony, this time having drawn them a Line between their Slave-Keepers, and their Wage-Payers, as if doom’d to re-encounter thro’ the World this public Secret, this shameful Core. . . . Pretending it to be ever somewhere else, with the Turks, the Russians, the Companies, down there, down where it smells like warm Brine and Gunpowder fumes, they’re murdering and dispossessing thousands untallied, the innocent of the World, passing daily into the Hands of Slave-owners and Torturers, but oh, never in Holland, nor in England, that Garden of Fools . . . (Ch. 71)

‘Sir, an hundred twenty lives were lost!’ “I reply, ‘British lives. What think you the overnight Harvest of Death is, in Calcutta alone, in Indian lives?— not only upon that one Night, but ev’ry Night, in Streets that few could even tell you how to get to,— Street upon desperate Street, till the smoke of the Pyres takes it all into the Invisible, yet, invisible, doth it go on. All of which greatly suiteth the Company, and to whatever Share it has negotiated, His Majesty’s Government as well.’ (Ch. 14)

“Sooner or later,” Dixon far too brightly, “— a Slave must kill his Master. It is one of the Laws of Springs.” (Ch. 72)

On the other hand, the book is not free of an incessant mystification which M&D battle with as the self-proclaimed “men of Science” they are. For instance, during their encounter, the Learnèd English Dog informs Mason, somewhat mockingly: “I may be præternatural, but I am not supernatural. ’Tis the Age of Reason, rrrf? There is ever an Explanation at hand, and no such thing as a Talking Dog,— Talking Dogs belong with Dragons and Unicorns. What there are, however, are Provisions for Survival in a World less fantastick.” (Ch. 3)

And again, after Mason perceives the ghost of his deceased wife:

He tries to joke with himself. Isn’t this suppos’d to be the Age of Reason? To believe in the cold light of this all-business world that Rebekah haunts him is to slip, to stagger in a crowd, into the embrace of the Painted Italian removed herself, and the Air to fill with suffocating incense, and the radiant Deity to go dim forever. But if Reason be also Permission at last to believe in the evidence of our Earthly Senses, then how can he not concede to her some Resurrection?— to deny her, how cruel! (Ch. 15).

“Get a grip on yerrself, man,” mutters Mason, “what happen’d to ‘We’re men of Science’?” “And Men of Science,” cries Dixon, “may be but the simple Tools of others, with no more idea of what they are about, than a Hammer knows of a House.” (Ch. 69).

I assume Pynchon expresses a disenchantment of sorts with the supposed “Age of Reason” which had been forcefully detached of its earlier, seemingly mystical, origins; perceived as a revolution that ineradicably changed the ways of logic, and which must be indiscriminately embraced, regardless of the cruel exploitation it may cause. In fact, M&D parallels what Pynchon had previously expressed in his 1984 essay “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?”, in which he wrote:

THE word "Luddite" continues to be applied with contempt to anyone with doubts about technology, especially the nuclear kind. Luddites today are no longer faced with human factory owners and vulnerable machines [...] there is now a permanent power establishment of admirals, generals and corporate CEO's, up against whom us average poor bastards are completely outclassed [...]. We are all supposed to keep tranquil and allow it to go on, even though, because of the data revolution, it becomes every day less possible to fool any of the people any of the time.

I write down every dream I have, which I suspect helps me remember even more of my dreams. Anyway, the dream goes as such:

In 19th-century Austria-Hungary, a nun initiated and led a peasant rebellion against lords and the emperor. However, a conservative, religious institution in our modern times organized a campaign to condemn the nun and label her and her convent as ‘communist.’ I was irked by this group's blatant attitude in rewriting history according to its whims.

The idea of a ‘communist’ nun intrigued me and so I did a bit of research in hopes of finding something pertinent regarding a communist nun or church. And I did find some interesting bits of history.

• The 1381 Peasants' Revolt in England. In June of that year, a band of rebels from Wroxham broke into the convent of Carrow where they demanded the prioress to hand over the convent's deeds which they burned.

• Maura Clarke, an American nun and leftist activist who was radicalized by her overseas missions in Latin America.

• Philippino nuns’ active engagement with the New People's Liberation Army.

• Marie Carré, a protestant nurse who converted to catholcism and published the supposed memoirs of an undercover Soviet spy tasked with the infiltration of the Catholic church.

• Bella Dodd, a labor union activist and member of CPUSA who later converted to Catholicism and became a staunch voice of anti-communism. She claimed that the CPUSA had plans to infiltrate the Catholic Church.

This is everything I managed to gather, if there are more interesting related stuff, please do share.

I'd like to announce that I rewrote the 30,000 words or so (or, half of what I had wrote in total) that I lost due to my negligence and poor judgement. I had to pull an all-nighter every other day, to fetch literature and sources, of which I vaguely remember their spirit, on a scuffed search engine. I have to consistently live with the fear that I missed writing a groundbreaking observation or an ingenious concept now lost for eternity. Despite the pain I suffered (or perhaps becase of it) I was appreciative of the fact that I hadn't lost more than I did; the mere thought of having to search for more academic literature gives me goosebumps. My face is pale, body is sore, and I have neglected all the other aspects of my life for the sake of writing. Only three weeks have passed since the catastrophe, but they felt as long as the eternal hell realm in the Buddhist tradition. I am at last content, yet paradoxically the sense of loss has persisted in one way or another. Let this be a worthwhile reminder and lesson, for future me and whoever reads my late-night ramblings. I have been consistently backing up my work since then, and so should you.