![]() ![]() Once I began reading Mason and Dixon I could not put it down for long. At any rate, I bought the book soon after summer vacation began and read its first pages in a subterranean coffee shop in Philadelphia (without yet realizing how appropriate such a setting would be). ![]() Perhaps it was that I heard that in Mason Pynchon had created his greatest straight man, in Dixon his liveliest comic hero. Perhaps it was the rumored portraits of colonial America, especially Philadelphia, near where I live. Perhaps it was its subjects, Enlightenment science and the contradictions in American democracy that came to be marked by Mason and Dixon's famous line. In the summer of 1997 a force like a gravitational field drew me to reading Thomas Pynchon's Mason and Dixon. pure Space waits the Surveyor,- no previous Lines, no fences, no streets to constrain polygony however extravagant,- angles pushing outward and inward,- all Sides zigging and zagging, going ahead and doubling back, making Loops inside Loops,- in America, 'twas ever, Poh! to Simple Quadrilaterals." ![]() "There is a love of complexity here in America. ![]()
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