<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body dir="auto"><div>But he wasn't brought in for nothing. P made the connection. <br><br>Sent from my iPad</div><div><br>On Jan 18, 2013, at 9:33 PM, David Morris <<a href="mailto:fqmorris@gmail.com">fqmorris@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br><br></div><blockquote type="cite"><div>No sentient reader could think GR is about Nixon. He isn't even a bit player. More like a quick toilet wipe. Want to smell? Didn't think so.<span></span><br><br>On Friday, January 18, 2013, alice wellintown wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">I'm a Slow Learner too. Took me almost that long to figure out that<br>
_Moby-Dick_ is about a whale.<br>
GR wasn't the only novel that year, and many of them were focused on<br>
the Nixonland that America had become after the War. K. Sales, author<br>
of the book I liked there at the NYTRB, was hip to a lot of the same<br>
shit.<br>
<br>
On Thu, Jan 17, 2013 at 5:00 PM, Heikki Raudaskoski<br>
<<a href="javascript:;" onclick="_e(event, 'cvml', 'hraudask@sun3.oulu.fi')">hraudask@sun3.oulu.fi</a>> wrote:<br>
><br>
><br>
> Thanks for unveiling what GR is about. What is more, its essence is<br>
> easy enough to memorize: Nixonland around 1970. For 25 years, I've<br>
> been trying to figure out what to make of the novel's encyclopedic<br>
> and stylistic exuberance, so the revelation was long overdue.<br>
><br>
> However, the Finnish translation of GR, "Painovoiman sateenkaari",<br>
> comes out in April, and I don't know what to think of its fragilely<br>
> celluloid cover. E.g., what is this "B" on the side of the rocket?<br>
> Gottfried's buttocks?<br>
><br>
> <a href="http://www.risingshadow.fi/library_link/images/books/6810.jpg" target="_blank">http://www.risingshadow.fi/library_link/images/books/6810.jpg</a><br>
><br>
><br>
> Heikki<br>
><br>
> P.S. C o n g r a t u l a t i o n s, tofuman!<br>
><br>
><br>
> On Wed, 16 Jan 2013, alice wellintown wrote:<br>
><br>
>> One could write a book on this subject, and perhaps some ambitious<br>
>> young scholar will do so....as we wait for this we might consider how<br>
>> Nixon fits into the networks that GR explores, and how the old<br>
>> network, the setting of the romance, the War, functions as the Puritan<br>
>> American period does in The Scarlet Letter or in the Cruciable, but<br>
>> the novel is about, its contemporaries and the lives in the balance,<br>
>> and so the new network, and, of course, the new money; yes, P's<br>
>> concern is with new money and the Nixon period, not with the old<br>
>> money, though readers have often focused on the Nazis and the Standard<br>
>> Oil, ICI, and IG Farben Octopus, but just as P explains how Orwell has<br>
>> been misread as saying something about the past, or as a propher, he<br>
>> is neither, and neither is P prescient, but only writing about his<br>
>> world, the new money world of Nixon, so of aerospace and defense<br>
>> contracting, of oil, and natural gas, and of the alliances, yes, the<br>
>> military industrial complex alliance, formed around these domestic<br>
>> opperations, in contrast with the international IG Farben and Standard<br>
>> Oil and so on of the War Period...of the setting of the novel's<br>
>> historical events, so we need to look, to a zone actually, but that<br>
>> zone is not European History, but American Expereince circa 1970, and<br>
>> so, as TSI and CL49 suggest, we need to look at real-estate operations<br>
>> during the postwar period, and the new money invested there, in the<br>
>> sunbelt, where the population explodes and so....Nixon.<br>
>><br>
>> To argue that the book declines as it brings this into focus, or<br>
>> foregrounds it, is to engage in a selective misreading, as the<br>
>> evidence of the theater that is America circa 1970, as aopposed to the<br>
>> theatre that is the War in Europe is there from the very first<br>
>> page....and when we meet Malcolm X, or Little, and as we read on into<br>
>> the post-Invisible Man Nixonian American Experience, there can be no<br>
>> mistake as to where we are: in Nixonland.<br>
>><br>
</blockquote>
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