MDMD (6)---192.4----192.12 Pynchon, 11 days, E.U.

[Mark Smith]

E.A.W. Writes:
> It seems to me that on p192 the resistance towards losing 
> the 11 days is not only a matter of the difficulty the poor
> had in paying rents on properties  for days they never 
> had the privilege to live through while neither having had
> the work days to pay them off. It is akin to something
> more modern.
> 
> Ithe popular resistance toward a Europe united and homogenised 
> in the interests of  capital and power---notice how Time and Money 
> are equated. At least some of Pynchon's time in GB writing and 
> doing research was very likely co-incidental with the hot debates 
> around European Monetary Union, a cause for which there is very
> little popular sympathy amongst most actual European Citizens,
> but a very great deal amongst most European big businesses,
> City Dealers and bureaucrats. I wonder if we aren't meant to be 
> drawing at least a few parallels here?


Well here's another parallel for you.  There's a show on late night T.V.
over here with this amazing kook named Jack Van Impe, and his wife, the
lovely Rexella.  In what can only be described as one of the modern
"Classics of Idiocy", Jack rants on and on about the E.C. as it is
foretold in the book of Revelations.  You've really got to see this to
believe it, and I suggest sound AND vision.  Jack is simply thrilled to
death at the coming Armageddon, and sees the common currency thing as a
veritable "sign of the beast" made manifest.  It's the whole trilateral
commission conspiracy angle, and when I first read chap. 19 I couldn't
help seeing the parallels with the lost 11 day talk.  What a hoot!

I remember a quote by Peter Cook, about some American televangalist: 
"You've got to wonder - if miracles do exist then why can't something be
done about his hair?"  

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