GRGR(28): Summarizing

[Jeremy Osner]

Just want to review the events of this last piece  of "In the Zone"; it
is only six pages long, and yet it seems pretty wide-ranging.

At the outset, Tchitcherine is sitting on a hill in the Lueneberger
Heath, watching some people; I'm pretty sure they are the Argentines
although this is never stated explicitly. He is obsessed by the search
for the 00000 and his half-brother, and worried about Marvy's
disappearance, which he believes to have been engineered by the
Counterforce. (We know, as T. does not, that Marvy was actually
kidnapped by agents working for Pointsman, who mistook him for Slothrop;
but what if that confusion was somehow *deliberately created*?) This
leads T. to worry about the possibility of a Rocket-cartel, and about
Der Springer's possible connection with it. He flashes back to an
ominous conversation he had last week with Mravenko, who told him he was
in trouble with the Apparat -- they regard him as "useful".

Coming back to the moment, we move to the anarchist commune for a
digression on sentient rocks (an important digression, something that
has already come up several times in this Group Read) and the beautiful
line, "who'll be there, once or twice per century, to trip the shutter?"
Graciela is shuffling a deck of cards, thinking about her relations with
Belaustegui and her dependence on the community.

The mention of the anarchist community leads to a discussion of other
strange communities in the Zone, particularly the Hund-Stadt; which
leads to Their efforts to eradicate the Hund-Stadt, managed by guess
who, a disgraced Pointsman, and we're back in London. Mossmoon and
Marcus are engaged in "idle, bitchy faggotry" which feels almost
Pythonesque. "The real and only fucking is done on paper."

--
In that time, thousands and thousands of people,
who for the most part did hard work and lived a
hard life, in their free time would sit stooped
over quadrants and crosses made of letters, whose
holes they would fill in according to certain
rules.

The Glass Bead Game
http://www.readin.com/books/glasperlen