IVIV: Hughes & the Bomb

[Mark Kohut]

Nice.

Who's the mob behind the mob? ---from somewhere in Inherent Vice.

--- On Wed, 11/18/09, Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:

> From: Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
> Subject: IVIV: Hughes & the Bomb
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Wednesday, November 18, 2009, 6:54 PM
> Like I said earlier, I know I have to
> go to multiple sources and actually spend time reading them
> before I would have real comprehension of the specific
> targets of this book. Being as this is a book by Thomas
> Pynchon, it's going to have multiple levels of meaning,
> that's always been his M.O. so the chance of him switching
> gears this late in the game is ziltch.
> 
> Why Manhattan Beach? Why Vegas, spring of 1970? What
> happened that might give us insight as to why he thought he
> needed to write this piece of crap, point us in this
> direction? Why this sky? This long road? This empty room?
> 
> I suggested there must be something autobiographical about
> Inherent Vice.
> 
> I've only just opened "Citizen Hughes", by Michael Drossin.
> I looked it over briefly—a biolographical reporting of
> Howard Hughes' handwritten interoffice memos, heisted on
> June 5, 1974 by some group of plumbers at 7000 Romaine
> Street in Hollywood. followed soon thereafter by the
> resignation of Richard Nixon, President of the United
> States, on August 9, 1974. What Howard Hughes wanted to do,
> more than anything else during the moment of the spring of
> 1970, was to get Richard Nixon to stop testing nuclear
> weapons in the Nevada desert only 100 miles north of the
> Strip & The Desert Inn, where Hughes lived, naked &
> stoned, the richest man on the planet. I'll get/give more
> details in time, but the gist of it was that there were CIA
> operatives who were devoted to Howard Hughes more so than to
> Richard Nixon. I suppose the Plame/Wilson/Rove/Cheney matter
> could be trotted out as a representative example of that
> sort of thing save that in the Nixon/Hughes match-up the
> odds were much higher. the story was effectively buried in
> the rubble of Watergate & Hughes oddly ends up on the
> side of the angels, for once. Nixon's failure to accept
> Howard Hughes offers of massive bribes and other favors in
> exchange for a cessation of nuclear tests in Nevada meant
> that Nixon was attempting to cover up the awful toxicity of
> these tests—if Hughes had his way, it would most likely
> result in far fewer nuclear tests, less poisoning of the
> planet, fewer bombs  . . .
> 
> Of course, we all knew what happened.
> 
> Pynchon seems to be consciously tracking CIA folks back to
> the places where he rubbed elbows with them in the first
> place; Gordita/Manhattan Beach, heir apparent to Bay
> City/Santa Monica—R & D centers of the military
> Industrial Complex where as of 1970 aerospace technology was
> quickly turning into spy satellite technology. Pynchon
> probably worked with some of the folks at TRW, back in the
> days when he worked at Boeing.
> 
> If there was one mammoth take-away from Gravity's Rainbow,
> it was "The Bomb!", writ large 'cross the sky like it was
> our collective tombstone.  What Nixon & Hughes were
> up to must have been up in the air during the time and at
> the place where Thomas Pynchon wrote Gravity's Rainbow.
>