Re: IVIV: chapter seven—the Golden Fang

[Mark Kohut]

Great on halifax explosion and The Preserved.....

Can this be said? War explosives did NOT get it, BUT warmongers still did.  What's the line about The Golden Fang being The preserved but without
a soul, mean?....Once you're in league with the CIA and run drugs, your soul is gone.......

By surviving the halifax Explosion, souls were preserved?

--- On Wed, 9/23/09, Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:

> From: Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
> Subject: IVIV: chapter seven—the Golden Fang
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Wednesday, September 23, 2009, 5:06 PM
> Trystero is not depicting a "real"
> conspiracy. It is more of a poetic conceit, like Nick
> Drake's "Theater full of sadness for a long forgotten show"
> in the song "Fruit Tree." Trystero contains elements of
> reality, but under it all is all the sadness and anger of
> leftist/anarchist movements over time. "The Golden Fang" is
> its flip side and boils down to entrenched forces of greed.
> One of those elements to prop up the "Golden Fang" is the
> CIA and Pynchon is more explicit about that connection in
> this book than any other. But the CIA's involvement with
> "The Golden Fang" is a given and the characters in the book
> mention that connection in a very offhand way. It's an
> assumed element.
> 
> One aspect of the "The Golden Fang" is the ship:
> 
>     . . . her original name was Preserved,
> after her miraculous
>     escape in 1917 from a tremendous
> nitroglycerin explosion in
>     Halifax Harbor which blew away most
> everything else in it,
>     shipping and souls.
> 
> This was real, much like the Tunguska event of 1908. and
> like that massive explosion serves as a preview of upcoming
> nuclear explosions:
> 
>     The Halifax Explosion occurred on
> Thursday, December 6,
>     1917, when the city of Halifax, Nova
> Scotia, Canada, was
>     devastated by the huge detonation of the
> SS Mont-Blanc, a
>     French cargo ship, fully loaded with
> wartime explosives, which
>     accidentally collided with the Norwegian
> SS Imo in "The
>     Narrows" section of the Halifax Harbour.
> About 2,000 people
>     were killed by debris, fires, or
> collapsed buildings and it is
>     estimated that over 9,000 people were
> injured.[1] This is still the
>     world's largest man-made accidental
> explosion.[2]
> 
>     At 8:40 in the morning, the SS
> Mont-Blanc, chartered by the
>     French government to carry munitions to
> Europe, collided with
>     the unloaded Norwegian ship Imo,
> chartered by the
>     Commission for Relief in Belgium to
> carry relief supplies. Mont-
>     Blanc caught fire ten minutes after the
> collision and exploded
>     about twenty-five minutes later (at
> 9:04:35 AM).[3] All buildings
>     and structures covering nearly 2 square
> kilometres (500 acres)
>     along the adjacent shore were
> obliterated, including those in
>     the neighbouring communities of Richmond
> and Dartmouth.[1]
>     The explosion caused a tsunami in the
> harbour and a pressure
>     wave of air that snapped trees, bent
> iron rails, demolished
>     buildings, grounded vessels, and carried
> fragments of the Mont-
>     Blanc for kilometres.
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_Explosion
> 
> This leads to the fictional history of film actor Burke
> Stodger and then to the not-so fictional history of
> Post-WWII Geopolitics:
> 
>     Shortly after World War II, as fishing
> schooners were giving way
>     to diesel-powered craft, she was bought
> by Burke Stodger, a
>     movie star of the period who not long
> after got blacklisted for his
>     politics and was forced to take his boat
> and split the country.
>     
>     "Which is where the Bermuda Triangle
> comes in," recounted
>     Sauncho.
> 
>     "Somewhere between San Pedro and
> Papeete, the ship
>     disappears, at first everybody assumes
> she's been sunk by the
>     Seventh Fleet, acting on direct orders
> from the U.S.
>     government. Naturally, the Republicans
> in power deny all
>     involvement, the paranoia keeps growing,
> till one day a couple
>     years later, boat and owner suddenly
> reappear—Preserved in
>     the opposite ocean, off Cuba, and Burke
> Stodger on the front
>     page of weekly Variety, in an article
> reporting his return to
>     pictures in a big-budget major-studio
> project called Commie
>     Confidential. The schooner meantime,
> instantly, as if by occult
>     forces, relocated to the other side of
> the planet, has been
>     refitted stem to stern, including the
> removal of any traces of
>     soul, into what you see out there. The
> owners are listed as a
>     consortium in the Bahamas, and she's
> been renamed the
>     Golden Fang. That's all we've got so
> far.
> 
> Coming up next: The CIA.
>