V-2nd Dopplegangers

[Mark Kohut]

Speaking of The Depression, as Alice does below. 
A reposted tidbit obliquely relevant and an oblique
doubling, so to speak. 

Another of the writing Adams Family had another new history of America
published @1930......he wanted to call it The American Dream (or have that
in the title somehow, can't remember)................

His publisher told him No Way.......Title would have no connection with
Americans, with potential readers................They had it 
changed.............

But he had used the phrase in the text and it is from then that the phrase
went wide in America...............

In my ill-fitting cultural historian cap, I might suggest that when most 
Americans
simply lived and worked embedded in their world.....most Americans were still 
small farmers
or small business merchants, etc...............
they did not need the 'fantasy' of The American Dream"....so, they did not have 
it in the language......

Then came The Depression...........



----- Original Message ----
From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Fri, August 20, 2010 7:37:00 AM
Subject: Re: V-2nd Dopplegangers

The letter is telling: V. is Ike's America and Adams's world. In the
section under discussion, young P wants to connect Ike's America with
Adams's world underground so he sends Benny hunting and Stencil
hunting. The mid-point, if you will, historically anyway, is the great
depression. Above ground, way above the street, in the home of Mafia
and Winsome, after P gets in all his jokes and digs at Rand & Co., P
has Rachel call looking for her young roomie and Stencil. Winsome too,
as part of his convoluted machination to divorce his wife, is but
another pig randy for Paolo, Hod's women from Malta who can be any
age, any ethnic or racial type, and who speaks scraps of nearly every
tongue--the girft of tongues catholic joke is coming. Winsome from
Charisma learns that Stencil sent a message from the sewer that he's
down below searching. The man who brings the note from Stencil is said
to be wearing US Army stuff or whatever circa 1898. OK, so maybe its
army surplus and he's a bum. What else would he be doing in the sewer?
After the war between the states, and P expects us to figure this out,
in part thru the marriage (as I said, read a rose for emily by
faulkner) of a northern -- post new england romance romantic (so a
perversion of P's favorite and chosen genre--american romance a la
hawthorne and melville and poe) -- novelist who is also a racist and
anti-semite and who also is, at least in the Rand role, Jewish, though
not devout or even practicing (this is a key in early P--the
secularization of the magical catholic stuff that later becomes
science-cult--the romantic cannons become cold war rockets) with a
southern gouvner (the american gothic gouvner is the decky dance
southern jim crow romantic gentleman--american gothic from say, house
of seven gables or poe's usher down to a rose for emily or kill a
mockingbird or morrison's song of solomon or beloved...is linked by P
in his luddite essay to frankenstein and castle of otranto...and deals
with some transgression, a sin, a curse..in america it is almost
always slavery and extermination of indians and the land but, of
course, after 1898, the sins go global as henry adams goes to tahiti
to get a little girl love and then the us, as adams's histories
document, go to asia, not vietnam, but china and, of course, the
philipines. so, Ike, plus civil war troop reductions from a million
man union army, then back up as the us goes global--spanish american
war boxer in china and so on. the key that locks all this together is
PAOLA.

also, the saint of thr sewers--her name starts with V, french no?