Nixon & GR

[Markekohut]

C'mon...how can a parody of the world need the comic relief it doesn't't have? and no hope of reform? Compared to GR, say? 
for IV's flaws, which I am too fanboy to see, I would vote for sentimentality, the lost girl refound, the mystery solved, traffic working out in urban/ suburban america in the final scene.  and not nearly enough "total cynicism". 


Sent from my iPad

On Jan 16, 2013, at 7:13 PM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> Another reason to reject the slick and nasty little beach novel,
> Inherent Vice, is that it is a mindless pleasure that its readers,
> those that will put up with its stupid pussy jokes and the reast,
> unlike, say, the viewers of Casablanca, are shown a world that the
> author only parodies for his own amusement, a world that has no hope
> of reform, of comic relief, of anything other than surrender to the
> cycnical turns of the wheel...to a satire that shoots at its targets
> from behind a concrete pillbox, and has poor aim.
> 
> On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 6:57 PM, alice wellintown
> <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>> One could write a book on this subject, and perhaps some ambitious
>> young scholar will do so....as we wait for this we might consider how
>> Nixon fits into the networks that GR explores, and how the old
>> network, the setting of the romance, the War, functions as the Puritan
>> American period does in The Scarlet Letter or in the Cruciable, but
>> the novel is about, its contemporaries and the lives in the balance,
>> and so the new network, and, of course, the new money; yes,  P's
>> concern is with new money and the Nixon period, not with the old
>> money, though readers have often focused on the Nazis and the Standard
>> Oil, ICI, and IG Farben Octopus, but just as P explains how Orwell has
>> been misread as saying something about the past, or as a propher, he
>> is neither, and neither is P prescient, but only writing about his
>> world, the new money world of Nixon, so of aerospace and defense
>> contracting, of oil, and natural gas, and of the alliances, yes, the
>> military industrial complex alliance,  formed around these domestic
>> opperations, in contrast with the international IG Farben and Standard
>> Oil and so on of the War Period...of the setting of the novel's
>> historical events, so we need to look, to a zone actually, but that
>> zone is not European History, but American Expereince circa 1970, and
>> so, as TSI and CL49 suggest, we need to look at real-estate operations
>> during the postwar period, and the new money invested there, in the
>> sunbelt, where the population explodes and so....Nixon.
>> 
>> To argue that the book declines as it brings this into focus, or
>> foregrounds it, is to engage in a selective misreading, as the
>> evidence of the theater that is America circa 1970, as aopposed to the
>> theatre that is the War in Europe is there from the very first
>> page....and when we meet Malcolm X, or Little, and as we read on into
>> the post-Invisible Man Nixonian  American Experience, there can be no
>> mistake as to where we are: in Nixonland.