Nixon & GR

[alice wellintown]

I'm a Slow Learner too. Took me almost that long to figure out that
_Moby-Dick_  is about a whale.
GR wasn't the only novel that year, and many of them were focused on
the Nixonland that America had become after the War. K. Sales, author
of the book I liked there at the NYTRB, was hip to a lot of the same
shit.

On Thu, Jan 17, 2013 at 5:00 PM, Heikki Raudaskoski
<hraudask at sun3.oulu.fi> wrote:
>
>
> Thanks for unveiling what GR is about. What is more, its essence is
> easy enough to memorize: Nixonland around 1970. For 25 years, I've
> been trying to figure out what to make of the novel's encyclopedic
> and stylistic exuberance, so the revelation was long overdue.
>
> However, the Finnish translation of GR, "Painovoiman sateenkaari",
> comes out in April, and I don't know what to think of its fragilely
> celluloid cover. E.g., what is this "B" on the side of the rocket?
> Gottfried's buttocks?
>
> http://www.risingshadow.fi/library_link/images/books/6810.jpg
>
>
> Heikki
>
> P.S. C o n g r a t u l a t i o n s, tofuman!
>
>
> On Wed, 16 Jan 2013, alice wellintown 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.
>>