Nixon & GR

[David Morris]

No sentient reader could think GR is about Nixon.  He isn't even a bit
player. More like a quick toilet wipe.  Want to smell? Didn't think so.

On Friday, January 18, 2013, alice wellintown wrote:

> 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 <javascript:;>> 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.
> >>
>
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