Nixon & GR

[Markekohut]

But he wasn't brought in for nothing. P made the connection. 

Sent from my iPad

On Jan 18, 2013, at 9:33 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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> 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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