Nixon & GR

[Paul Mackin]

On 1/18/2013 10:25 PM, David Morris wrote:
> To make mention of a derided contemporary US Prez, especially that 
> Prez, is like just breathing for the likes of TRP.  Spice for the mix. 
>  Not main courses. His GR river ran much deeper.

David is right I think, but the problem may be a failure to communicate.

The term "Nixonland" may say something to most or many p-listers, but it 
probably needs some clarification.

WWII changed everything in the world because it changed the position of 
the US in it. The US became THE world power--there was a rival but never 
much question of who ended up on top.

Power of course breeds all sorts of things--both responsibilities and . 
. . .well it's easy to fill in the hated blanks.

Anyway, just as Roosevelt FDR   was Slothrop's president, Dick Nixon 
filled that roll for the children of '68.  Nixon was (still is) the 
symbol of all that was bad in the equation.

It might be unfair to use the term Oedipal but our author does as much 
in Vineland.  The children both hated and loved the power that Brock 
represented.

The p-list include includes quite a few children of '68--at least 
honorary ones.  It is all too natural for them to see Nixonland in GR.

P (a child of '45)




>
> On Friday, January 18, 2013, Markekohut wrote:
>
>     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
>     <javascript:_e({}, 'cvml', '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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