Old fans who've always been at the movies

[Michel]

The author has some things wrong.  It was another street, it was another 
movie. He has the number of victims right, though.

My Mom's twin sister was a Red Cross volunteer at the time - they lived 
about 500 meters from where the Rex Rocket struck and my aunt had to go 
out and assist. As the chaos was incredible. she fetched my Mom who, to 
this day (she's 87 now and doing fine, thank you) remembers the blood 
and the dust, and vomited on the scene (no pun intended) on discovering 
limbs all over the place. And the dust. It takes hours, apparently, 
before it falls down. She thinks to this day that any image of a rocket 
attack is dishonest unless you see the dust (but then the picture is 
worthless, of course).

Pynchon's talent (again) is how he uses Rex -the cinema where the 
western was playing- in GR, not to talk about this Rocket, but to refer 
to a fascist Belgian movement -and some other things re: Belgium, 
Antwerp and Rockets. Please check this article: Herman, Luc. "*Antwerp 
and the Representation of the Holocaust in /Gravity's Rainbow/*." 
/Approaches to Teaching The Crying of Lot 49 and Other Works by Thomas 
Pynchon/ . Ed. Thomas H. Schaub. Modern Language Assocation, Baltimore, 
Maryland, United States (2008): 106-113.

Can tell you more on this, but not today. It was this Rocket that got me 
hooked on P (and those funny names).

Michel.



Op 29-5-2013 16:39, Joseph Tracy schreef:
> Have we? Care to elaborate a bit?
> On May 29, 2013, at 8:58 AM, Monte Davis wrote:
>
>> (Haven’t we?)
>>   
>> Antwerp, 1944:
>>   
>> “Nearly twelve hundred seats were filled in the Rex Cinema on bustling Avenue De Keyser for the Friday afternoon matinee on December 15… [for] a classic Western: The Plainsman, a Cecil B. De Mille melodrama starring Gary Cooper as Wild Bill Hickok and Jean Arthur as Calamity Jane…
>>   
>> “At 3:20 p.m., just after Gary Cooper learned of Custer’s death at the Little Bighorn, a searing white light flashed across the auditorium as a V-2 – unheard and unseen, launched from a new site in Holland – blew through the roof… Recovery teams ultimately retrieved 567 bodies, more than half of them Allied soldiers, Navy gun crews,  and merchant mariners...”
>>   
>> Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe,  1944-1945
>

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