9-11 box cutters 11 september utility knives

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Mon Nov 25 03:41:56 CST 2013


Well, in my defense, expecting a Pynchon novel set in NYC 2001 to avoid all
mention of these matters would be like aunt Jemima's pancakes without her
syrup!

The same readerly qualities that made me pore over GR - iconoclasm,
distrust of the military-industrial complex and yes, a taste for the
bizarre - were clarion-called by the search results when i idly typed "9-11
bush knew", led me deep into the alternate theories offered for the events
of "29 Fructidor" as the sans-culottes might have called it.  I dug in with
relish, in fact wrote a paper on some of them for a composition class,
receiving an A.  My thesis was that there are some suspicious facts indeed
but that doesn't justify antisocial behaviors on my part in response - in
fact the opposite.

I am rather surprised that more of those who share a taste for Pynchon
weren't drawn to the extensive literature - i imagine a great survey course
could be cobbled together by an imaginative professor.

There is such a massive amount of material, and so much editorializing -
overtly but also implicitly by selection!

I'd start with a rationale of sorts (this course will help develop reading,
writing and critical thinking skills), move on to excerpts from NIST and
9-11 commission, then find the most cogent critiques of these, evaluate
their validity, then work my way through the outlier spectrum from
muckrakers to wildeyed ravers...IMHO, there is a wonderful range of writing
from sublime to ridiculous, a sense of zeitgeist, a range of viewpoints,
and a God's own plenty of new facts to try to organize.
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