Chabon on BE

[Fiona Shnapple]

I love Chabon and think he is spot on in his comments on the sauce. Notice
that he says, old Left liberal. That Jewish for uws resident.
On Saturday, October 19, 2013, Thomas Eckhardt wrote:

> Thanks, Charles.
>
> Unfortunately I have not yet come around to read a novel by Chabon but I
> am very fond of the movie version of "Wonder Boys". I also very much
> enjoyed his take on Power Pop/Big Star (to be found here:
> http://michaelchabon.com/**uncollected/musical/tragic-**magic/<http://michaelchabon.com/uncollected/musical/tragic-magic/>
> ).
>
> I also found his review of BE perceptive in many ways (his take on
> Pynchon's so-called flat characters, as Monte Davis said, is particularly
> good) Nevetheless, I think this --
>
> 'His scorn for all this weak sauce is most sharply evident when it
> dribbles from the lips of an otherwise affectionately rendered old-lefty
> liberal New Yorker who sententiously repeats a baseless canard:
>
> You know where it all comes from, this online paradise of yours? It
> started back during the Cold War, when the think tanks were full of
> geniuses plotting nuclear scenarios. Attaché cases and horn-rims, every
> appearance of scholarly sanity, going in to work every day to imagine all
> the ways the world was going to end. Your Internet, back then the Defense
> Department called it DARPAnet, the real original purpose was to assure
> survival of US command and control after a nuclear exchange with the
> Soviets.'
>
> -- is hopelessly wrong. DARPAnet and Continuity of Government are not
> 'baseless canards', and I do not believe the author (or the implied author,
> if you are, as I am, a nitpicking narratologist) views them that way.
>
> In fact, I believe that Marge (like Maxine's father later on) articulates
> one of the basic themes of the novel: The continuity of, let us say,
> unlawful actions (e.g. black ops in Central and South America, Iran-Contra,
> MK-Ultra, the in itself as well as for the novel highly important
> Inslaw/PROMIS scandal, which all are at least alluded to in BE) of the US
> government from the cold war until today.
>
> Referring to Chabon's Marge quote above: In the deep political background
> here, as in "Vineland", the spectre of "Continuity of Government" raises
> its ugly head. Peter Dale Scott has something to say about this with regard
> to September 11: http://www.japanfocus.org/-**Peter_Dale-Scott/3362<http://www.japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3362>
>
> At the very least this provides some context for Marge's "weak sauce." And
> Chabon did not -- could not, I assume -- provide any passage where the
> narrator is making fun of crazy old Marge.
>
> Thomas
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?**list=pynchon-l<http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l>
>
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