BEER - chapters 1 and 2 - questions and notes

[Monte Davis]

A few expansions:

The Manchurian Candidate -- That tendril of paranoia is now kept green by
the cable series "Homeland", in which Brody, a soldier taken prisoner in the
Iraq war, was rescued as a hero after eight years -- but has become a Muslim
and a willing/unwilling/who's asking? terrorist. Empires with uneasy
consciences can't get enough of this stuff. As for Fletcher vs. Lansbury, P
is deliberately unsystematic w/r/t the names of performers vs. those of
their defining or best-known roles; I imagine he's playing with our own
all-too-frequent conflation of the two as viewers.

DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) -- maybe not
entirely unconnected with the schema of the Kugelblitz school. How could
Pynchon not love the very idea of organizing and classifying madness?
 
Tri-State Area -- the Pynchon Wiki doesn't flag this, and my en.wikipedia
gives NY, NJ, CT. That said, as the definition of "tolerable" commuting
distance has stretched, I know people who live in easternmost PA and work in
NYC, and certainly some NYC broadcasters (you remember broadcasting,
dontcha, kids?) have long counted part of PA in their market.

Robert Steiner -- by no means invented. Don't you know by now that Thomas
Pynchon doesn't make stuff up?
http://www.steinerprints.com/catalog/?oc=year&page=8&pp=12
No connection I can see with the duck-stamp painter who is Marge Gunderson's
husband in "Fargo," but I await enlightenment on that.

"Bad Accountant" yes, that has to be a nod to the awesome/awful "Bad
Lieutenant". (And don't forget Keitel in Ridley Scott's The Duellists
(1977), aka "Bad Napoleonic -- VERY Napoleonic -- Cavalry Officer") 

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