9/11 (SPOILER ALERT)

[Dave Monroe]

On 9/11/13, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:

> "This city, even on the best of days, had always been known for its
> background rumble of anxiety. . . . The city more and more vertical,
> the population growing in density, all hostages to just such an
> incursion…. Who outside the city would have imagined them as victims
> taken by surprise—who, for that matter, inside it? Though many in the
> aftermath did profit briefly by assuming just that affecting pose. . .
> . Fire and blood were about to roll like fate upon the complacent
> multitudes. Just as the peak of the evening rush-hour, electric power
> failed everywhere throughout the city, and as the gas mains began to
> ignite and the thousand local winds, distinct at every street-corner,
> to confound prediction, cobblestones erupted skyward, to descend
> blocks away in seldom observed yet beautiful patterns. . . .Later,
> fire alarms would go unanswered and the firemen on the front lines
> find themselves too soon without reinforcements, or the hope of any."
> (AtD, pp. 151-2)
>
> http://www.academia.edu/886476/_Theres_an_Empty_Space_Where_America_Used_to_Be_Art_and_Terrorism_in_Thomas_Pynchons_Against_the_Day_2006_and_Don_DeLillos_Falling_Man_2007_

A sensational best-seller envisions the destruction of New York City.

Published in 1890, Caesar's Column is an account of a trip to New York
City in 1988 by a visitor from the Swiss colony of Uganda. The great
metropolis dazzles with its futuristic technology, but its
ostentatious wealth and luxury mask the brutal repression of the
laboring classes by their rich bosses. The workers, aided by
international terrorists, stage a violent revolt and the narrator
flees the devastated city by airship to found an agrarian utopia in Africa.

http://www.upne.com/0819566659.html

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=1303&msg=171840