Section the Third, pg.17-19

[Monte Davis]

 "The old house has been subdivided by the slummakers of war... a
stale‑smoke paper warren... The floor is filthy lino, there are no windows:
the electric light is yellow, cheap, merciless... there must be cubicles
like this all over the ETO: only the three dingy scuffed‑cream fiberboard
walls and no ceiling of its own. "


My father was a USMC correspondent (reporter, writer, interviewer,
photographer, editor) from mid-1941 to fall 1945, He served at a US-UK
naval base in Londonderry, Northern Ireland in 1942-1943, with working
trips to London that took him into many military offices. He found a lot of
GR's street scenes strikingly accurate and evocative from an author who
hadn't been there and then, but it was office scenes and atmosphere like
this that he said really nailed it. Whether in a peacetime office building
or a converted home, most large rooms (and even some wider hallways,
lobbies, etc.) were subdivided with hastily thrown-up partitions, every
vertical surface covered with thumbtacked or Sellotaped posters, notices,
duty rosters, maps. Even with more temporary space added every day, newly
assigned staff might not fit:


https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/95/61/d5/9561d5a307b271bb0b0f99d421e2b1ed.jpg

...

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On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 9:55 PM, Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:

>      And here we are introduced to our hero, Tyrone Slothrop, though he
> doesn't appear in person. Teddy Bloat, sent to spy on him, for reasons yet
> unrevealed, finds a desk, which results in a Plist (pun fully intended),
> littered with the slothful accumulation of "bureaucratic smegma".
> Everything from official documents pertaining to the war, to bits of
> tobacco and erasers and odd pieces of jigsaw puzzles, broken ukelele
> strings, all seem to be of equal importance, or lack of same, to our hero...
>      Seems Teddy Bloat, whose ass was saved by the quick reaction of
> Pirate Prentice in the first section, is a spy, for whom we are not yet
> told, though it must be official, SHAEF sword hairbrushes and all. His old
> college friend, Lt. Oliver ("Tantivy") Mucker-Maffick (a name which seems
> to beg for multiple layers of interpretation), shares an office with
> Slothrop at ACHTUNG (I won't preach to the choir about the beauty of this
> acronym..), and must have mentioned Slothrop's soon to be infamous map....
>    Multicolored stars labeled with women's names, coinciding with the
> locations of bomb disasters Slothrop's been sent out to investigate for
> ACHTUNG. What does it all mean?
>    And, more importantly, to whom does it all mean anything?
>
> --
> www.innergroovemusic.com
>
>
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