NP but DeLillo

[Mark Kohut]

I once got to meet Jim Hougan, very nice guy with a sense of wit. Had to
pick him up at the airport for
a book & author day in town once..We had difficulty, pre-cellphones with
the meet-up spot (I think the gate changed
and I remember him spotting me from the side at a ticket counter as I held
up a copy of SPOOKS just as I turned
that way to look for him. Our eyes met like spy vs spy, he joked.)

I do not need to say that he told me nothing about the interesting details
you give above....I know I had only read some of the book....
I think he did tell me he knew Norman Mailer....

One degree of separation.

On Fri, Oct 30, 2020 at 8:09 AM Thomas Eckhardt <thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de>
wrote:

> Amongst the books in the deep politics section of my library are works
> by Sally Denton ("The Bluegrass Conspiracy") and Jim Hougan ("Spooks",
> "Secret Agenda") that I am very fond of.
>
> Did we know this (Wiki on Jim Hougan) about DeLillo:
>
> -- In the mid-1980s, Hougan joined author Sally Denton in forming a
> Washington-based company – Hougan & Denton – which undertook
> investigative research for law firms and labor unions. (...) During this
> same period, Hougan joined with Norman Mailer and Edward Jay Epstein in
> forming what Hougan characterized as "an invisible salon," but which The
> New York Times called "a small coterie of intelligence buffs, conspiracy
> theorists and meta-political speculators, who, with all proper
> self-mockery, call themselves 'the Dynamite Club.'" The group met
> irregularly at the Manhattan apartment of Edward Jay Epstein and at the
> Washington manse of Bernard "Bud" Fensterwald (founder of the
> Assassination Archives and Research Center in Washington, D.C.).
> Attendees included Dick Russell (author of The Man Who Knew Too Much),
> Don DeLillo (Libra and Underworld), Kevin Coogan (Dreamer of the Day),
> G. Gordon Liddy (Will) and others. At the time, Hougan was helping
> Mailer in his research for what became Mailer's CIA novel, Harlot's
> Ghost. And while Mailer referred to these informal gatherings – drinks
> and dinner – as "meetings," the affairs had more in common with those of
> a salon than of an actual "club." --
>
> Very interesting. I did not know that DeLillo (ir)regularly had
> conversations with people like that (at least Epstein, Russell and
> Fensterwald are important journalists/researchers wrt JFK and the idea
> that French mercenaries were on the Grassy Knoll, also taken up by James
> Ellroy, may have its origin in Fensterwald's research on Jean Souetre)
> but the meetings surely had some influence on "Libra". A-and G. Gordon
> Liddy?
>
> And where is Pynchon in this picture? Not involved? Even though he
> appears to have known about MK-ULTRA and CHAOS ("The Crying of Lot 49"
> with its thematic concerns including LSD experiments, Dr. Hilarious and
> the postal services suggests at least some knowledge) long before the
> Church Committee brought those programmes to light? But this was, of
> course, decades earlier...
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>