BEg2 ch25 summary - forgot the most important part

[Mark Kohut]

I greatly dislike that arrogant pontificating about how stupid everyone
else has been on* Vineland *by the law journal guy....
who in the footnote about that does say some have. A modicum of critical
thinking would say that he contradicts himself but who has that
modicum?....Typical.......F*ck him but for his insights...I have read
others, including a whole recent new book,
who see "the historical depths" including, if I remember right, Even Salman
Rushdie in his first simple review....

I have already given lots of takes on March and much else; I do not think
much of what Thomas says about BE connects with BE as text....I notice he
protects this "parapolitical" projection by saying some don't want to talk
about it and if GR and V. And Mason & Dixon and AtD haven't had overt
political insights up the wazoo then I can't read.....(but one can't argue
that one doesn't want to talk about a hidden frame that is talked about
overtly)
and, I think he is mostly wrong about "controversial from the beginning" as
he repeats. And I think TRP puts into BE the only "controversial" aspects
left.......

I don't expect Thomas to praise me for keeping the BE faith although yes,
Michael, kudos, as I wait to post my next will-be- ignored chapter reading.


On Wed, Apr 6, 2022 at 5:30 PM Thomas Eckhardt <
thomas.eckhardt at protonmail.com> wrote:

> rich wrote:
>
> > My point as much as March Keller and
> > others rant about late capitalism or the horros of the US government
> abuses
> > as on the money as they are, there seems to be something bigger going on,
> > of which even Mr P himself can only allude to. He does it well, dont get
> me
> > wrong, and maybe this is just my take on it and Pynchon never thought
> these
> > things. But as I read BE again, it disabuses me of the previous notion I
> > had that Pynchon was more clear about them, the bad dudes in the later
> > books (well at least the last three and Vineland) being obvious. and
> > despite so much nonsense in BE and clutter and waste, there are some
> really
> > frightening things at the corner of the reader's eye.
>
> You are not finally warming to BE, rich? I should very much hope so.
>
> Here is a quote on VL that appears to echo your thoughts on BE:
>
> -- [S]uch appraisals are the result of these readers' failure to
> apprehend the historical depth the novel offers, and their refusal to
> take seriously the endpoint of the history it relates. There has yet to
> be a critic who, like the ghost of Walter Rathenau in Gravity's Rainbow,
> is able to "see the whole shape at once," the continuing pattern of
> executive aggrandizement so carefully interwoven into the exposition of
> Vineland and which leads up to a moment as apocalyptic as any in recent
> fiction. To answer Leithauser, Wilde, and Mackey, there is in Vineland
> something "overarchingly malignant," "some glamorously threatening
> force," an "awesome glimpse of the sublime and the demonic"; it has
> simply gone unrecognized. --
>
>
> https://web.archive.org/web/20100607060958/http:/tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/okla/thoreen24.htm
>
> Yes, there are dark and troubling things mixed in with the "clutter
> and waste" (of course, I don't see it that way). I would say Pynchon IS
> clearer about them in VL than in BE, and I believe that there is a simple
> reason for this.
>
> I will come to it, but first:
>
> Every novel by Thomas Pynchon has a parapolitical, or deep-political,
> layer that serves as a more or less well-hidden frame of reference (some
> readers never want to discuss this aspect of the novels at all). In VL,
> this parapolitical frame of reference includes the
> Iran/Contra hearings, especially the infamous testimony of Oliver North,
> COINTELPRO, and Nixon's War on Drugs (a thrilling take on the WoD and
> its link to the Fascist International is: Henrik Kruger, The Great
> Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence & International Fascism; I also highly
> recommend the books of Michael Levine who quit the DEA in disgust after
> his most important undercover operations against drug kingpins were
> sabotaged by the CIA).
>
> Oliver North and REX 84:
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug0IL7k3elQ
>
> Even if we do not know what exactly was discussed in "closed session"
> about REX 84, we can say that Iran/Contra was a conspiracy at the
> highest level of the US government to circumvent the Boland Agreement in
> order to deliver weapons to the Contras in Nicaragua. To this end, the
> government was prepared to let the Contras smuggle cocaine into the US
> and, if the US decided to wage war against Nicaragua, round up
> dissidents and incarcerate them in FEMA camps:
>
> "Nixon had machinery for mass detention all in place and set to go.
> Reagan’s got it for when he invades Nicaragua. Look it up, check it
> out.” (264)"
>
> (It should also be noted that these are
> Continuity of Government measures. CoG also plays a role in BE.)
>
> My point is, this is historically proven. The evidence is in. In BE, the
> case is different. There is no generally accepted historical
> evidence for alternative explanations of the events on 11 September. On the
> other hand, the official narrative was controversial from the beginning
> and remains so today. Pynchon is therefore not in a position to say
> "Look it up, check it out." What he does instead is, amongst other
> things, use March Kelleher as a mouthpiece for alternative explanations.
> She surely does not mince words (perhaps it is just me, but I find this
> very funny):
>
> -- "Its the Reichstags fire," she greets Maxine.
> "The what?"
> "Those fucking Nazis in Washington needed a pretext for a coup, now
> they've got it." --
>
> (317)
>
> I hope to write more on the historiographic aspects of this as we proceed.
>
> Meanwhile many thanks to the keeper of the flame, Michael Bailey.
>
>