The Crying of Lot 49, Group Read 2024

Fri Jun 21 05:45:43 UTC 2024

Joseph sez

 The black tristero agents are hired killers, not anarchists. You are
> conflating The Waste of Oedipa’s SanFramcisco experience with the hired
> murderers of Angelo. The bums in the Dylan song were also hired killers
who
> had a remarkable likeness to CIA agents.

The text calls them assassins. nothing about being "hired"...in fact,
Oedipa asks this look:
"Was it written in as a stage direction?"....in this deeply uncertain,
willfully uncertain text,
all we know is they are assassins.....lots of historical movements, even
those abusing the
anarchist tradition had assassins who did not need to be hired and weren't.

I'm not wasting my time on the great Dylan song, where bums supposedly
don't mean what they always mean in Dylan, and/ but 'bearing a remarkable
likeness to CIA agents' is another
Tracy---and Huebschrauber's---dustbin of history fantasies.....

Pynchon would not have bothered with such cheap conspiracy theories and
didn't. The text shows it.

"Dylan told his early biographer Anthony Scaduto
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Scaduto>, however, that he wasn't
particularly devastated by Kennedy's assassination
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_John_F._Kennedy>: "I didn't
feel it any more than anybody else. We were all sensitive to it. The
assassination took more of the shape of a happening. I read about those
things happening to Lincoln <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln>,
to Garfield <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_A._Garfield>, and that it
could happen in this day and age was not too far-fetched. It didn't knock
the wind out of me. Of course, I felt as rotten as everyone else. But if I
was more sensitive about it than anyone else, I would have written a song
about it, wouldn't I? The whole thing about my reactions to the
assassination is overplayed".

Read the next paragraph in the wikipedia entry where he famously said in
public, "I felt some of myself" in Lee Harvey Oswald...

Learn enough Dylan to know how identifying with everyone is a key theme....

On Fri, Jun 21, 2024 at 12:51 AM Michael Bailey <
michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:

> You’re talking about the dudes on the Grassy Knoll, right?
>
> https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.200814.html
>
>
> I found an article with new (to me) details, from one who, unlike the Peter
> Pinguid Society, takes the “lone assassin” theory as Holy Writ…
>
> https://www.texasmonthly.com/being-texan/the-fourth-tramp/
>
> There was a 4th arrest of a man who claimed to’ve been Oswald’s cell mate,
> & heard him say he knew Jack Ruby.
>
> But also, the arrest records for the 3, along with the names they gave, are
> (or at least in 1992 were) available, and the Church Commission tried with
> ‘70s era computers to match them with any known individuals.
>
> (Still, that’s even before the 386 (-; )
>
>
> To share the flavor with a longish excerpt is beyond my ability to resist:
>
> “[3 others were arrested the same day, including a John Elrod]
> Nine months after the assassination, Elrod appeared at the sheriff’s office
> in Memphis looking for help. Elrod was an alcoholic and now, though he was
> trying to dry out, he had been drinking and contemplated killing his wife.
> At the sheriff’s office, he confessed to something else that was bothering
> him. He said that while he was in a cell with Oswald the day of the
> assassination, a prisoner with a battered face had been brought down the
> corridor by guards. According to Elrod, Oswald had said he knew the man
> because he had seen him in a motel room a few days earlier discussing
> selling stolen guns with four other men, including Jack Ruby. The Memphis
> sheriff contacted the FBI. Agents interviewed Elrod and filed reports of
> his statements. They sent to Dallas for his arrest records, but the reply
> came that there was no record of Elrod’s being arrested on November 22,
> 1963. The FBI assumed Elrod’s tale was the fantasy of a drunk and proceeded
> no further. Now Mary [a researcher] had found proof that he had been
> arrested that day after all.
>
> That would not amount to much if there weren’t a few other tantalizing
> facts the [researchers] La Fontaines found to support Elrod’s story. Oswald
> was put in a cell at some point during the afternoon of his arrest. A log
> prisoners were required to sign to make telephone calls showed that Oswald
> was in cell F-2. The F cell block was a corridor with three small,
> adjoining cells. No known record shows what cell Elrod was in, but in 1993
> he told the La Fontaines that “a kid from Tennessee who had stolen a car in
> Memphis” was also in the cell. The same phone log shows that Douglas, the
> confessed car thief, was in cell F-1. And there really was a prisoner with
> a battered face in the jail that day. He was Lawrence Reginald Miller, now
> dead, who on November 18 was the passenger in the front seat of a blue
> Thunderbird carrying guns stolen from a military arsenal. The car crashed
> along Hall Street in downtown Dallas while being pursued by the police.
> Newspaper stories the next day refer to Miller’s injured face. And, to
> complete the circle with exactly the sort of fact that could mean
> everything and could mean nothing, the driver of the Thunderbird, Donnell
> Darius Whitter, worked in the garage where Jack Ruby took his car. Indeed,
> he had personally worked on Ruby’s car.
>
> This is the kind of tale that makes wading through assassination literature
> rewarding. And isn’t it a great story! The three prisoners watching the
> convict with the bloody face paraded before them, the meeting in the motel
> room with Ruby, the stolen guns, the chase through downtown Dallas in a
> blue Thunderbird with Jack Ruby’s mechanic at the wheel…not that I believe
> that all this proves anything. Elrod’s story may be true, but there is no
> proof he was in the cell with Oswald. He could have, for instance, been in
> a cell with the man with the battered face and learned his story from him.
> And, even assuming Elrod was in the same cell, there is no proof that
> Oswald said a thing. Indeed, why would Oswald, who was smirky and elusive
> in everything he is known to have said after the assassination, who was
> smirky and elusive during his time in the Marines, in Russia, in Dallas,
> and in New Orleans, suddenly start talking cordially and intimately to a
> teenage car thief and a drunk. Surely, whether Oswald was part of a plot or
> not, he would have suspected that anyone put in a cell with him was there
> to inform on him to the authorities and thus would not have volunteered
> that he knew Ruby.
>
> By discovering the identities of the three tramps, the La Fontaines have
> made a real and important contribution to the history of the assassination.
> Few books on Kennedy can make that claim with justice. By discovering
> Elrod, they have made an ingenious story based on a few related or
> unrelated facts. Most books on Kennedy can make that claim. Oswald killed
> Kennedy all alone, but people will never believe it in their hearts. There
> are too many bizarre facts, too many deep and foreboding characters, and
> too many hypnotic stories to weave around them.
>
>
> On Thu, Jun 20, 2024 at 11:40 PM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>
> > The black tristero agents are hired killers, not anarchists. You are
> > conflating The Waste of Oedipa’s SanFramcisco experience with the hired
> > murderers of Angelo. The bums in the Dylan song were also hired killers
> who
> > had a remarkable likeness to CIA agents.
> >
> > > On Jun 20, 2024, at 6:36 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > If the three bums in this great song are loosely associated with the
> > anarchists in black then that's yours.
> > >
> > > They are not to me.....Dylan's bums here are not even close to the
> > anarchist associations in Pynchon or his own
> > > Watchtower song imo.......
> > >
> > > These bums are us.....
> > >
> > > On Wed, Jun 19, 2024 at 8:08 PM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net
> <mailto:
> > brook7 at sover.net>> wrote:
> > >> ...
> > >> There’s three bums comin’ all dressed in rags
> > >> Pick up the pieces and lower the flags...
> > >>
> > >> They mutilated his body and took out his brain
> > >> What more could they do, they piled on the pain
> > >> But his soul was not there where it was supposed to be at
> > >> For the last fifty years they’ve been searching for that
> > >> Freedom, oh freedom, freedom over me
> > >> Hate to tell you, Mister, but only dead men are free
> > >>               Murder Most Foul.     Bob Dylan
> > >>
> > >>
> > >>> On Jun 19, 2024, at 5:57 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com
> <mailto:
> > mark.kohut at gmail.com>> wrote:
> > >>>
> > >>> P. "the anarchist dressed all in black"....like Driblette's assassins
> > >>> and the Tystero Force....the main part--the essence of it?
> > >>>
> > >>> Which is why it is disruptive but also sometimes violent?
> > >>>
> > >>> I often think of Dylan's two men on horseback in *All Along the
> > Watchtower*
> > >>>
> > >>> and Pynchon's two riders in* Against the Day....*
> > >>> --
> > >>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> > >>>
> > >>
> >
> > --
> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> >
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>