CoL49 group reading ch 3, 35-36-37

[Michael Bailey]

Forgot to ask - if the postmark is Piercean, then is this tampering with
his mail a phase of “Mucho getting a visit from The Shadow”?


There was indeed a Russian fleet in San Francisco harbor during the Civil
War
https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1935/may/visit-russian-squadrons-1863

Unable to find Peter Pinguid, as expected.

But I love his cogitations in his cabin:
“Appalled at what had to be some military alliance between abolitionist
Russia (Nicholas having freed the serfs in 1861) and a Union that paid
lip-service to abolition while it kept its own industrial laborers in a
kind of wage-slavery”

However, why did he feel that was a reason to resign his Confederate
commission?
“Lincoln and the Czar forced him”?
How so?

An ambiguous nighttime naval encounter (by which he was as over-traumatized
as Mucho by the car lot?)

Internalizing the idea that the South was now up against Russia was more
than he could take?

Driven to brooding by the hypocrisy of the wage-enslavement practiced in
the North?


The punchline for this action is Peter Pinguid, like Rimbaud, spending the
rest of his life acquiring wealth. As a real estate speculator.

Tickles Oedipa into spraying her drink; also the narrator seems tickled
into more than usually casual language: “[Oedipa] sprayed it out again in a
glittering cone for ten feet easy…”

Then the mail call, the postman here being “a fat kid, looking harassed.”
Metzger spots a Yoyodyne badge on him, and - inquisitively? or tutorially?
- asks Oedipa, “What do you make of that?”

Is he already easing her on down the road towards The Tristero?