CoL49 group reading ch 3, 35-36-37

[Joseph Tracy]

> On May 19, 2024, at 5:01 AM, Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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?
Peter Pinguid, translatable as Fat Dick, is obviously a stand-in for Mike Fallopian who conveys the whole story, and who replaces Alexander with Nicholas . Why?Because  Nicholas was the first internationally known historic martyr to the Bolshevik marxists and the major figure kept alive  in the  Western image of the Russian revolution. ( MF has proselytized with this  story before)The speculation on PP feeling betrayed by a Northern  abolitionist alliance with a Russian abolitionist Czar and his anger about that and the North's supposed hypocrisy while allowing "wage slavery” is just imaginative speculation by MF  that reinforces Fallopians need for a martyr who drives the war with Russia and therefor Marxism further back than the Birchers.  The whole story’s net effect goes something like this: The real war with Marxism goes back to the civil war when Peter Pinguid takes a heroic rebel stand  against wage slavery  and abolitionism  somewhere between Carmel and Pismo Beach with one ship or another gone in the morning and nobody actually hurt, after which PP then moves to LA to become a  real estate speculator. With the real estate  ending  MF achieves  uncontrollable laughability and OM spews . Why she confides in him after this is hard to fathom. She seems blinded by her vulnerability to men. 

Mike's Fallopian brain is pregnant with some pretty weird fetal possibilities via his chosen fat Dick.  He is also interested in stamps and has a small scale secret postal system at Yoyodyne. Much later in the book, after suggesting her entire experience looking into PI’s stamps  and Tristero may have been entirely orchestrated by Inverarity, recommends a visit to Tremaines Swastika and Gun shop.



 
> 
> 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?
> --