GR translation: Snake the remittance horse

[Mike Jing]

Thanks for the reply, Michael.

I guess it's not really clear, because a couple of paragraphs down, it
says: Strange, strange are the dynamics of oil and the ways of oilmen.


On Fri, Jan 24, 2025 at 2:09 AM Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Maybe Midnight was owned by the oil man or his cronies, and they didn’t
> want the competition from Snake on the circuit?
>
> According to Wikipedia, Midnight’s peak years were the 1920s & ‘30s -
> mostly retired in 1933 due to “ringbone disorder” and perished in 1936.
>
> Which fits with Tchitcherine’s Kirghiz posting during “early Stalin days.”
>
>
> Midland, Texas triggers a reflex reference:
>
> There’s a historic home in Midland, Texas where Bush 41 & family lived from
> 1951-55 even though that may not be super relevant.
>
> He was an oilman…but not during the 1920s
>
> From Wikipedia, he doesn’t seem to’ve been super high profile either,
> during the likely writing time of GR but ¿quièn sabe?
>
> “Following an unsuccessful run for the United States Senate in 1964, he was
> elected to represent Texas’s 7th congressional district in 1966. President
> Richard Nixon appointed Bush as the ambassador to the United Nations in
> 1971 and as chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1973.”
>
> I couldn’t find a Midland, Texas oilman from the ‘20s but I didn’t look
> very hard…
>
>
> On Sun, Jan 19, 2025 at 11:24 PM Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > V342.10-18, P347.11-19   Tchitcherine’s horse is a version of himself—an
> > Appaloosa from the United States named Snake. Snake used to be some kind
> of
> > remittance horse. Year before last he
> > was in Saudi Arabia, being sent a check each month by a zany (or, if you
> > enjoy paranoid systems, a horribly rational) Midland, Texas oil man to
> stay
> > off of the U.S. rodeo circuits, where in those days the famous bucking
> > bronco Midnight was flinging young men right and left into the sun-beat
> > fences. But Snake here is not so much Midnight-wild as methodically
> > homicidal. Worse, he’s unpredictable.
> >
> > What's the rationale behind the Texas oil man's desire for Snake to stay
> > off of the U.S. rodeo circuits? And what does it have to do with the
> famous
> > bucking bronco Midnight? I'm just trying to get a better understanding of
> > the underlying logic here.
> > --
> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> >
> --
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>