ST ch 37 Business Plot

[Robin Landseadel]

> On 05/10/2026 6:10 PM PDT Joseph Tracy <coypoet at mailfence.com> wrote:
>  
> 
> In the p-lists last reading of COL 49 I decided to explore the idea ( most forcefully developed by Charles Hollander) that the Courier's Tragedy play and the tristero was an indirect reference to the assassination of JFK and the battle for control of the media  and of private thought life of citizens  which is part of CIA/deepstate history, but is a concept and practice of statecraft reaching far back in history, in COL49 the history focusing  on the reformation  era. I did not refer much to Hollander's work, trying to see the patterns  and references for myself but the results had some overlap and I found the basic premise to be hard wired into the novel.
> 
Haven't made the great leap to the JFK assassination yet. I remember spending a fair amount
of time in 1964 in L. A.'s South Central, remember that every house in that neighborhood had
a copy of the JFK memorial record, not played much but on prominent display, usually near the
portrait of Jesus. We were living in a tiny apartment in November 1963. When we turned on
the TV to watch the news on the 22nd, the TV's transformer blew out, leaving an awful acrid
stench hanging in the air for days. We got a replacement TV, used naturally, we were pretty poor
back then. This Raytheon model blew out the very same way around the time Jack Ruby shot
Lee Harvey Oswald.

The hand of the CIA and presence of the military-industrial complex in this work is ubiquitous.
The Beatles were still the biggest game in town, I was permanently attached to a portable AM
radio, constantly plugged into top 40. I remember the long boulevard that led to Rocketdyne, we
would drive past it to get to the house of one of my dad's friends. JPL was our backyard, early 1964. They would occasionally conduct rocket engine tests. I watched Yogi Bear and
Magilla Gorilla in my time but would rather watch Bugs Bunny in the afternoon, three-ish.

There's more than one thing going on here and I can recall more than a few.

JT: "Of course there is much more there concerning this time -period in California, the role of the Aerospace and fledgling digital industries,  the ongoing battle to shape the mental landscape,  and the hidden legacy of fascism evident in MK ultra, the postwar movement of axis wealth, the Vietnam war.  I don't understand what  Pynchon felt he had unlearned with the Crying of Lot 49.  Guesses won't do and he seems to have little else to say."

I'm pretty sure Pynchon said enough. Here are a couple two/three things he said and some
conjecture from moi:

1: "It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol or other abstract unifying agent, and then try
to force characters and events to conform to it.

Slow Learner, 12

Don't ever antagonize the horn.

2: "The next year, he is in the middle of writing a book that he characterizes as a potboiler. When it grows to 155 pages, he calls it "a short story, but with gland trouble," and hopes that his agent "can unload it on some poor sucker." The book turned out to be his highly praised second novel, "The Crying of Lot 49.""

Pynchon's Letters Nudge His Mask https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/books/030498pynchon-letters.html

3: This is a guess, but one can't help but get the impression that CoL49 was a rush job that that
author whipped out in order to keep the lights on and the rent paid. I guess that feature makes
this "short story, but with gland trouble" a bit like On the Road in having a lot of "first thought,
best thought" "Beat" thing going on, but stuff like rented cars enter and exit from the story as if
they've been apported/asported.

He mentions some other things in Slow Learner he seems to have supposedly learned earlier,
forgot later, that apply to this supersized pamphlet. Like "I was operating on the motto "make
it literary," a piece of bad advice I made up all by myself and then took" and "The problem here
is like the problem with "Entropy": beginning with something abstract—a thermodynamic coinage or the data in a guidebook—and only then going on to try to develop plot and
characters. This is simply, as we say in the profession, ass backwards. Without some grounding in human reality, you are apt to be left only with another apprentice exercise, which is what this
uncomfortably resembles."
SL, 17/18

But hey! Chicago Tribune sez: "A spectacular tale. . . . The work of a virtuoso with prose . . . .
Pynchon's intricate symbolic order is akin to that of Joyce's Ulysses."
 
So, what does this guy know anyway?

I think the author was in the process of reconsidering his priorities as of 1984, with the two books he was working on having far more grounding in character and human reality.

Whatever is going on, the dude didn't like it.

What I find striking about this work is that the author seems to have found his voice here.

Also, that I became seriously obsessed with it.

> 
> 
> Since the 60s some very powerful books and research into the CIA, MK Ultra, and the JFK assassination have been published. For me the most telling is David Talbot's book the Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government. Talbot did lots of interviews with people who knew Dulles and other players and obviously had the advantage of having been educated in the elite schools and had family familiarity with the upper classes. He has since written about Smedley Butler, the Kennedy brothers, and radicals from the 60s.
> 
Have placed the e-book on hold from the local library. Thanks again.

"There must be a pony in here somewhere."