At the end of the third section (p.25) Inconvenience commander Randolph St. Cosmo meets with detective Nate Privett of Windy City Investigations. Devil in the White City, anyone?
“Since the Haymarket bomb,” Nate was explaining, “we’ve had more work than we can handle, and it’s about to get even more hectic, if the Governor decides to pardon that gang of anarchistic murders. … Antiterrorist security now more than ever will be of the essence here.”
The Haymarket labor unrest was over the eight-hour work day, obviously a grave radical threat which should be “rolled back” any time now. The anticonspiracy intrigue might sound familiar, both from today’s headlines, and as the well-trodden ground of the Modern novel.
On p.6 “the ever-alert Lindsay Noseworth” warns of “the inexorably rising tide of World Anarchism”, which was also at the heart of Conrad’s 1907 The Secret Agent. See this delightful annotation site from a student who admits, “I never actually read the novel.”
On p.19 French balloonists at the Siege of Paris discover “how much the modern state depended for its survival on maintaining a condition of permanent siege” (original emphasis). This wonderful UH engineering site outlines the story, which sounds like a Pynchon novel in itself.
As for the “confidential assignment in Our Nation’s Capital (see The Chums of Chance and the Evil Halfwit)” (p.5), and their K.K.K. encounter “at the town of Thick Bush” (p.8), I’m sure any resemblance to current precedents or presidents is purely coincidental.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
I like your blog. Cool idea -- much more efficient than putting messages in bottles. (Or are we simply communicating with different versions of ourselves in alternate universes?) I've put an update with a link to your blog in my Pynchon post at Letter from Here.
Post a Comment