The Assassination of Olof Palme discussion

To be clear, the book is in progress. In fact, tomorrow I expect to receive a passage on an assassination in Washington DC that was part of Operation Condor . The 'reporter' is Larry Riley, the translator of Roberto Arlt's The Flamethrowers, first in English, completing in English finally one of the seminal novels of perhaps the most advanced literary civilization of the previous century.

The full title, and this is important, is The Assassination of Olof Palme, a People's Novel.
Using Olof in the title is a classic misdirection play, straight out of the Miami Dolphins offensive line's playbook from 1972. Olof IS back there, and the his river rushes, but another gap opens, this one a DIVIDE, and up through comes Spear and Son, Raspeguy, our man on the cover Giuseppe Pinelli, and here we find there is another ball and Nancy's trying to get round end on Ronnie's giddyup, her hand grasping the waistband of the jock strap, holding it high over her head...

By the way, if you are here, you have also been invited into the novel, into contributing. If you invited yourself, that's still an invitation, isn't it.

What is this novel?

This is an anthological novel, meaning that it includes more writers than the man who conceived it, Rick Harsch.
It was inspired by the realization that writers should dismiss as many of the constructs the current business of writing imprisons us in. As Bob would say, the present writing landscape is mindbottling. I was writing this novel and came across a passage I needed to write and thought, Sesshu Foster would be a better choice to write this, and so I asked Sesshu to do it, and he agreed. Thus was born a collaborative effort.
The topics of the novel include the Reagan era's magical effect on the US populace, making them forget Vietnam and Nixon, the antics of US spies in Europe after WWII, how they contributed to bloodshed especially in Italy and France, but also employed and later ratlined out Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, from Europe to South America, where he was free to earn lots of money for 37 years after he should have been executed (the French wanted him bad, but the US kept him cozy a few hundred miles away for 6 years then sent him on his way). Iran/Contra figures prominently, as does Olof Palme. But the heart of the novel is Giuseppe Pinelli, pictured on the cover after 'falling' four stories from a police station in Milano in 1969. A right wing group that had received C4 explosives from a US agent had bombed a square in Milano and the anarchist Pinelli was arrested, killed, and now songs are written about him, and the Nobel Laureate Dario Fo wrote his Accidental Death of an Anarchist about him. Yes, the Balkans play a significan role in the novel, which will include at least 60 contributors. Right not I have about 70% of the material I need. You are all invited to contribute more, from one good word like mindbottling to a chapter or two or three...

That's a fascinating description of the project.

I just discovered mindbottling in Blades of Glory: Mind-Bottling (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSfeb...).

Assassination is also itslef a fascinating word, with all those connections to Burroughs’s use of it and his obsession with Hassan i Sabbah. The Castle of Alamut reminds me of Altamont (where the Stones played and the 60s died). Assassin also reminds me of Jose Triana’s play about revolutionary Cuba, Night of the Assassins, and the song of the same name by Les Rallizes Dénudés, who’s original bass player, Moriaki Wakabayashi, was part of the Red Army highjacking of Japan Airlines Flight 351 on 31 March 1970. Perhaps for a bass player ‘low-jacking’ would be more suitable. The highjinx was also a bit of a failure. They wanted to fly to Cuba, but the plane didn’t have the fuel capacity to make it, so instead they chose North Korea (They first landed in Seoul, and the authorities tried to trick them by decorating the airport to look like the north). The four surviving members are still in N.K. but want to come back to Japan. They’re got a Twitter account (Japanese: https://twitter.com/yobo_yodo) pleading their case, which has so far been refused because of alleged involvement in several abductions off the coast of Japan.

Btw, we just had an earthquake. Not heavy in Tokyo, but enough to set off the phone warning and wobble the pot plants. That’s the last thing we need now. Not wobbly pot plants. I mean everyone stuck in a school hall inhaling viruses. It's a lovely spring day, and trucks are crawling around asking people to say indoors. The Japanese constitution doesn't allow the government to implement anything other than a soft lockdown. People are still taking their kids to the park and having picnics on the grass next to benches, tables and equipment taped up like a murder scene. In contrast, one of Japan's most infamous murder scenes, the Setagaya house, has just had its blue tarpaulin removed. The murders have remained unsolved for almost 20 years, and there's a 20 million yen reward for information, but the police want to demolish the house. Until recently there was a guard on 24/7 and 40 fulltime detectives working on the case.

p.s. I just learned that low-jack is "the term used to imply that someone has you on an electronic leash. In other words, keeping track of where someone or something is by a device" (Urban Dictionary).

Incidentally, South Korea have been most successful in countering the virus through the use of keeping track of people through their phones...

The Soft Lockdown--you going to use it or am I?

Absolutely, All yours!

...and that was when she put me in the soft lockdown, which to her, I suppose now, was a form of love...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/10/wo...

I saw that. No true bearing on this novel, hvala bogu.

Hey Rick! Is that a newly designed cover? I dig both, maybe this one slightly better.

That's the new Driftless Trilogy cover. The back is on my profile page, I think, and it's as important as the front.

The Olof cover will be the same except for eventual author name changes.