Before the questions, a little mop-up work on The Moviegoer is in order. Anybody who has read the book will remember this well-known passage:
“I dreamed of the war, no, not quite dreamed but woke with the taste of it in my mouth, the queasy-quince taste of 1951 and the Orient. I remembered the first time the search occurred to me. I came to myself under a Chindolea bush.
(The Moviegoer, p10)
Here is a bit of unrelievedly good news: the Chindolea bush has been found. Turns out that this is (perhaps) Percy’s spelling of Jin-Dal-Rae, or in Korean, 진달래.
Whew!
Maybe everybody knows this already, but I remember it being something of an open question at the last Percy conference. I’m awfully glad to see this finally cleared up. There are questions that remain open, however, and of course we’re now chiefly concerned with Lost in the Cosmos. So I would appreciate if anybody can tell me
(1) Who is “the man from Chicago” mentioned on page 78?
(2) Is there, or has there ever been, a spacecraft called Voyager 19?
(3) If Voyager 19 really does (or did) exist, who is the man who designed it, described on pages 1 and 2 as “one of the most screwed-up creatures in California—or the Cosmos”?
Thanks for your help!
Have you submitted these questions to wiki.answers.com?