Bob's longtime collaborator in the McLuhan circle — the man who borrowed McLuhan's annotated Finnegans Wake from Corinne and set Bob to copying it, and whose later religious turn broke up the post-McLuhan seminars. He surfaces in dialogue 39 across both stories.
Across the dialogues
Gets his own page — the go-between of Bob's McLuhan years, present both at the copying of the Wake and at the seminars' unraveling
Nelson borrowed McLuhan's three annotated Finnegans Wake volumes from Corinne and handed them to Bob to xerox over a single weekend — the origin of Bob's archive of McLuhan's marginalia.
"and there's Nelson with these three books, three piled up big books. And he says, here, Bob, Xerox them, and I need them Monday morning. So I said, okay. And then I started to look and begin to intuit what the hell I was holding. It's like someone handed me a billion dollars worth of gold."
Nelson's conversion to the Garner Ted Armstrong sect led him to abandon the Coach House seminars, seeing Derek's televised commentary on the visiting Pope as service to "the Antichrist."
"so he refused to do the fucking seminar anymore."
Connections
Bob's partner through the 1980s–90s McLuhan work — the xeroxing of the Wake, CKLN radio, and the Mary McLuhan consulting.
borrowed McLuhan's annotated Wake volumes from Corinne, which Bob then copied.